‘What are you doing?’
‘What do you think? I’m not letting Kent get away.’
Wishing she had a better pursuit vehicle, Tina accelerated away after the people carrier, telling Grier to stick the emergency halogen light she kept in the glovebox on the dashboard so that their quarry would know the police were after them.
Another balaclava-clad figure jumped in the back of the people carrier, then it drove through the small gap between the crashed vehicles and the parked ones lining one side of the road before picking up speed as it continued down Doughty Street towards Theobalds Road.
Tina followed it through the gap, clipping a parked car in the process. She couldn’t read the people carrier’s number plate as it was driving without lights, so she slammed her foot hard on the floor in an effort to catch up.
The driver must have realized he was being followed because he speeded up as well and hurtled straight across the junction without stopping, narrowly missing a man on a bike who had to mount the pavement to avoid being hit, before doing a hard right, tyres wailing, and accelerating in the direction of Bloomsbury.
Tina knew she had to do the same. She couldn’t lose them. Not when they were carrying a cargo as valuable as Andrew Kent. Clenching her teeth and ignoring Grier’s protests, she shot across the junction, yanking the wheel and only just managing to straighten up in time to avoid hitting a taxi that was dropping someone off on the other side of the road.
Only twenty yards separated the Focus and the people carrier, and Tina felt a burst of delirious excitement that would have shocked her if she’d had time to think about it.
Her quarry overtook a bus on the wrong side of the road, squeezing between oncoming traffic, hitting speeds of fifty miles an hour and getting faster all the time, and Tina followed suit, keeping tight to him.
‘Christ, be careful!’ yelled Grier as they swerved to avoid an approaching car. ‘You’ll get us killed!’
‘Get on the phone and tell them his number plate. We’re not losing this thing!’
The people carrier weaved in the road, overtook another car, but it couldn’t shake Tina off. Now only fifteen yards separated them and she could just make out the numbers and letters on the plate.
Then, without warning, one of the balaclava-clad figures leaned halfway out of the window and pointed a shotgun at them, looking very much as if he was taking aim. Grier yelled something unintelligible and Tina instinctively slammed her foot on the brakes and spun the wheel. She just had time to duck her head before the windscreen exploded, showering her with glass. The car spun round as she lost control and left the road, the suspension jarring angrily as she mounted the pavement and smashed sideways into an empty shopfront, scattering the diners at a next-door pavement café but managing to avoid hitting any of them, before finally coming to a halt.
Tina’s breathing came in short, rapid bursts as she sat back up in the seat, letting shards of glass fall off her. The car had turned round completely now, but she could see the people carrier disappearing round the corner in her rearview mirror.
She quickly checked herself but couldn’t see any sign of injury, then looked over at Grier, fearful that he might have been hurt, which would have been her fault. But he looked OK, shaken but uninjured. She felt an immediate relief. She’d already lost two colleagues in her career. She couldn’t face losing another.
In fact he was still talking on the phone to the 999 operator, describing what had just happened, before adding that he hadn’t got a chance to take the registration number of the suspect vehicle. ‘We’re going to secure the scene now,’ he said, and rang off.
Tina sighed. ‘Are you all right?’
He glared at her, and she could see he was trying to keep calm, knowing that, whatever might be going through his head, she was still his superior — although for how much longer was anyone’s guess. Tina had always been considered something of a loose cannon, a copper who attracted trouble, even if that trouble wasn’t usually her fault. People who worked with her got killed; she’d even killed someone herself the previous year, while officially off duty, and though no blame had been attached to her for that, it was still seen by some as a blot on an already badly bloodstained copybook. Crashing a car into a shop during a high-speed chase and narrowly missing a dozen terrified pedestrians was another, especially when she’d been drinking.
Tina sighed and rubbed her eyes. There was bound to be a breath test, and she was hugely relieved that she hadn’t drunk anything in the pub earlier, and that the two hits of vodka she’d sneaked in the toilet were long enough ago now to keep her under the limit.
Even so, pretty soon her luck was going to run out.
‘I’m OK,’ Grier said quietly, his voice trembling with emotion, ‘but why did you do that, ma’am? You could have killed us both.’
Grier was one of the new breed of cops, a desk man who didn’t like taking big risks, and although he’d held himself together enough to finish the phone call to the 999 operator, Tina felt a wave of contempt for him. ‘I had to make a split-second decision,’ she answered firmly. ‘I didn’t want to lose them.’
‘Well, you did lose them, ma’am,’ he said slowly, and she noticed that his hands were shaking. ‘You did bloody lose them.’
And she had. She’d failed. She should have made sure Kent went to the hospital with an armed escort.
Not only had she misread the situation, she also knew with a terrible lurch of certainty that if she’d held back rather than sped after the carrier like a teenage boy who’d just passed his test she would have stood a better chance of following them.
She groaned. Whichever way she looked at it, the whole thing had been a set-up. And she’d fallen for it hook, line and sinker.
Twenty-five
‘What did you shoot him for? You told me there was going to be no need for violence, and then your buddy here blows away a copper at point-blank range. Why?’
We were now in the second getaway vehicle, a clapped-out minibus that had been stolen the day before from an old people’s home — a typically callous move from Tyrone Wolfe. He and Haddock were again in the front, with me sitting directly behind them, my shotgun resting on the back of Andrew Kent, who was lying lengthways along the narrow aisle separating the seats, face down and not speaking, eyes tightly shut. He was clearly desperate not to see any of our faces now that we’d removed our balaclavas, since to do so would effectively sentence him to death. Blood was still dribbling out of his head where I’d hit him earlier and one side of his face was covered in a network of dark rivulets. Behind me sat Tommy, smoking a cigarette and not saying a great deal.
The people carrier had been dumped in a deserted car park behind a block of flats on the massive Barnsbury Estate in Islington, barely a mile from the snatch point, and set on fire to destroy any forensic evidence linking any of us to it. According to Wolfe, the area wasn’t covered by CCTV cameras, and no one had seen us change vehicles, so the minibus we’d been in for the last fifteen minutes as we drove north-west across London, mingling naturally with the other traffic, was clean.
During that time I’d sat in brooding silence, shocked at what had just occurred. I was also thinking furiously about what I had to do to bring this situation under control. I knew I needed to gather as much information as possible about our next movements so I could lead police reinforcements to wherever we were going. First, though, I wanted to vent my spleen at the men who’d just gunned down a fellow police officer and, for the benefit of my recording device, get them to admit what they’d done, so there’d be no way they’d see the outside of a prison cell again.