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Rodent was on his way back to London. Despite stopping off for a lovely fry up in a little roadside café on the A28, he had made very good time. His route had taken him along the A21, onto the M25 and then onto the A2, and he was now chugging along in the noisy diesel van towards the Blackwall Tunnel Southern Approach. With luck, he would be back on his own manor by half-eleven.
He was in turmoil over what to do about Jenna. Perhaps, if he drove straight to her chemist shop and threw himself at her mercy, she would take pity and forgive him for yesterday’s wretched behaviour.
He had been stressed at the time and she had flustered him, and he had responded badly, which he very much regretted. He was hoping that now Winston was out of the way life would quickly return to normal, and they could repair their damaged friendship and put this silly misunderstanding behind them.
He had been so worried about getting back to the Big Smoke and putting things right that he’d hardly slept a wink, and at one point, about halfway through the night, he had woken up gasping for air, the weight of his emotions crushing him like a huge stone slab.
Perhaps he should stop off at Tesco and buy her some flowers and a box of chocolates? He’d heard that girls liked that sort of thing.
He suddenly became aware of sirens coming up on him from behind. When he looked in the mirror, there were two big police cars sitting right on his tail, and the lead one seemed to be trying to get him to pull over.
Rodent’s stomach turned to ice.
What could they possibly want with him?
He hadn’t been speeding and he was wearing his seatbelt.
Rodent took a deep breath and tried to work out what to do next, but his brain seemed to freeze, the way it always did when he needed to think fast.
Was there anything in the van that could get him into trouble with the police? No, Winston and the others were all back at the cottage, and they had taken all their belongings with them. He began to breathe a little easier.
Maybe he had committed a minor traffic violation that he was unaware of?
That wouldn’t be a problem if he held a full licence and had insurance. Unfortunately, he didn’t have either. Of course, he could always pretend to be Norman – he’d found his mate’s driving licence in the glovebox yesterday when he’d been looking for the Sat Nav – but that would just mean dropping one of the only friends he had in the shit, and that just didn’t seem like the right thing to do, not after Crouch had loaned them his works van.
Without realising, Rodent had been steadily gaining speed, and when he glanced down at the speedometer a few seconds later, he was surprised to see that he was now doing eighty five miles per hour instead of the steady fifty he’d been doing when he’d first spotted the police cars. His heart rate started to climb; they would think he was making off from them.
A third police car joined the others, but instead of dropping in line behind them, it accelerated past Rodent’s van and pulled directly in front of it. Then the rear police car pulled out and accelerated until it drew level with him. Looking down, he found himself looking into the flint-like eyes of the car’s front-seat passenger. As soon as the police cars finished hemming him in, the lead car’s brake lights came on and he was forced to apply his own brakes to avoid running into the back of it.
What was going on? Were they trying to make him crash?
As he began to lose speed, it dawned on him that there was no other traffic on the road. Looking in his wing mirrors, he saw two marked police vehicles way back in the distance had stopped all northbound traffic.
Would they go to all the bother of doing that just for a traffic violation?
The three police units surrounding his van were aggressively shepherding it onto the hard shoulder and forcing it to stop. As soon as it came to a halt, policemen with assault rifles were jumping out of the cars and pointing their big fuck-off guns at him.
“ARMED POLICE! SHOW ME YOUR HANDS!” they screamed, snapping at his heels like a bunch of rabid dogs.
Frozen with fear, Rodent found his hands had become glued to the steering wheel. He couldn’t move, not even to turn his head away from them.
They seemed to take this as open defiance, and he felt the tension outside the van crank up a notch.
Rodent wondered if these were the same armed officers who had stopped Errol. If so, were they going to shoot him, too?
Rodent swallowed hard; he didn’t want to die.
“D-d-don’t shoot," he pleaded as tears prickled his eyes. The words came out as little more than a croak.
“SHOW ME YOUR HANDS!”
“Please, I’m unarmed. Don’t hurt me,” Rodent whimpered, feeling his bladder loosen.
“SHOW ME YOUR FUCKING HANDS – NOW!”
Shaking with fear, Rodent finally managed to prise his hands away from the wheel and place them in the air.
One of the firearms officers immediately rushed forward and yanked open the driver’s door, while another thrust a gun muzzle straight into Rodent’s face. A third officer grabbed hold of his wrists and he was manhandled out of the van and brought down onto the floor, where his face was rammed into the cold, hard concrete. A knee was placed in his back so hard that it took his breath away and his arms were thrust behind him, making him cry out in pain. He heard a sound like fabric tearing as the plasticuffs
