radius to an escape from the hospital, and has been sounded only five times in earnest in more than fifty years.
Ben Dawson had been asleep for about forty-five minutes when the siren burst into life. He jerked up from a dream about sleep, the kind of long, deep, uninterrupted sleep that had been impossible in the six weeks since Isla was born, and felt his wife raise her head slowly from her pillow.
“The baby OK?” she slurred.
“It’s not Isla,” he replied. “It’s the siren.”
“Siren?”
“The bloody Broadmoor siren,” he snapped. It was deafening, a two-tone scream that made his chest tighten with anger.
“What time is it?” asked Maggie, forcing her eyes open and looking at him.
Ben flicked on his bedside lamp, wincing as the light hit his eyes, and checked the clock.
“Quarter to four,” he groaned.
Not fair, he thought. It’s just not fair.
Then he heard a second sound, in between the peals of the alarm; a high, determined crying from the room above their bedroom. Ben swore and swung his legs out from under the duvet.
“Stay there,” said Maggie, pushing herself to the edge of the bed. “It’s my turn.”
Ben slid his feet into his trainers and pulled a jumper over his head. “You see to Isla. I’m going outside, see if anyone else is awake.”
“OK,” said Maggie, stumbling through the bedroom door. She was barely awake, moving with the robotic lurch of new parents everywhere. Ben heard her footsteps on the stairs, heard her begin to gently shush their daughter.
Ben felt no fear at the sound of the siren. He had been up to the hospital several times, had seen the electric fences and the gateposts and the sturdy buildings themselves, and was not the slightest bit concerned about the possibility of a breakout. There had been several, over the years; the escape of John Straffen in 1952, who had climbed over the wall while on cleaning duties in the yard and murdered a young girl from Farley Hill, was the reason the siren system had been built. But the last time anyone had made it out had been almost twenty years ago, and security had been increased and expanded since then. Instead, as he stomped down the stairs towards the front door, knowing the baby was already awake so it didn’t matter, what Ben was mainly feeling was frustration.
The last six weeks had been nothing like the parenting books had suggested, or as their friends had described. He had expected to be tired, expected to be grumpy and stressed, but nothing had prepared him for how he actually felt.
He was utterly, physically, exhausted.
Isla was beautiful, and he felt things he had never felt before when he looked at her; that part was exactly as advertised, he had been glad to realise. But she cried, loudly and endlessly. He and Maggie took it in turns to go and check on her, to warm bottles or burp her or just rock her in their arms. Eventually, her eyes would flutter closed, and they would place her back in her cot, and creep back to their own bed. If they were lucky, they might get two hours of uninterrupted sleep before the crying began again.
Ben shoved open the front door. The night air was warm and still, and the siren was much louder outside. He walked out on to the narrow cobbled street and saw lights on in the majority of his neighbours’ homes. As he lit a cigarette from the pack he kept for emergencies, like when he had been woken up for the third time before it was even four o’clock, doors began to open and pale figures in pyjamas and dressing gowns began to appear.
“What on earth is going on?” demanded one of the figures, a large, broad man with a huge, bald dome of a head that gleamed in the light. “Why doesn’t someone turn it off?”
Charlie Walsh lived next door to Ben and Maggie. Ben glanced at him as he made his way over, then returned his gaze to the hill above the village. The hulking shape of the hospital was visible as a distant black outline in the centre of a faint yellow glow.
“I don’t think you can,” Ben replied. “I’m pretty sure you can only turn it off at the hospital.”
“Then maybe someone should go up there and see what’s happening?”
“Maybe someone should,” replied Ben.
“All right then,” said Charlie. “I’ll come with you.”
Ben stared at his neighbour. He wanted nothing more than to go back upstairs, wrap his pillow round his head, and wait for the terrible ringing to stop. But that was now no longer an option.
“Fine,” he snapped, and strode back into his house to grab the car keys from the table in the hall.
A minute later the two men were speeding out of what passed for central Crowthorne in Ben’s silver Range Rover, heading up the hill towards the hospital.
Behind the desk in Crowthorne’s tiny police station, Andy Myers was trying to hear the voice on the other end of the phone over the deafening howl of the siren.
Crowthorne police station was rated Tier 1 by the Thames Valley Police, which meant that its front desk was staffed entirely by volunteers. There were twelve of them, mostly retirees, who took turns to field the small number of enquiries that came in from local residents – everything from minor incidents of graffiti and vandalism, to requests for advice on traffic accidents. The station was not manned overnight, but one of the volunteers was always on call. Tonight, Andy Myers had drawn the short straw.
He had dragged himself from the warmth of his bed when the siren burst into life, grumbling, stretching, and feeling every single one of his sixty-eight years. The space in the bed beside him was cold and empty; his wife, Glenda, had occupied it for more than thirty years before cancer had claimed her the previous summer. Since then Andy, who had spent his working years in the brokerage houses of the City of London, had been looking for ways to fill the hole in his life that she had left behind. Volunteering at the police station was just one of the ways he tried to do so; he was also on the board of the local Rotary Club, an active member of the Village Green Association and secretary of Crowthorne Cricket Club.
He dressed quickly and made the five-minute walk to the station. He did not hurry; he was no more concerned about the possibility of an escape than Ben Dawson was. But there were protocols in the event of the siren sounding, and Andy Myers was a great believer in protocol.
He walked into the station’s car park, wincing at the bellowing noise from the siren that stood behind the building. It was little more than a converted house, sitting at the end of a row of terraces. He unlocked the door and went inside, flopped down into the worn leather chair behind the desk, reached for the phone, and dialled a number.
The official response to a suspected escape from Broadmoor was twofold: it required all local schools to keep children inside and under direct supervision of staff until parents could arrive to take them home, and it called for the establishment of a ring of roadblocks at a ten-mile radius from the hospital. Crowthorne station had a single police car, an ageing Ford Focus that was sitting outside, so Andy’s only duty was to call the Major Incident Response Team in Reading and request instructions.
“Say again, sir?” he shouted, over the din of the siren. “You want me to do what?”
“Drive up there,”
