Then Henry was out. He too loped drunkenly sideways, but gripped the roof of the car and turned to Flynn who was at the bonnet which had smoke and steam hissing out of the gaps and the front radiator grille.
Barlow ran across the left hand lane towards the side of the bridge, holding his side and also limping like an injured wolf.
Henry pointed urgently at him and screamed to Flynn, ‘Get him, get him…’ He yelled something else, but the sound of his voice was drowned out as, way further back, a truck hit a car with an almighty crunch.
As Barlow got to the footpath, he turned and fired the gun twice.
Flynn ducked instinctively, but the shooting seemed more like warning shots than anything. Running and keeping low he knew he would soon catch this man.
Henry hit the steering wheel hard with his chest, the pay-off for not wearing a seat belt. It drove everything out of him, every atom of his breath, and something snapped. Then the Mercedes impacted from behind and jerked him backwards, flicking his head against the head rest.
Barlow’s head smacked the windscreen and because he had been sitting sideways-on to Henry, the side of his ribcage connected with the dashboard. He too was then thrown backwards a second later as the Mercedes connected.
Wheezing painfully, Henry exited the car as quickly as he could, noting that Flynn had angled Alison’s car across the front of the pool car and was already out on the road.
Barlow got out of the car and started to leg it across the road. Henry shouted for Flynn to go after him, but to be careful, the guy was armed. He didn’t know if Flynn heard him.
Ignoring the pain and possible new injuries, Henry ran to the Mercedes, realizing that the poor condition of the pool car had changed matters completely. He tore open the rear passenger door, ignoring the driver, and instantly there was no pain in him, just an all-consuming anger as he saw Alison lying curled up in a foetal ball in the footwell behind the front passenger seat, unmoving.
Henry roared, ‘You bastards!’
The youngish, good-looking man in the back seat went for Henry. This was the man who had held Alison’s head up to the window, taunting Henry, then smashing her face against the glass, smearing it with her blood. Henry did not know who he was, nor what part he was playing in this whole scenario. He did not care.
Henry sidestepped, grabbed him and hauled him out of the car with a primeval strength he did not know he had. Powered by the red-mist rage, he started to pound his fists into the man’s face, punching him so his features were twisted and distorted, again and again, and then he stomped on him, with the man screaming, ‘No, no.’ Words Henry ignored.
The driver of the Mercedes, stunned for a moment by the accident, got out. Henry turned on him, now a terrible monster. Henry made for him, but he ducked and ran.
Barlow might have been running like an injured wolf, but Flynn simply jogged after him like a hunting dog, keeping a safe distance away, no way he was going to lose the guy, just run him into the ground. Easy.
Barlow reached the Millennium Bridge and started to run across towards St George’s Quay on the opposite side of the river. There was a lot of people on the bridge, many of whom had turned and were coming back against him to see what was happening on Greyhound Bridge, where there had obviously been a serious accident involving a number of vehicles, and was still stacking up.
By the time Flynn stepped onto the bridge, Barlow was about halfway across and Flynn thought this was as good a place as any to bring him down because there was nowhere else he could go, other than over the side.
Flynn upped his pace, as, noticeably, Barlow began to slow down and stagger, the effect of the accident now hitting him hard.
Flynn was ten feet behind him when Barlow did a quite spectacular pirouette, probably more by accident than design, at the same time bringing the gun around. Flynn dropped sideways, the gun discharged somewhere across the river, and Barlow fell to his knees, clutching his chest, breathing heavily and obviously painfully. The gun was still in his right hand, swinging to and fro.
Members of the public began to gather.
Someone shouted, ‘He’s got a gun.’
Flynn circled him and Barlow’s watchful eyes stayed with him all the way. The gun came up, but dithered, then he dropped it as he coughed up a mouthful of bright red blood from the internal wound in his chest.
TWENTY
It was two days before Ralph Barlow was released from hospital, where he had spent his time under police guard. He had punctured a lung in the pile-up, but it had been saved by the quick actions of the doctors in A amp;E at the Royal Lancaster Hospital.
It was also two days before the whiplash injury Henry had sustained when the Mercedes crashed into him kicked in bad. And although he moved as stiff as a kid’s robot, and was in agony when he moved at all, Henry could not be kept away from work. With Rik Dean, he waited for Barlow’s imminent arrival at Preston custody office, where it had been decided it would be best to lodge him under the circumstances, well away from any friends in high places.
He was back to being represented by a duty solicitor. Henry almost wished his fancy-pants brief was sitting by his side, but it was not to be.
Henry and Rik carried out the interview. After he had been cautioned and the introductions done for the tape, and he had been informed that the interview was being videotaped, Henry — sitting bolt upright, hardly able to move his neck without agonizing pain — said, ‘Ralph, one way or the other, I don’t expect this interview is going to be an easy one, but you have the choice to make it straightforward if you want to. Myself and DI Dean have seen the recording on the mobile phone and if you wish, we will project it up onto a screen and go through it second by second, pausing it and asking you questions about it as we go through it.
‘Just for the record, I am referring to a video recording on a mobile phone that was probably the property of Harry Sunderland, the other suspect in this case. It shows a murder being committed by three men clearly identifiable as you, Ralph Barlow, Harry Sunderland and a man we believe to be called Oscar Malinowski. The phone is passed round the three men who film each other as they kick and beat to death a young woman, who has yet to be identified.’
Henry stopped, let the words sink in, then said, ‘The choice is yours, Ralph.’
‘It’s all down to Harry Sunderland. It just got a bit out of hand
…’
‘Bad, bad people,’ Henry said. ‘You get involved with them and you pay the price.’
He looked at his mini-team — and to do so, he had to move his whole torso in order to keep the pain in his neck manageable. There was Jerry Tope, Bill Robbins, Rik Dean, and, of course, the team leader, Robert Fanshaw-Bayley. Slouched at the back of the office was the unofficial member, Steve Flynn. On the floor next to him was a holdall — hand luggage for his flight back to Gran Canaria later that day.
They were assembled in Henry’s office to update progress so far on what was proving to be a challenging investigation.
They all knew various bits of the story — other than Flynn, who knew what he knew, because, over the last six days, he had been doing what he came to the UK to do — help an injured friend and run a shop.
‘Where to begin,’ Henry said, shuffling various papers. He was sitting at his desk. To his right was a projector screen on the back wall. A laptop had been set up, connected to the data projector that was fitted to the ceiling.
A chorus of muted voices came, ‘Why not at the beginning?’
‘Ho ho,’ he said.
‘But keep it brief — I’m at the Police Authority in half an hour,’ FB said.
‘OK — still have a long way to go with this, but this is where we’re at now.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Background is that Harry Sunderland, leading businessman and Lancaster socialite, gets involved with a Russian crim in Cyprus dealing with cheap property and other criminal activity. Sunderland is a friend of Ralph Barlow, soon to be ex-DI of our parish, through golf and stuff like that. Sunderland was also matey with Joe Speakman, whose
