‘Armed police!’ she heard Mo call out, his voice faltering just a little. ‘Drop your weapon!’
The sirens were loud now, but reinforcements still weren’t quite here.
The Wraith straightened, her finger tensing on the trigger.
Tina squinted down the pistol’s sights, her hand shaking slightly, looking for a body shot.
The Wraith didn’t move.
A second passed.
Then she dropped the gun and raised her free hand. ‘I surrender.’
‘Step away from the gun!’ shouted Mo.
The Wraith took a tentative step backwards, still clutching her leg.
Which was when Tina got back to her feet and strode towards her, still holding Mike’s pistol out in front of her.
‘Tina, get out of the way!’ shouted Mo, but still she kept walking until she stood directly in front of the woman who’d almost killed her twice. Now making her stare down the barrel of the gun.
The Wraith stared back at her defiantly, although her face was contorted in pain. ‘Do as your friend says,’ she hissed through gritted teeth. ‘I’m unarmed and I’m surrendering.’
‘Move out of the way, Tina – now!’ Mo’s voice came from only feet behind her, angry and tense.
Tina ignored him. Her finger tightened on the trigger. ‘This is for my neighbour, Mrs West,’ she said. ‘And for everyone else you’ve killed.’
The Wraith suddenly looked utterly terrified, her poise completely gone in that one second, and she seemed to visibly shrink. ‘God please, no.’
‘Don’t do it, Tina!’ shouted Mo.
Tina thought of Mrs West, of Mike, of the man she’d tortured to death on a live-stream feed to his wife … of every person this woman had destroyed in her foul career.
She squeezed the trigger.
And stopped. Just at the last second.
‘You can rot in prison, bitch,’ she said, and turned away.
At that moment she heard movement behind her and Mo suddenly yelled a warning.
The noise of bullets filled the air, and Tina fell forward.
50
‘I cannot tell you how saddened I am to hear about the deaths of two brave police officers, cut down in the line of duty like this,’ said Alastair Sheridan solemnly as he conducted an interview with the BBC over his laptop via Skype.
He was pleased that the BBC had approached him faster than anyone else, bar the Prime Minister, who’d still yet to make an official statement on the killings. It showed how important he was, how high up the pecking order.
‘People sometimes forget what an incredibly difficult job the police do, in often dangerous circumstances, as we’ve seen today, and with fewer and fewer resources. I’ve long said that the government needs to divert resources from other areas to give the police force the support it needs to maintain law and order. I also believe we are going to have to take a much tougher line on criminals in this country, because right now it really is beginning to look like they’re taking over our streets, and that is a frankly intolerable situation. We cannot let it happen. It would be an insult to the memory of these two brave officers.’
Alastair knew you could never go far wrong on the law and order ticket. The voters never failed to lap it up. And at the moment it was an especially useful stick to beat the PM with.
‘Do we have any more details about what actually happened in this particular incident?’ he asked the interviewer, a boring middle-aged man who seemed to think that dyeing his hair the colour of turd would make him look younger. Four hours had passed since it had taken place but that was a lifetime these days.
Unfortunately, the interviewer didn’t, or none that he could say on air anyway, and that was the problem with the BBC. It was always behind the curve.
Alastair wound up the interview with some thoughts and prayers for the victims’ families then said a suitably sombre goodbye and got up to rejoin his family and the Buxton-Smythes on the veranda, where they’d been enjoying a Thai dinner personally prepared by one of Zagreb’s top chefs, who’d been flown in especially. Alastair was in a particularly jovial mood, and he was just checking his Twitter feed to see how many people had liked his earlier post condemning the police killings (27,618 in less than two hours) when he saw the name Tina Boyd trending.
He clicked on one of the posts and saw that there was a rumour that the two police officers had been killed while rescuing Tina Boyd from a disused garage where she was being held against her will, and that Tina herself had been killed.
Alastair grinned, and there was a real spring in his step as he went back out onto the veranda and sat down at the head of the table, picking up his glass and taking a big gulp of Cristal.
‘Now, where we?’
51
Tina wasn’t dead. She was in a hospital bed trying to come to terms with the events of the last few hours.
One second she’d been about to kill the woman known as The Wraith, but then, as she’d lowered the gun and turned her back, everything had happened so suddenly that it had all been over in a flash. Using Tina as cover, The Wraith had gone for her gun, only for Mo Khan to open fire on her as Tina dived to the ground.
Tina wasn’t sure whether or not The Wraith was dead. The last she’d seen was Mo giving her first aid while she lay motionless on the gravel. But it didn’t look good for her. Still, as far as Tina
