‘ We haven’t finished yet,’ Henry said grimly.
‘ You’d better be sure this is the right guy,’ Danny warned him.
Underneath, however, she was secretly exhilarated both by the chase and the change in Henry Christie as the cop in him had slicked back into place. Even if it was a cop suffering from the ‘red mist syndrome’.
A hundred yards down the A59, he slammed on sharply, lifting the rear end of the car, yanked the steering wheel down to the left and mounted the kerb with a crash of front bumper and a sickening scrape of sump.
He drove across the pavement and on to a short footpath which led through to a cul-de-sac abutting the dual carriageway. As the MX-5 bounced down, a car in front of them tore away from the side of the road, slithering. It was a white Ford Escort XR3i. Though now a few years old it had been lovingly maintained by a careful owner who, at the moment, beavering away in her office in Preston, was blissfully unaware the car had been stolen. It could still pick up its skirts. The driver looked back over his shoulder and saw the MX-5 behind. He jumped to the right conclusion.
The cops were on his tail.
He cursed with a violent tongue and rammed the accelerator to the floor. At the same time he leaned across into the passenger footwell with his left hand and picked up the revolver lying there. He slotted it, barrel down, between his thighs.
In the MX-5 Henry asked Danny if she had a personal radio with her.
She shook her head.
‘ Looks like we’re on our own,’ he breathed philosophically.
The MX-5 was right up the rear end of the Escort. Henry was determined this was going to be a victory.
As the driver of the Escort sped towards the junction with what used to be the main road between Preston and Liverpool before the dual carriageway had been built, he was faced with a major decision.
To go right would mean travelling in the direction of Preston. Busy roads, built-up areas, slow-moving traffic, lots of cops. But also lots of rat runs, possibilities to ditch the motor and leg it over the fences, gardens and down back alleys.
Turning left would take him towards more rural areas. Fast-winding roads, fields, cows, fewer cops. And also the chance to outpace and out-manoeuvre the bastard behind.
Both ways had good and bad selling points.
The only reason, in the end, the driver chose to go left was for practical driving purposes only. It was easier to negotiate the left-hand turn at speed. So without any noticeable reduction in mph, he skidded out of the side road, slewing sideways across the tarmac. He wrestled with the wheel, almost losing the car in the gardens opposite. Then he regained control and gunned it away.
Ahead of him was a tractor, pulling an empty, flat trailer, trundling merrily along. Easy to pass.
Behind, Henry edged out of the side road with more prudence than his prey. From bitter experience, he knew that fully liveried cop cars are far less likely to get hit than plain ones.
Intending to shoot by the agricultural combination, the driver of the Escort veered out on to the wrong side of the road, desperate to put the farm vehicles between himself and the pursuing Mazda.
And then the tractor driver did something that happens far too regularly on country roads.
He fucked-up the townie driver.
Without a signal, without a warning, not even a backward glance, he turned right across the path of the overtaking car.
The Escort driver had nowhere to go. Braking was useless, quick manoeuvring was out of the question. He screamed.
The front end of the Escort smashed into the coupling between the rear of the tractor and the front of the trailer. The roof of the car was effectively sliced off, but the rest of the car did not continue to go underneath the trailer and come out of the other side to continue a comic pursuit. It became a tangled, mangled, twisted mess.
The driver was killed instantly. His head was severed from his body with the efficiency of a guillotine.
Henry Christie found it a hundred yards back down the road where it had rolled face down into a grate.
Chapter Seventeen
It took longer than anticipated to carry out the transfer. There were fifty money-containers constructed of Kevlar-steel, all about the dimension of a medium-sized suitcase. They were all very heavy indeed and must have been tightly packed inside. Even allowing for a prearranged systematic transfer, there was a very edgy ten minutes during which everyone of the team felt vulnerable and exposed as they passed the containers from the back of the security van, down the line, into the back of the Sherpa.
Then it was done. The money was in. Crane and Smith slammed the rear doors shut.
Hawker jumped into the driver’s seat of the security van and started the engine. A minute later he was on the M6 heading south. Behind him, in one of the Audis, was Price. Their task was to run the van down to Staffordshire and dump it about a mile away from the gates of the security waste-disposal unit. By doing this, time would be bought for Crane and Smith to sort out the money as necessary — if the radio-control room of the security company were not alarmed by the length of the stoppage which would have been transmitted to them from the tracker unit fitted to the van.
Putting their minds at rest was Hawker’s first job.
‘ Alpha One to base, Alpha One,’ he called up on the radio system.
‘ Alpha One — go ahead. We’ve been concerned.’
‘ All OK. Repeat, all OK,’ Hawker said coolly. ‘A bad case of the runs in here today, but we’re back on the road now. Please inform the waste centre we’ll be running late.’
‘ Roger — wilco.’
The money weighed down the back of the Sherpa, making steering light and very imprecise. Crane edged slowly away from between the two HGVs, but instead of driving on to the motorway, he went up the Staff Only road at the back of the service area, turned right at the end of it, and drove over the motorway towards the A6. From there he would travel north up to Lancaster and then back over to the warehouse in Morecambe.
While he drove, Smith busied himself with a mobile phone and left a message on a pager.
In the truckers’ cafe on the northbound side of the service area, two lorry drivers had been dawdling over a long meal and numerous cups of coffee. One of them received Smith’s pager message. He looked up at the other man and nodded. ‘Time to move.’ These were the two men who had earlier parked the two curtainsided heavy goods vehicles parallel to each other, leaving a space wide enough for the security van to squeeze into. They paid for their grub, then walked across the covered footbridge to the southbound side of the services. Their task was to now abandon the HGVs. A few moments later both were thundering down the motorway. Unbeknown to one of them, he was carrying four corpses.
Smith slid his mobile phone on to the dash. ‘That went like a fucking dream, even if I say so myself.’
Crane nodded grimly. He negotiated a tight curve in the road.
‘ No cops, nothing,’ Smith said. ‘Brilliant.’
‘ They’ll be wondering what’s hit them,’ Crane agreed. He checked his mirrors. Close behind was the Audi sports car driven by Gunk Elphick. Thompson was in the passenger seat, Drozdov in the rear. Crane recalled the Russian’s actions in swiftly disposing of the two security guards, almost as a challenge. The man was a ruthless, clinical killer, someone to be wary of. ‘It’s not over yet,’ Crane said. ‘Not by a long chalk.’
Henry remembered that when he had joined the police twenty-odd years earlier he had actually been issued with a piece of yellow chalk; it had come with his appointments — his staff and handcuffs — and also a tape
