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  No doubt the Savage boys knew there were human derelicts down here and had discerned there was no threat from them. But it was plainly obvious to anyone that this particular tramp was interacting with someone else.

  ‘Just a little change, sur,’ he said in fluting Irish, sticking an empty hand under Heck’s nose. ‘A couple of pounds wouldn’t go amiss …’

  Heck chanced another glance. One of the two brothers had opened the driver’s door to the van and looked set to climb into it. The other was still frozen in place, still peering along the passage.

  ‘Get down, you damn fool!’ Heck hissed. ‘Get on the floor now!’

  ‘Just a little change, sur. An entry fee, if you loike. The price of visiting our little parlour …’

  Heck lunged, grabbing the skeletal figure by the lapel of his coat and dragging him out of the torchlight, hurling him to the floor. At the same time he bellowed: ‘Armed police! You’re completely surrounded! Drop your weapons and get on the ground with your arms outspread!’

  The response was two thundering gunshots, the first kicking a first-sized chunk from the concrete corner in front of Heck, the second whining past. There was an echo of slamming doors.

  Heck slid forward to look. The transit van was already haring away down the passage, its tail-lights receding. The Mondeo sat unattended. Heck raced back to his Fiat, stepping around the groaning tramp.

  ‘’Tis a cruel thing to manhandle a fella so,’ came a feeble voice.

  Heck leapt behind the wheel, slammed his key into the ignition and hit the gas. The tramp, staggering back to his feet, gave a V-sign to the windscreen, only to be blinded by Heck’s headlights. He toppled backwards as Heck wove the car around him, accelerating past the lock-ups, tyres screeching. Far ahead, the transit van rounded a corner at such speed that its bodywork drew sparks from the opposing wall. Heck took the corner tightly as well. The van was still far ahead; at the end of the next drag, it ascended another ramp into the sodium-yellow glow of the streets.

  Heck thumbed the volume control on his radio and shouted at the top of his voice. ‘DS Heckenburg chasing! Two suspects for M1 murders travelling in a white Ford van, leaving Fairwood House car park by what I believe is the east exit … no registration as yet! Urgent warning! At least one of the suspects is armed; shots already fired … no casualties, over!’

  There was nothing more dangerous, nor more discouraged in the modern police, than high-speed pursuit of suspects through built-up areas, yet Heck knew he had no choice. For so many months they’d had nothing – no forensics, no CCTV footage, no crime scenes, no survivors (bar one, who was severely injured), no likely suspects at all – and now, suddenly, they had everything … just in front of him by a skinny fifty yards, yet moving at seventy miles per hour through a busy town centre.

  Horns blared and pedestrians scattered, shrieking, as the white van mounted pavements to cut across junctions. Other vehicles swerved and skidded into shop-fronts, lampposts, or each other; panes of glass imploded, splinters of metal flew. Heck weaved frantically through the chaos. Reaching out of his offside window, he managed to throw his detachable beacon onto the roof of his Fiat. He shouted again into his radio, updating the Comms suite as best he could. By the approaching wail of sirens, other units were close by, but it still seemed likely that the target vehicle would escape. He lost sight of it completely when it sped through a stop-zone on red, other vehicles slewing sideways, one crunching headlong into the traffic light, buckling its pole and bringing the signal head down in a mass of dancing sparks. The cars in front of Heck shunted together, while others turned sharply to avoid the pile-up. Instinctively, Heck shot down a right-hand alleyway, trying to evade the snarled-up junction, only to see the van zip past the end of the alley, now headed in the opposite direction.

  ‘DS Heckenburg to Sierra Six!’ he bawled, swerving into pursuit. ‘Target vehicle doubling back on itself, headed west along …’ He scanned the buildings flicking by, trying to catch a street name. ‘Heading west along Avebury Boulevard. The suspects are Jordan and Jason Savage, and they live at eighteen, Wilberforce Drive and fourteen, Boroughbridge Avenue respectively. I repeat they are armed and highly dangerous!’

  Ahead, the van mounted a pedestrianised precinct, sending benches cartwheeling. Heck mounted the precinct as well, but the van slid to a halt about forty yards in front, smearing rubber as it pulled a handbrake turn. Heck only realised at the last second that he’d been lured into a side-on approach. He ducked as a gun-muzzle flashed from the driver’s window, the projectile punching the top corner of his windscreen, spider-webbing it.

  ‘Where’s that firearms support!’ he shouted, backhanding the Fiat into reverse, crashing through heaps of boxes.

  A local police patrol, a Vauxhall Astra in yellow and blue Battenberg, came hurtling onto the precinct from the opposite end, sirens whooping. The van lurched forward again, bolting down a side-street and veering left onto another main road. The patrol car made immediate pursuit, litter swirling from its wheels. Heck went next, still shouting into his radio.

  ‘Target headed north along Saxon Gate! Seventy-five plus!’

  The van was all over the road as it hit speeds it had never been designed for, sideswiping a litter-bin through a shop window. The Astra kept pace from behind, only for the van’s back doors to burst open and one of the Savage brothers to crouch there and take aim with his pistol. Over the howling engines, Heck barely heard the detonations, but the three rapid gun-flashes were clear enough. With windscreen peppered, the Astra crashed over the outer wall of a civic building with such explosive force, the footings tore out its front undercarriage, so that it finished standing on its nose in an ornamental pond.

  ‘Police RTA on the entrance to Portway!’ Heck shouted. ‘Ambulance required!’

  He wasn’t sure that his instructions were even being heard. The airwaves were alive with frantic messages. In front, the van’s rear doors slammed open and closed as it juddered from side to side. The gunman knelt just inside, slotting another magazine into place.

  ‘Heading east along Portway!’ Heck shouted. ‘These guys are fucking packed! Get me that Trojan quick!’

  Sirens could now be heard from all directions. A Thames Valley motorcyclist overtook Heck in a swirl of blues and twos. It tried to overtake the van as well, but the van swung right, sending the bike hurtling onto the pavement and glancing along a wrought-iron fence, from which it caromed back onto the blacktop, managing to right itself again – only to flip end-over-end when it struck the kerb of a traffic island, its rider somersaulting through the air.

  Heck glimpsed this in his rear-view mirror as he blistered past. ‘DS Heckenburg to Sierra Six! We now have two police RTAs … one on Saxon Gate, one on Portway! At least two officers injured! Ambulances essential! Still pursuing!’

  Ahead, flashing blue lights were clustered across a bridge. He hoped this meant that a stinger unit had been deployed underneath, but the white van rocketed through unhindered. Two more police vehicles, a Vectra and a Vivaro, came surging down the slip road; not soon enough to intercept the target, though they managed to block Heck’s progress. He shouted and swore as he took evasive action.

  The gunman opened fire again, concentrating first on the Vectra. Two holes the size of hubcaps were torn in its bonnet. A third slug missed, and ricocheted from the road surface, blasting Heck’s offside mirror to shards.

  The Vectra lost speed, pouring black smoke. Heck accelerated into the gap, he and the Vivaro running neck and neck. On an open, empty road there were manoeuvres they could attempt, boxing the van in, bringing it to a forced halt. But too many members of the public were around. A Royal Mail vehicle spun out of control as the target rear-ended it, trying to ram it out of the way. Heck swerved again to avoid a body-crumpling collision. The Vivaro wasn’t so lucky: it slid across the opposing carriageway, hitting a row of bollards, jerking around on impact, steam boiling from its mangled radiator. The van accelerated again as it found open spa
ce, the gunman in the back falling left to right, unable to get a shot off at his one remaining pursuer, Heck.

  The two vehicles tail-gated each other as they blazed across a flyover, beyond which signposts gave directions to the M1 motorway.

  Heck swore volubly – there would be many, many more road-users on the motorway – and these guys had shown no interest in preserving innocent life.

  Before they reached it they hit another roundabout. Here, more police patrols – Traffic unit Range-Rovers – were waiting at the turn-offs. They seemed more interested in holding back the public than in attempting to intercept the target, allowing it to roar away unimpeded, spewing black fumes. Possibly, Milton Keynes Comms were issuing orders for officers to stand off. But Heck had received no such instruction, so he continued the chase, bulleting along the slip road and down the access ramp.

  The M1 southbound was busy at the best of times. Now, at the tail-end of rush hour, it was heaving. The average speed was still about sixty miles per hour, but it was a fast- moving log-jam. Despite this, the van forged ruthlessly ahead, ramming and shunting, ignoring the honking horns and shaking fists. Heck hit his own horn repeatedly, but had to swerve and skid as vehicles were sideswiped into his path.

  The bastards were trying to cause a pile-up, he realised. Their plan was to create a barricade of car-wrecks. And on top of that, they were still armed. He glimpsed more flickering blue lights in his rear-view mirror, but they were far behind and nobody in the control room seemed to be answering his messages – at which point his quarry suddenly attempted the craziest manoeuvre Heck had ever seen.

  There was a double-sided crash barrier down the motorway’s central reservation. A fleeting gap appeared – and the van jack-knifed into it, attempting a U-turn.

  A U-turn! At sixty miles an hour! On the motorway!

  By instinct rather than logic, Heck did the same. The next junction was a good fifteen miles away, and he couldn’t take the chance that the felons might escape.

  But even though Heck jammed his brakes on as he turned, he lost control crossing the northbound carriageway, skidding on two wheels and slamming side-on into the grass embankment with such bone-shuddering force that his Fiat rolled uphill … before rolling back down again and landing on its roof, its chassis groaning, glass fragments tinkling over him. The white van had also lost control, but whereas Heck had lost it at thirty, the Savage brothers had lost it at sixty. Their vehicle didn’t even manage to turn into the skid, but ploughed headlong across the carriageway – straight into the concrete buttress of a motorway bridge. The resulting impact boomed in Heck’s ears.

  That sound echoed for what seemed like seconds as Heck lay groggily on his side.

  At length, in a daze akin to the worst hangover in history, he began to probe at his body with his fingertips. Everything seemed to be intact, though his neck and shoulders ached, suggesting whiplash. His left wrist was also hurting, though he had full movement in the joint. With an agonised grunt, Heck released the catch of his seatbelt, crawled gingerly across the ceiling of his car and tried to open the passenger door, only to find that it was buckled in its frame and immovable. For a second he was too stupored to work this out; then slowly, painfully, he shifted himself around and clambered feet-first through the shattered window.

  When he finally stood up, he found himself gazing across the underside of his Fiat, which was gashed and dented and thick with tufts of grass and soil. Clouds of steam hissed from his busted radiator. Passing vehicles slowed down, the faces of drivers blurring white as they gawked at him. Multiple sirens approached from the near-distance.

  Clamping a hand to his throbbing neck, he had to turn his entire body to gaze along the debris-strewn hard shoulder. Thirty yards away, the smouldering hulk of the white van was crushed against the concrete buttress, reduced to about a third of its original length. Heck hobbled towards it, but when he got within ten yards the stench of fuel and rubber and twisted, melted metal was enough to make him sick.

  So was the sight of the Savage brothers.

  Whichever one of them had fired the shots from out of the back had been catapulted clean across the van’s interior, bursting through its windscreen, his head striking the buttress of the bridge and splurging several feet up the concrete in a deluge of blood, brain and bone splinters. The driver had been flung onto the steering wheel, and now lay across it like a bundle of limp rags. From the crimson rivers gurgling out underneath him, the central column had torn through his breastbone and punctured his cardiovascular system.

  Heck tottered queasily away from the wreck.

  Other police vehicles were now drawing in behind his Fiat. The first of their drivers, a young Motorway Division officer in a bright orange slicker, came running up. ‘Is that him?’ he asked. ‘The Maniac?’

  Heck slumped backwards onto the grass. ‘Let’s hope so,’ he muttered. ‘Bloody hell … let’s hope so.’

  Chapter 3

  The ‘M1 Maniac’, to use the nickname the press had given him (or ‘them’, as it turned out), had terrorised southern England for the previous six months, primarily targeting teenage boys.

  His hunting ground was confined to the vicinity of the M1 motorway, but this was not small. In geographic terms, his attacks ranged from Luton in the south to Northampton in the north; from Aylesbury in the west to Bedford in the east. He claimed nine victims, all older teenagers, all abducted from public places – usually when they were walking home from pubs or nightclubs. Eight of these were later found bound with wire, raped anally and orally, and killed by an execution-style gunshot to the back of the head. Their bodies had been dumped in ditches or roadside culverts.

  The victim who survived was fourth in terms of the running order. His name was Lewis Pettigrew, and he was a nineteen-year-old Oxford University student who was on a visit to his parents’ home in Milton Keynes. Like the others, he was found bound, badly assaulted and with a bullet-wound to the back of the head, but in his case, possibly because of the angle at which it was fired, the bullet had lodged in his skull rather than penetrating his brain. Pettigrew, though he’d lost the power of speech, was able to write and thus informed the police that he had been standing at a bus stop just around midnight when a white van pulled up alongside him. The hooded driver climbed out and produced a handgun, forcing the boy into the back, where his wrists and ankles were tied with wire which was pulled so tight that he feared it had cut off his blood supply.

  The van was then driven around for an estimated half-hour or so. When it finally stopped, the abductor climbed from the driving cab and re-entered the vehicle through its rear doors, still armed with his pistol, at which point he forced Pettigrew to perform fellatio on him. When this was over, the abductor climbed out of the van, only to climb back in again a few minutes later and sodomise the prisoner. When this second sex act was complete, the van’s rear doors were opened again, Pettigrew was forced to kneel up, facing outwards – into what looked like isolated woodland – and was shot in the back of the head. It was a miracle he survived, but an entire day passed before a woman walking her dog discovered him; like the others, he had been dragged into a ditch and covered with branches and moss.

  This was a major break for the police, because it explained the M1 Maniac’s modus operandi. There was no DNA, just as there never was with any of the other cases, because the killer always wore protection, but at least Pettigrew was able to describe the van and the assailant, even if this latter description amounted to little more than a man with blue eyes and red hair, wearing a black anorak hood.

  Unfortunately, none of this did much to make the public less frightened, because the murders continued. The fact that it was red-blooded young men who were the object of the viciousness made it all the more disturbing. There were athletes among them; one had even been a junior boxing champion. Additionally terrifying, the Maniac’s victims had been grabbed off the street while going about their everyday business. A criminal psychologist on the radio exacerbated the
situation when he voiced a theory that the perpetrator was probably not gay; that in fact he was straight and that his sexual sadism was simply a means to assert his dominance. Women could be next, he said.

  Needless to say, others were less sure about this, and as the panic rose the public order situation deteriorated: anti-gay graffiti appeared, gay nightspots were stoned. Vigilante justice became ever more brutal and indiscriminate – a prominent gay spokesman was dragged from a podium and beaten while attempting to address a public meeting.

  In the midst of all this, the police came under mounting criticism. It was noted in the popular press that speed-cameras had assisted in the prosecution of thousands of motorists in the time since the reign of terror had begun, but that they seemed incapable of playing any role in the apprehension of this ‘real criminal’, even though road-use was integral to his method.

  Such an incendiary atmosphere was soon going to explode. It looked increasingly unlikely that the hunt for the M1 Maniac would end in anything less than a disaster.

  Though perhaps no one realised how much of a disaster, Heck thought, as he sat in A&E, trying not to wince while an orthopaedic collar was carefully fitted around his neck. Even now, the bodies of the Savage brothers were being brought to the mortuary here at the Milton Keynes Hospital. He grunted his thanks as the nurse told him he was done and moved away. As well as the neck-brace, his left arm had been strapped and fixed in a sling; a doctor had checked it earlier and concluded that it was only sprained but that it needed rest – which was always easier said than done. Heck shuffled to the lavatory. When he’d finished his ablutions, a surprisingly complex procedure with one hand, he regarded himself in the mirror over the washbasin. He’d looked better. His black hair was a sweaty mop, his lean, rugged features cut and bruised. He was thirty-eight later this year and still in reasonable nick, but time waited for no man, and whenever he got a little beaten-up these days, it seemed to take that much longer to recover.