Or so I thought. But the other side always has extra resources to bring against you. And this time it just wasn’t tennis. Cavendish drew aside his overcoat and pulled a handgun from the pocket of his suit. He gripped it in both hands as he aimed it straight at the JCB.
Before I could react, a bullet crashed through the windscreen, showering me with bits of broken glass and setting my ears ringing with the bang as it embedded itself in the roof. I ducked, swerved and ploughed the machine through a mouldering heap of concrete and twisted metal into the steel fence around the engine house. The steel ripped with a painful screech and collapsed as the JCB ground to a juddering halt. A second shot ricocheted off the bucket, and a burning pain seared through my arm as a bullet tore a gash in my leather jacket.
So it was game, set and match. I clung to the torn plastic seat of the JCB, and waited for Cavendish to finish me off.
24
The rain was dripping down my collar from the roof of the shed. I’d already been feeling cold and tired and on edge, and right now I was really irritated. Ahead of me, in the dark, was a house, and somewhere inside were the blokes we’d been chasing for weeks. My partner was round the corner, covering the back door. The suspects were armed and dangerous, like they say on the telly. But no worries — all we had to do was wait for the back-up to arrive.
And then I was distracted by a noise to the left, coming from a brick lean-to extension near the garden shed. Something like an outside toilet or a coal house. Yes, that noise could have been pieces of coal rattling. A cat or a rat maybe. Or maybe not.
I opened the coal house door carefully and felt along the wall. There was a light switch, but it didn’t seem to work. Somewhere in there, I thought I could hear breathing, but I couldn’t be sure. With my foot I felt a rough stone step down into darkness as I pulled my torch from my pocket. It was the blackest place I’d ever seen, without a chink of light penetrating from the outside or even from the open door.
I flicked on my torch and did a quick sweep. I registered a few roles of mouldy carpet, a pair of staring eyes, and about half a ton of coal heaped against the far wall. The coal hadn’t been used for a long time and was growing mould like the carpets. The eyes were as bright as an animal’s, glittering with fear.
The figure back there in the darkness made a dash for it, slithering across the coal towards the door. He was never going to make it, and I had him up against the wall by the arm in a second. I dragged him out into the light, and he dropped a sports bag with a clatter of steel. We knew who we might expect to find in the house, but the individual I was looking at now wasn’t any of them. This was a nobody, a lad off one of the estates, just like a thousand others.
I actually knew this one, too. I’d nicked young Dean before, several times. But he was nineteen now — and that meant he’d go down for this one. It was tough. Dean had two kids already, one of them two years old and the other no more than a couple of months. Unlike a lot of lads his age, he was sticking by the mother and trying to support the family. That wouldn’t stop him going down.
Dean had nothing to do with the job we were there for, surely? He was a petty thief, not a heroin dealer. He wasn’t exactly the Archbishop of Canterbury, but he knew where to draw the line. Dean never carried a weapon either. Once, when he’d been disturbed by a householder, he’d almost fainted with fright.
We looked at each other for a minute. Dean’s shoulders slumped as soon as he recognised me. With one hand on his arm, I opened the zipper of the bag. Inside were a few tools, an old radio, a roll of copper wire, even a plastic bottle of motor oil — pathetic bits and pieces nicked from the garden shed. Was this all Dean’s life was worth — half a litre of Duckham’s multigrade?
“You’ve picked the wrong house this time, son,” I said.
He didn’t answer. I wondered how much he’d hoped to get for the stuff he’d nicked, and how it could possibly justify risking a spell inside. The whole lot couldn’t have been worth a tenner.
I didn’t have much time to make my mind up. My partner was round the corner, covering the back door. Any second now, our back-up would arrive — a senior officer to take charge, a Special Operations team issued with firearms and trained to use them. And that would be curtains for Dean.
“Go on, clear off out of it.”
“What?”
Dean stared at me, amazed. Then slowly he began to walk away.
“Take the bleedin’ bag with you. I don’t want it.”
He grabbed the bag and began to run. But his footsteps and the clanking of the tools in the bag reached the ears of my partner, who came thundering round the side of the house and spotted the figure legging it for the road.
“Stop! Armed police!”
“Frank, you daft bastard, leave it!”
Sergeant Frank Moxon skidded to a halt and glared from me to the vanishing Dean.
“What the hell’s going on?”
“Stop shouting, for God’s sake, Frank. You’ll wake the whole bloody street.”
“Stones, you’ve just let that bloke get away, haven’t you?”
An upstairs window in the house banged open and there was a movement between the curtains as an arm poked through it.
“Shit. Get down!”
I dragged Moxon with me and we rolled behind the wall of the shed as the first bullet from a handgun dug a hole in the lawn.
“Jesus. Now you’ve done it, Frank. The lad was nothing to do with it.”
“Oh yeah? How do you know? Have you been conducting a full interrogation out here? Got the tapes of the interview for the record, have you?”
I pushed Moxon off me and used my radio to call the control room and tell them we’d bollocksed the operation. A bullet bounced off the garden wall to emphasise the point.
“Believe me, he wasn’t worth it, Frank.”
“Worth it? Was he worth your job? Because you’ve gone too bloody far this time, Stones.”
I could hear shouts in the house, and a car engine revving up in the garage. We were helpless while the bloke at the window had us pinned down. It looked as though our targets were about to make a getaway. Frank Moxon was spitting with rage.
“You’ve turned a blind eye once too often, and this time you nearly got me killed. That’s way out of order.”
“Frank—”
“Why do you always think you can do things by your own rules? Just because some kid comes from the same estate as you, you think he deserves special treatment. You’d be a good cop if you weren’t so bloody soft-hearted about these low-life wasters. Deep down, you’re still just one of them yourself, aren’t you? You’re just a thieving dosser’s kid off the Forest Estate who’s had a bit too much education for his own good.”
“Let’s talk about it later, Frank.”
“Later? When we get out of this, McClure, I’m going to see you shafted.”
“Thanks, partner.”
Moxon knew more than enough about me to do it, too. I wondered whether to walk out into the open and let the bloke at the window kill me there and then. In view of what happened later, I might as well have.