‘Fuckers!’ Lilith howled at the oblivious driver. ‘All bloody day to make this journey and you decide to make it now? And what the hell are you driving? A sodding pedal-car?’
Cocooned in a duvet and light-headed from leaving most of my blood on the dungeon floor I could almost find it funny at first, but as soon as Lilith had found space to overtake we found another almost identical caravan blocking the route.
‘Damn it. Bank holiday.’ Lilith thumped the steering wheel.
‘Wha’?’
‘It’s the bloody August Bank Holiday, isn’t it? Every sodding caravan in northern England’s going to be on the road between us and the hospital, and each one towed by some geriatric old fart who took his test in nineteen-bloody-thirty-two and refuses to go faster than twenty miles per hour.’
She overtook the next trailer as she raged, and we missed the oncoming motorbike by what appeared to be the depth of a layer of paint. ‘Twat!’ Lilith yelled as the bike’s wheels threw up clouds of dust from its emergency swerve to the kerb.
‘Ow.’
‘Sorry – I’ll try to keep it a little steadier.’
‘No worries. Wasn’t you – Coyle, dropping me ... jarred a bit.’
Lilith frowned. ‘You okay? I mean, in the whole, ‘just got stabbed’ context.’
‘Yeah, sure. I’ll be fine. Just try not to kill any coffin-dodgers, huh?’ I used my elbows to try and manoeuvre into a comfortable position. The old t-shirt that Henry had dug out for me stuck wetly to my stomach, and I hoped to God it was just sweat.
The trees disappeared first. Well, not so much disappeared, but kind of merged with the sky and the road. It wasn’t an unpleasant sight, but try as I might, I couldn’t get them back into focus. Even with one eye shut, they stubbornly remained a big pastel blur. I wondered if it was worth mentioning to Lilith, but she was pretty preoccupied with the whole driving business, and speaking was now a little too complicated for me to manage. I shut my other eye, and let myself begin to float.
‘Finn? Finn Strachan, you fucker! Bloody well stay awake, you bastard!’ Lilith hollered in my ear. It seemed a little aggressive, considering I’d only just drifted off, but I grudgingly forced myself to look at her. She had the same cotton-wool quality as the clouds, and now the whole sensation didn’t seem half so pleasant.
Lilith
A set of temporary traffic lights gave me the first opportunity to stop. Something was badly wrong. I leaned over and pulled the duvet aside, and saw the cherry-red stain that had spread across Finn’s t-shirt since we had started the journey. I recalled Coyle’s stunt as he moved Finn into the Land Rover, and realised that it had done far more damage than I had first thought.
‘You know, sometimes stoicism is a very overrated virtue.’
Finn gave me a drunken look of puzzlement. ‘Huh?’
‘Nothing.’ I rested my forehead on the grimy steering wheel and for the first time since I’d started my rescue mission, began to fear for its success. I had naively thought that getting Finn off the island was the end of the problems, but in reality it was only the start. I guessed I still had some twenty miles to go before I reached the hospital, and the way things were going, it was going to take us until curfew to cover the next few yards.
Just before the lights changed, I saw the only break I was likely to get that day. Two hundred yards ahead, sunlight flared off the reflective stripe of a police patrol car, hiding in a nest of hawthorn and cow parsley. Before I had time to analyse the risk, I placed a hand on Finn’s shoulder. ‘Hold on,’ I warned him. The lights turned to green and I ground the stubborn gear lever into first and floored the accelerator.
We were already doing sixty by the time we streaked past the incredulous officer at the wheel of the BMW. Within seconds, the cab of the Land Rover was flooded with dancing blue light and I pulled into the verge. I jammed a frayed and filthy baseball cap on my head before I wound down the window. I could only hope I’d managed to bag myself a good one.
‘Eager to get pole position are we, miss?’ A ruddy-faced officer in his early fifties peered into the car, ready to deliver a stern telling off in a broad Yorkshire accent. Then he caught sight of Finn, slumped in a widening puddle of his own blood, and his complexion turned a whole shade lighter. ‘Oh, hell fire...’
‘I think we need your help, officer,’ I said, as calmly as I could manage.