And by a miracle, the one she grabbed dislodged. It wasn’t broken but had come loose from its concrete base. Breathless, she bent and twisted it until she’d created enough space to get past.
Unsure whether it was her imagination that a dark-clad figure advanced along the row of bars towards her – she never even looked to check – she slid her thin body through and ran to the foot of the metal staircase, almost slipping on a tiled floor covered by green scum, before haring up it. At the top, there was a concrete landing she didn’t recognise. Wheezing, drenched with sweat under her ragged, bloodstained clothes, she pivoted in a bewildered circle. A single bulb shed light up here, showing a couple of metal doors leading off in different directions. Nan was perplexed as to which way she should go. But when she heard a heavy tread ascending the stairway, it jolted her forward, propelling her to the nearest door.
On the other side of that, she ran down a corridor with entrances to flats on either side. At the end, she entered another similar corridor, but now she knew where she was.
A few seconds later, she was out on the balcony overlooking the central court.
Her own door, No. 26, was only four along from here.
As she tottered towards it, she fumbled in her handbag for her keys.
Only to find that the bag was empty.
The reality of this only washed over Nan as she came to a halt in front of her flat door, which stood huge and solid and impenetrable.
‘No,’ she moaned. ‘Nooo … ’
She’d been so frightened down in the subway that when she’d fallen over the pram, she’d assumed all she’d dropped was loose change, lipstick, reading glasses – not her house key!
A figure rounded the corner onto the balcony and proceeded towards her.
Nan would never know where it came from: a memory, dredged from nowhere, that before she’d left the Spar that evening, she’d dropped her key from her handbag, and had only spotted it at the last minute, bending down, scooping it up – and putting it in her anorak pocket. With robotic speed and smoothness, all the time aware of that dark shape encroaching from the left, she delved into the pocket, pulled out the key, and jammed it into the lock.
She turned it, and the mechanism disengaged.
Nan tottered inside, banged the door closed behind her, and rammed the bolts home.
Twenty minutes later, when Nan found the courage to unlock the bathroom and re-emerge into her narrow hall, she heard nothing.
But then she wasn’t sure what she’d expected to hear.
Someone trying the front door, or someone simply idling there, muttering to themselves?
Even if this person – whoever it was – had been following her, none of that seemed likely. One thing you had to say about these old run-down blocks of flats, they were fairly secure. The units weren’t easy to force entry to, and with everyone living so close to each other, if someone tried, they’d cause such a racket that the police would inevitably be called.
Even so, it took Nan another five minutes, still damp under her clothes, to actually approach that front door. And she only did so armed with a carving knife she’d brought from the kitchen. Even then, she was tentative. Half a foot short, she waited, listening hard – but still there was no sound.
Neck and shoulders tense, breath tightening in her narrow bird-chest, she considered leaning forward to the spyhole. She’d seen so many horror films where this happened and immediately an ice pick was driven through it from the other side, or a bullet fired into the eye of the person peeking. She didn’t think that was actually possible – how would the madman know when you were looking, and when you weren’t? But it was still a horrific prospect. When she finally steeled herself to do it, the fisheye lens gave its usual restricted, distorted view of the balcony, but showed nobody standing near the door. Despite this, it was another whole minute before she could sum up the extra courage to withdraw bolts and turn the main lock.
She kept the safety chain on, of course, the door opening to four inches maximum.
Now she could see much more of the balcony, and still no one was there. Night sounds reached her: the hum of distant traffic, someone laughing in one of the flats above. Encouraged, Nan loosened the chain, opened the door properly, and with knife levelled like a bayonet, ventured one step outside – just enough so that she could look both right and left.
The balcony trailed harmlessly away in both directions. There was no one there, the only movement a scrap of wastepaper drifting on the summer breeze.
The life of Eddie Creeley was pretty much a blueprint for the development of a violent criminal. Born into poverty in the Hessle Road district of Hull in 1979, his mother died from a stroke when he was three years old, leaving him in the care of his older sister by ten years and his unemployed ex-trawlerman father, who sought to fill the void in his life with alcohol, and periodically took time off from this to beat his children black and blue.
On one occasion, or so the stories told, young Eddie was battered so savagely by his raging parent that he ‘didn’t know where he was’ for nearly two days.
By the early 1990s, perhaps inevitably, the youngster had become a regular juvenile offender, with form for shoplifting, car theft, burglary and assault. In 1993, he finally dealt with his father, retaliating to yet another unprovoked backhander by breaking a bottle over the old man’s head and dumping his unconscious body in the litter-strewn alley out back, where a freezing rainstorm was almost the death of him. After this incident, there were no further reports of the Creeleys’ father attacking either of his children, though it was noted that he himself often sported black eyes, split lips and missing teeth.
Throughout this period, Eddie Creeley served regular time in juvenile detention, where he became well-known for his violent and troublesome behaviour. One thing he didn’t like were authority figures, though he could extend his brutality to any person at any time. In 1997, for example, he beat his pregnant girlfriend, Gillian, so severely that he caused her to miscarry. On this occasion, he was sent to adult prison, where he was involved in frequent altercations with staff and fellow inmates. Only five months into his four-year stretch, in response to a sexual advance, he ambushed a much older fellow prisoner and smashed his legs with an iron bar. This brought him to the attention of Newcastle gangster, Denny Capstick. Impressed by Creeley’s viciousness, Capstick took him on as muscle, and he spent the next few years, both inside jail and out, attacking and terrorising the rivals of Capstick’s firm and even, or so the rumours held, carrying out several murders on their behalf.
Capstick cut him loose in 2001, when he robbed a mini-market in Sunderland and unnecessarily brutalised a female cashier. Sentenced to ten years, it looked as if Creeley was finally out of circulation, but in the end he only served seven, coming out in 2008 and returning to his native Humberside, where he cheerfully recommenced his criminal career. Using his extensive underworld contacts, he put together a ruthless team, and over the next few years they carried out several raids on banks and post offices, all of which were eye-catching for their levels of violence, with shots fired, and bats and pickaxe handles used on staff, customers and security personnel alike.
In 2010, he hit the big time when, with high-level underworld backing, he pulled off a massive
