The Wraith hit a button and the roller door started to rise. At the same time, Mike poked his head back round the frame, saw what was happening, and ran inside the room, pointing his gun towards her.
‘Armed police, drop your weapon!’
The roller door had only opened about a foot but that was enough for The Wraith and she dived down and rolled through the gap, out of sight.
Bolt didn’t get a good shot at the shooter in the Scream mask, and even if he had it would have been unlawful to take it if his life wasn’t in danger, and at that point it wasn’t. That was the thing about being a police firearms officer in the UK. You had to make split-second decisions, knowing that the onus was always on you not to pull the trigger. Because in the worst-case scenario – and he’d seen it happen several times before – you ended up facing a murder charge just for doing your job.
As the shooter rolled under the door and out of sight, Bolt stole a quick glance over at Tina who was sitting tied to a chair in the middle of the cavernous workshop, looking pale and shocked but still very much alive – and felt an immediate burst of relief.
‘We’ve got you, Tina!’ he shouted as he raced towards the roller door, gun outstretched, taking a quick look over his shoulder to see Mo come running into the room, a gun in his hand and a phone to his ear as he called an ambulance for the plainclothes cop who’d just been shot.
Everything had happened incredibly fast, but that was the way with extreme violence. It exploded out of nowhere, and you had to know how to react to it. Bolt had been in this kind of situation before, albeit a long time ago, and he knew what he had to do. They had one man down, two more with the prisoners, and the other ARVs were still en route.
Bolt was on his own. And he knew he couldn’t let this shooter get away because by the way she moved, she was a woman, which meant she was almost certainly the person who’d killed Mary West.
As he took off after her, he felt a burst of exhilaration. There was no fear. There wasn’t time for that. He didn’t think about Leanne or the fact his life was good and a sunny, warm retirement for them both beckoned. He was in the moment. Concentrating with every ounce of his being; he raced towards the roller door, now already risen a good five feet, and, bending down, ran under it, and out into a yard facing the railway line.
He spotted her almost immediately. Unlike virtually all other suspects in a similar situation, she wasn’t running. Instead, she was in a two-handed shooting stance, less than fifteen yards away.
He reacted instantaneously, bringing his own gun round to fire, already having made the decision to pull the trigger.
But he was too late. He felt her first bullet hit him with the force of a cricket bat, somewhere in his upper body, then the second straight afterwards, just as powerful.
And then he was falling, the gun gone, the world seeming to melt and fade around him, no longer even conscious of the impact as he landed on the ground.
49
Even with the ringing in her ears, Tina clearly heard the two shots outside, and from where she was sitting she could just make out Mike falling to the ground beyond the now fully open roller doors.
At that precise moment, Mo was removing her wrist straps with shaky hands. As soon as her hands were free, she pushed him aside, pulled off the remainder of the ties, and got to her feet, slipping her trainers back on.
Tina didn’t hesitate. Ignoring the pain in her hand and Mo’s shouts to stay back as he followed her out, she ran over to the open roller door and out into the yard.
Mike wasn’t moving and his eyes were closed. As she crouched down beside him, Tina could see the two entry wounds – one in his chest, one in his upper belly. There was no sign of The Wraith, but from the angle she’d fired from, and the fact that a high fence topped with barbed wire blocked off access to the railway track, there was only one way she could have gone.
Anger and a desire for vengeance coursed through Tina, eclipsing every other feeling. Yelling at Mo to help Mike, she picked up his discarded pistol with her good hand and sprinted through the yard, making for the end of the main building where a narrow lane ran round the other side.
As Tina rounded the corner, not even slowing down, she saw The Wraith twenty yards further on, making for the road, having discarded her mask. She gave chase, her footsteps crunching on the gravel, already lifting the pistol to fire, the bleeding hand down by her side. In the distance she could hear sirens drawing closer.
Hearing her approach, The Wraith swung round, and Tina saw her for the first time, unmasked. In that single second it struck her that the woman who’d murdered her neighbour, possibly her former lover, boss and friend, and who’d almost murdered Tina herself too, was strikingly attractive – not at all the sort of person you’d expect to cause so much grief and pain.
And then, still running, Tina pulled the trigger, three times in rapid succession. The recoil from the third shot made her stumble and fall to the ground, which may well have saved her life because The Wraith was already firing back into the space where Tina had been.
But, as Tina
