Flynn winced, not quite able to make a decision, but by the time he did he was at the junction at the one-way system again and because of vehicles behind him, he had nowhere to go but forward and edged out into the traffic stream again.
He cursed and picked his mobile phone up from the dashboard, where it was wedged. He didn’t have Rik’s number, so he had to go through the rigmarole of finding the ‘ recently received ’ calls menu to unearth it, then call him back. By which time he had moved a good twenty metres. Progress was not good.
‘Yeah, Flynn,’ Rik answered quickly.
‘The pool car’s parked outside the nick… I couldn’t find anywhere to park up, so I’m looping back round to see if I can on this run.’
‘Right… Flynn, what the hell’s going on?’ Rik asked.
‘That question gives me a feeling of deja vu,’ Flynn said. ‘I don’t know, is the answer… but nothing pleasant, I suspect. Why the hell would he be with Barlow?’
He was back at the junction with King Street again, and moving slowly north, into Sun Street, then ninety degrees right into Marton Street again, at which point the motorist in front of him jammed on his brakes and came to a sudden, unexpected stop, obviously unsure where he was going. Flynn almost upended Alison’s car as he slammed the brakes on.
Up ahead he saw Barlow and Henry emerge from the police-station door and go to the pool car. Henry walked around it and leaned on the roof, talking across to Barlow, looking back down the street in Flynn’s direction.
Flynn honked his horn at the guy in front, who still hadn’t made up his mind. The man’s arm appeared through his window and he gave Flynn the middle-finger salute. Flynn pipped again.
The car edged forwards and Flynn could not decide what the bugger was up to — and then it kangarooed to a stalled stop.
‘I don’t believe this,’ Flynn said and he saw now that Henry had got into the car with Barlow and was moving off and joining the traffic Flynn had just left. And behind was the black Mercedes.
Flynn was trapped. He crunched the car into reverse, lurched backwards, stopping only an inch from the car behind, which honked with an angry warning. He gave a ‘sorry’ wave, spun the wheel, mounted the footpath with two wheels and passed the dithering car driver.
By the time he reached the junction, Henry was just turning right, heading north up through the city.
Flynn pushed the nose of the car into the junction, but no one was willing to give way, so he simply barged out, causing a concertina of braking cars and a cacophony of horns which made it sound more like Rome than a Lancashire town.
Even though he had forced his way in, he was still restricted by the sheer volume of traffic. The only way he could have made quick progress would have been to get all four wheels on the footpath this time and mow down a bunch of pesky pedestrians.
Instead he had to seethe.
There was no way, either, that Henry could rush through the morning traffic, and its slowness was compounded by a set of roadworks on the one-way system that for about a hundred metres reduced two lanes into one and almost brought everything to a halt.
Not that he was rushing. He was purposely going as slowly as he could, not taking any advantage of gaps, but crawled deliberately, feeling a surge of positivity in him because he had seen Flynn in Alison’s car and for a moment longer than necessary he had kept his face turned towards him in the hope that Flynn would see him. Surely he had.
He checked his rear-view mirror. The Mercedes was right behind now and he tried to see inside it, but all he could make out were two male figures, a driver and back-seat passenger. Alison, he realized, must be being held down in the space behind the front and rear passenger seat.
‘What’s the plan?’ Henry asked.
‘Wait and see.’
‘You know that the last person seen with a murder victim is usually the one who did the killing,’ Henry said. ‘If I turn up dead, which I presume is the plan, they’ll come a-knocking on your door, pal.’
‘That’s if there’s a body,’ Barlow said scarily, sending a tremor of fear through Henry which felt like all his blood had rushed out of his feet.
Henry swallowed. ‘You know you have no chance with this, don’t you?’
‘I’ll control it,’ Barlow said.
‘Like you did Jennifer Sunderland?’ Henry sneered. ‘That went tits-up straight-off, dinnit?’
Barlow snapped. He slashed the gun in his hand sideways into Henry’s face, into his broken cheekbone, then forced the muzzle into Henry’s groin, twisting it hard into his flesh.
‘A mistake I won’t make again.’
Flynn, stationary, was still on the mobile phone to Rik Dean. ‘Sorry, pal, this traffic ain’t moving.’
‘Do your best to try and stay with him.’
‘If I can lay eyes on him, I will,’ Flynn said. He used the term ‘laying eyes’ when sighting a marlin out sport-fishing off the Canary Islands. ‘Hey, one thing, there’s the possibility of another car tagging on with him, a black Mercedes.’
‘A big black car was seen outside the murder victims’ house by one of the neighbours,’ Rik said. ‘No make, but it was described as fancy — why?’
‘There was one parked on Marton Street and I saw Barlow give it a thumbs-up when he and Henry came out of the nick, then it set off behind them.’
‘Could be… Look, I need to speak to some people. I’ll call you back.’
‘Ditto, when I’ve got something to tell you.’
Flynn got through the lights and on to King Street at last, but was met by two solid lanes of cars stretching down through the city and in the distance he saw a ‘ roadworks ahead ’ sign and groaned with the injustice of it all. There was literally no way of making progress. He could possibly cut across the traffic at this point and then do a rat run around the western side of the city, but there was no guarantee it would be any quicker.
But Flynn preferred to be on the move and it surely could not be any slower. He signalled left, nudged his way across the traffic and on to Aldcliffe Road that ran down by the Lancaster Canal and, hoping he could remember his way through the back streets and byways of the city, he threw the car quickly along these streets, over the railway line, down by the back of the castle, winding his way down on to St George’s Quay where he had spent a short morning of passion with a paramedic in her tiny flat overlooking the river. He knew he would have to rejoin the traffic at the bottom of the city at Cable Street.
He did keep moving and probably it was quicker and as he waited to turn left onto Cable Street, he knew he had jumped the queue a little.
But he could not see Henry’s car — and he also knew that he was making an assumption as to where he was headed. It was possible that he could have actually gone in a different direction and cut east across the city centre, but Flynn had the feeling he would still be heading north. Possibly heading towards Sunderland’s haulage depot.
But he could have been wrong.
He edged into the traffic which was moving more freely down here after bursting free from the city-centre bottleneck and Flynn motored along slowly, turning on to Greyhound Bridge to drive across the Lune. Traffic here had thinned out considerably and was moving quickly now across the one-way bridge.
As he checked his mirrors and swung across the lanes to keep heading north, he thought he had lost Henry.
But he suddenly found that he had actually beaten him through the traffic because as Flynn drifted across the three lanes, the pool car and the Mercedes came into view behind him.
Even though his left eye was streaming, and the broken cheekbone was emitting shock waves of pain, Henry saw that somehow Steve Flynn had managed to get ahead of him. The problem was that there were three lanes of traffic over Greyhound Bridge and Flynn moved across to the right-hand lane and Henry was now expected to pass him using the middle lane, then filter across to travel north, as per Barlow’s instructions.