Suddenly, the ram stopped. The crusher had squeezed the car to a third of its width and we were still alive. Sweat streamed down my face and burned my eyes, but my hands and feet were ice cold. I looked at Steve and Dylan. We grinned at each other like idiots. Our lives were coming to an end, but we were grinning.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to them.
Steve reached across the front seats and grabbed my bound hands with his. ‘Don’t be sorry. You didn’t do anything wrong. You’re a good kid and I’m proud of you.’ He turned to Dylan. ‘I’m proud of both of you. Got that?’
A new hydraulic whine wiped away our smiles. The crusher had only completed the first stage of the process. The second ram, a hinged affair, folded over to crush us from the top like a giant, metal clamshell.
I looked up at the gallery of faces watching us. The Russians were egging the machine on to do its job. Hancock had turned away. Tommy had lost all the colour in his face. Even Morgan had lost his bloodlust. Only Derek met my gaze. I saw compassion, which wasn’t the reaction I expected to see. The top ram closed over the car and everybody disappeared from sight. Tyres burst, the suspension collapsed and the roof buckled and lunged at us.
Now in total darkness, my fear spiked. The collapsing car was a lot more frightening in the dark. The pitch-blackness forced me to find a pocket of space based on sound and touch. With the car’s geography changing every second, it was easy to get it wrong.
Our actions were futile, but life had become so damned precious. We no longer cared about the noise from the snarling diesel engine, the shriek and moan of collapsing steel or Rykov’s laughter. We didn’t care because none of it mattered. Living was all that counted. We’d fight to survive for as long as we could.
Over the noise of the compressor, the hydraulic rams and the buckling steel, I thought I heard something else. Short sounds. Loud noises. Harsh snaps. Sounds that didn’t fit the situation. My brain processed them and delivered an answer.
‘Gunfire,’ I said.
Steve and Dylan didn’t hear me. They were too busy trying to find the last pockets of space to save themselves.
I heard shouting, then the crusher stopped. The monster enveloping us was silent.
I was shaking. It had to be a joke. Rykov wanted to drag out our deaths for his entertainment.
‘Get that bastard thing open,’ a muffled voice shouted from outside.
The voice had authority and moments later the crusher opened up. I stared out through the slit of the windowless windscreen. Detective Brennan looked back at me.
‘Get them the hell out of there,’ he barked.
Lap Twenty-Seven
For the second time, I was alone with Brennan in a police interview room in the early hours of the morning. This time, I was being held at the divisional headquarters in Kidderminster. He’d sent Steve and Dylan to hospital to get checked out. Their statements could wait. Mine couldn’t. I was tired and I wanted to see Steve and Dylan to say sorry, thanks and tell them it was over, but I couldn’t leave without giving Brennan some answers.
‘Do you know how bloody close you came to ballsing up this operation?’ Brennan asked.
I didn’t. I just knew how close I’d come to dying. Another twenty seconds and the crusher would have squeezed all the free space from inside the Renault. When the crusher opened up, we re-emerged into a war zone. While Steve, Dylan and I thought we were living our last moments, four of the Russian’s men had lived theirs. The armed response team had killed them. They lay in various, untidy piles riddled with bullets. It looked to be touch and go for another of the Russians. Blood pumped from a big wound in his chest and the cop working on him struggled to stem the flow. Derek and his boys were OK and in cuffs. Hancock was gone. The police had slapped a bulletproof vest on him, put him in a car and taken him out of there before Steve, Dylan and I had been cut from the crippled Renault. Rykov had been wounded, but not seriously. Uniformed, plain clothes and armed police littered the salvage yard in large numbers.
When Brennan had brought me to the station, he stuck me in the interview room and left me for an hour before attempting to talk to me. The backlash of almost dying a nasty death was euphoria. I was amped up on the simple notion that I had a tomorrow and another one after that. My emotions pinballed off each other. I went from laughing one second to crying the next. Once the elation burnt itself out, Brennan came for my statement.
There was no pantomime or messing around with procedure this time. Brennan went by the book. He recorded the interview. Another detective sat in the room with us while I spilled everything to Brennan from the night before Alex died to the police’s eleventh hour arrival. Brennan had to change the tape twice before I was finished.
The other detective left with the tapes to get them transcribed. Now Brennan and I could really talk.
‘Did I get any of it right?’ I asked.
Brennan cracked a small smile. ‘Not much, but I’ll give you marks for originality.’
‘You could have made things a lot easier by telling me what you were up to.’
‘Yeah, like I was going to confide in you about a six month undercover operation. I tried to be as clear as I could that you were on the wrong track and you needed to back off. You chose not to listen.’
‘You didn’t do a very good job.’
Brennan swung his arms wide. ‘What can I say? Guilty as charged.’
I wondered how guilty. That smile said a lot. Brennan could have done more to set me straight, but he’d let me believe in the myths surrounding Derek, concoct my own theories and charge off on my fool’s errand. My misguided beliefs had done him a favour. It worked to his advantage to have me as a fly in everyone’s ointment. My interference made things happen.
Suddenly, I became aware of my stink. I reeked. I’d sweated through my clothes. First, from fear, and then from my survivor’s high. I wouldn’t bother washing them. I was burning the lot. Brennan had to have noticed and it was kind of him not to mention it. I wrapped the blanket the paramedics had given me at the salvage yard even tighter around me.
‘If I’m going to be your star witness, you have to tell me how wrong I’ve been.’
‘Valentin Rykov is Russian mob. He’s been in the UK since the nineties. Glasnost did wonders for the Russian mob in Western Europe. They set up shop running drugs, girls, protection, human trafficking, loan sharking and anything else you care to name. Rykov had his fingers in a lot of dirty, yet traditional, criminal pies. The trading in phantom cars was just one string to his bow.’
‘Phantom cars?’
‘One of the few facts you were right about. The conversion of insurance write-offs into new cars.’
‘He couldn’t have made much off each car. The depreciation must have killed most of the profit.’
‘That was where Vic Hancock came in. You guessed right about his money troubles. He was stretched thin, forcing him to secure funding outside the High Street banks. Rykov provided Hancock a way of paying back his debt and making some money. The great thing about Hancock was he gave Rykov the complete network to exploit. What you saw was one of two dozen operations. They might only make five to ten grand a car, but when dozens of cars are going through his dealerships every week, it stacks up.’