The Last Big Job (41 page)

That meant he had to turn left, no matter what.

Which was a problem because as his sharp eyes skimmed the
immediate vicinity he spotted a man on the other side of the road
running down a narrow path which led on to a quiet lane backing on
to the A59.

It was only a fleeting glimpse, but enough for Henry, from
years of culminated experience, to say, ‘That’s him - shit!’ He
struck the steering wheel in frustration.

Then he peered at the gap in the central reservation which had
been closed to cars and other motor vehicles by use of concrete
bollards. It was still possible to get across on a push bike or on
foot.

Henry’s mouth sagged open as he examined the width of the gap
between the posts. Surely a car as petite as a Mazda MX-5 could fit
through?

Danny - there was no need for telepathy because she could read
his face like a book - suddenly realised what he was going to
do.

‘
No,’ she warned him.

He revved the engine, gave her an evil ‘sideways’, released
the clutch and almost stood upright on the gas pedal. The wheels
screeched and the car lurched towards the impossible gap. Henry
held on tight to the steering wheel. Danny whimpered, cowered and
covered her eyes in horror. ‘My car, my car,’ she cried.

At the very last moment, the driver suffered the gravest
doubts as to whether the little sports car would be narrow enough
to squeeze through and come out the other side in a fit state to
keep working.

By then it was too late to brake.

‘
Breathe in,’ Henry suggested.

Danny clamped her eyes tight shut.

Many years before, as a young, bright and often very stupid
and immature uniformed PC, Henry had become somewhat of an expert
in getting police cars, vans, Land Rovers and the like, through
unlikely gaps between fence posts, bollards and all other manner of
very narrow places. There had been occasional scrapes, but
generally his reckoning had been perfect. All it took, he boasted
to his colleagues, was nerve, skill and the innate ability to line
up the vehicle at the correct angle.

But now, the older man, whose self-judgement was muddied by
the passage of time, was horrified to see the fast-approaching gap
between the bollards getting tighter and tighter and tighter - and
then suddenly he had no choice because the car was in there and he
had to keep going - or get stuck.

Snap! Snap!

The wing mirrors were shorn off with clinical
precision.

And that was it. He was through. He whinnied an almost
hysterical roar of triumph.

‘
Jesus Christ!’ Danny yelled. ‘My car!’ Henry careered on to
the opposite side of the road, wrestling with the tiny steering
wheel, causing a car which was hurtling down the road to brake,
swerve and pass with an enraged blast of the horn from a driver who
had been certain his number was up.

‘
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 measure and two pairs of white cotton gloves. He
had only ever used the chalk once and had lost the tape measure and
gloves. He was thinking about this because he was watching a
traffic officer dutifully marking the position of the vehicles in
the road with her piece of trusty yellow chalk. Subsequently she
would measure up the scene and draw a plan of the
accident.

The road was closed in both directions, completely blocked,
probably for several hours to come. The traffic department, now
renamed the Road Safety Department, had moved in and taken control.
The Fire Brigade were busy disentangling the gnarled wreckage of
the tractor/trailer unit and the Ford Escort. It was proving a
difficult thing to achieve and was made all the more distasteful by
the ghost-like presence of the headless body trapped in the
driver’s seat, still gripping the steering wheel with both
hands.

Henry and Danny stood a little way back, leaning on her
scratched and battered MX-5.

Henry’s euphoria at the chase had dissipated; his excitement
gone. He was starting to feel cold and not a little dithery. Maybe
shock was setting in. His hands were thrust deep into his trouser
pockets.

Next to him, Danny stood there arms folded, a cigarette
hanging from the corner of her mouth. She was slightly disgusted
with herself in that she was more concerned with her damaged car
than a fatal road traffic accident victim. She was about to
remonstrate with Henry but stopped when she caught sight of FB
approaching, purpose in his stride and a bundle of something in his
hands.

‘
Yours, I believe,’ he said, presenting Danny with two smashed
side mirrors. She took them from him and tossed them into the back
of the MX-5. To Henry he said, ‘Is this the guy who did the
‘copter?’ He jerked his thumb towards the carnage.

Henry looked down at FB. He was much taller than him. ‘I think
so.’

FB chortled with disbelief. ‘You think so? Fuck me, that’s
brilliant. You chase some poor fucker and chop his friggin’ head
off - and you
think so?
For your sake, it better be right, otherwise
you’ve some real hard explaining to do - because I won’t be doing
it for you when the press come snapping, understand?’