Drenched, freezing, weak from exhaustion and loss of blood, he knew he couldn’t afford the luxury of checking in to a hospital. He had to keep moving, if he wanted to stay alive. Otherwise he’d succumb to hypothermia, and shock. He was lucky in one respect. Folkestone at three in the morning was a relatively easy place to go shopping. He broke into a chemist’s for bandages and sulfadine, and raided the plastic bags dumped outside a charity shop for a change of clothes. A gents’ toilet next to a caravan park became his dressing room and his operating theatre. The wounds in his shoulder and thigh were bleeding way too freely, and the sulfadine didn’t even slow the process down. Tillman suspected that the chill water, close enough to freezing to constrict his arteries, had saved his life. Something nasty – something coated on the knife blades presumably – was stopping his blood from coagulating. He made another break-in, to a small convenience store, where he looked in vain for BIC lighters, settled in the end for Swan Vestas.
