The street led up to the entrance to a high-rise council estate. It was a dead end for cars. Bolt cursed. He knew that if the suspect got inside the warren of alleys that these characterless sixties estates always featured it would mean he'd almost certainly slip through the net. Jesus, where the hell was the back-up? Even the helicopter was no longer overhead; doubtless it had been sent to chase the money. It disgusted him that the recovery of the half a million pounds was more important to his bosses, and their bosses, than capturing a brutal knife-wielding killer and possibly saving the life of a fourteen-year-old girl, but then in his heart he'd always known it would be. The whole British justice system was built on the protection of property above the protection of lives, which was why armed robbers were always put away for two, three, sometimes even five times as long as child molesters.
Bastards. In those taut, desperate seconds, Bolt was a man entirely on his own, out on a limb and having to do everything himself, knowing that failure was unthinkable.
The armed response vehicle seemed to materialize from nowhere. In fact it had come out of a side road up ahead, just in front of the entrance to the estate. It stopped dead, blocking the way, and the three officers were out in an instant, their MP5s pointed straight at the suspect, who was twenty yards from them.
'Armed police! Drop your weapon!'
Bolt reached into his pocket for the pepper spray, knowing that the suspect was going to turn and run back his way, away from the guns, meaning it would be up to him to make an arrest.
But the suspect didn't. He kept on going. Charging right at them, yelling something that sounded remarkably like a battle cry.
'Don't shoot him!' shouted Bolt. 'Take him alive! For Christ's sake, we need him!'
'Armed police! Drop your weapon now!'
'Don't shoot!'
The suspect was only ten yards away from them. Still running, he pulled back his arm and threw the knife. It hit one of the ARV officers in the arm above the elbow, slicing right through the bicep. The cop dropped his gun and grabbed uselessly at the knife's handle, which was jammed halfway into his arm, stumbling as he did so. For the suspect, it was a suicidal move. Bolt knew it, and knew too what it meant. He saw a dead girl; a funeral; a lifetime of wondering how he could have done things differently.
The bullets sounded like firecrackers in the empty street, their noise reverberating hollowly off the high walls of the surrounding buildings. Two two-round bursts. The suspect flew backwards, arms flailing as he spun round before crashing to the ground, his sunglasses flying off and clattering across the tarmac.
'Police!' screamed Bolt to identify himself, holding up his warrant card as he ran over to where the suspect lay. He knelt down, felt for a pulse, knew it was pointless. There was something there, but it was fading fast, and even as his fingers squeezed the wrist and he shouted at him not to die, his voice full of desperation, it disappeared altogether. He was gone. His eyes were closed, his mouth ever so slightly open, a single drop of blood forming in one corner. It wasn't Scott Ridgers, either. This guy was young – late twenties, maybe thirty – an ordinary, unblemished face, olive skin and thick black hair suggesting a background from somewhere in southern Europe. Bolt had never seen him before, knew nothing about him, would probably never know anything about him, other than the fact that his death might have ramifications for him that lasted for the rest of his days.
And as he knelt there, staring down at the dead man, unable to understand why the ARV cops couldn't have used a non-lethal option like a taser or a baton round to bring him down, his worst fears were confirmed as Barry's frantic voice came over the earpiece.
'Control to all units. What do you mean you've lost suspect one? Find him! I want the whole fucking area locked down! We have to get hold of that money! Over.'
They'd failed. And God alone knew what happened now.
Forty-two
'Why the hell did you remove all the tracking devices, Mrs Devern?' demanded Mo Khan, barely able to contain his anger. 'You must have known it was going to help them get away.'
Andrea, ashen-faced, shocked like all of them, glared at him. 'Because they knew about them, that's why!' she yelled, her voice close to breaking. 'They knew you were there. How the hell did that happen?'
The question hung in the air.
Twenty minutes had passed since the fatal shooting of suspect two. Two police helicopters continued to hover overhead, moving in lazy circles, hunting for a quarry who had long since disappeared, leaving a trail of chaos in his wake. The worst of the crowds were gone too, although there were still large groups of pedestrians hanging around to see the aftermath of the action, and because they were spilling out into the road they were causing serious traffic congestion. The operation to clear the area to allow police forensic teams and ambulances in was being further complicated by an apparently unrelated outbreak of fighting between rival fans further up on White Hart Lane. The competing blare of sirens filled the air as Mo, Bolt and Tina stood beside one of a line of police vehicles clustered round the corner from the street where the body of suspect two still lay where it had fallen. Andrea was in the back of one of the cars, sitting with her legs out, holding a plastic bottle of water.
The mood among everyone at the scene was one of complete shock. The operation had been a complete failure. Half a million pounds of taxpayers' money had walked away from right under their noses; worse than that, a member of the public had been killed, one of the team's own number seriously wounded, and the one suspect they had managed to apprehend had decided to go out in a blaze of glory rather than be taken alive. It couldn't really have gone any more wrong. The only positive was that, unlike the stabbed fan, Turner was still alive, although the seriousness of his condition wasn't yet known. He'd been airlifted to the Homerton Hospital in Hackney whose expertise in dealing with knife injuries, honed through years of practice, was legendary, so he was in the best possible hands. Even so, as they all knew, that might not be enough.
Bolt felt as if he'd done ten rounds boxing a man twice his size and speed whose speciality was headshots. He couldn't seem to think straight, was finding it hard to come to terms with the fact that he and his people were being outthought and outfought by the men who'd taken Emma. He knew he couldn't give up, but standing there among the wreckage of the op, he was getting perilously close.
'What happened, Andrea?' he asked. 'We lost communication with you after you stopped to pick up the package.'
'I got a call on the phone that was in it. It was Emma screaming.'
Bolt swallowed. Told himself to keep calm.
'Just this one terrified scream. Then it cut out and he came on the line. He said that this time Emma was screaming out of fear, but the next time it would be out of pain, unless I did exactly what I was told. Those were his exact words. He told me to use that thing to start removing all the bugs and trackers' – she pointed at the bugfinding device that was now in an evidence bag in Mo's hands – 'and I tried to tell him I didn't know what he was talking about, but he told me he knew I'd gone to the police, and if I tried to deny it then he'd . . . he'd make Emma scream again.' She stared at them each in turn. 'I had no choice. Don't you see that? I had no choice. I want my daughter back.'