by Shaun Hutson
Foster swung the car round and paint ripped from the rear of the vehicle as it scraped the front bumper of the Sierra. But they were clear of the crossroads, heading up Wardour Street now, the motorbike still trailing exhaust fumes, the police sirens still wailing. Behind them the second car had narrowly missed the pile up in Shaftesbury Avenue and it, too, was in pursuit. From a side street Foster glimpsed another motorbike, a white one.
A police bike.
One second was all it took.
One second of broken concentration, then he heard Davies screaming a warning.
As he looked back through the windscreen he saw a man step in front of him.
THREE
The police car was doing fifty when it hit the pedestrian.
The impact catapulted the man into the air where he seemed to hang, as if magically supported, for several seconds before crashing back to earth, bones splintered and blood pouring from several ragged gashes. He rolled over in the gutter and lay still.
Davies looked back over his shoulder to see that the second police car had pulled up and one of the officers was getting out to look at the luckless soul.
'Jesus, Jesus fucking Christ,' shouted Foster, his face a mask of horror and revulsion. 'I couldn't stop. I couldn't…' He was breathing heavily, his face as white as milk. Davies said nothing; he merely gripped the handset and watched as the motorcycle policeman cruised up closer to the fleeing Bonneville.
He was almost level with his quarry when the rider reached inside his jacket and pulled out the automatic.
'No,' shouted Davies, as if in warning.
He saw the pistol being raised, pointed at the head of the motorcycle policeman.
The rider of the Bonneville fired once.
The high velocity round powered into the face of the other rider, blasting through the right cheek, pulverising the zygoma. At such close range the lethal bullet exploded from the policeman's skull through the left occipital bone, even blasting through his helmet, which filled with blood. Portions of bone and smashed helmet flew into the air, carried on a geyser of crimson.
The bike merely flopped hopelessly to one side, colliding with a stationary car. The policeman was hurled from the seat, sprawling across the bonnet, blood spattering the windscreen.
The Rover sped past the body.
'Lima Six come in.'
The voice on the two-way, startled Davies and he' jerked in his seat, hesitating a moment before answering.
'Lima Six, go ahead, over,' he said breathlessly, still watching the escaping motorcyclist up ahead.
'Lima Six, be advised that Oxford Street and all roads leading off it are now closed by other units,' the voice told him.
Now there's nowhere for him to go, Davies thought triumphantly. Nowhere else to run, you bastard.
'Lima Six, do you read? Over.'
'Understood, we will continue pursuit. Over and out.' He jammed the handset back onto its clip on the dashboard and leant forward slightly. 'Let's get this fucker,' he hissed.
The rider had still not looked behind him. Only when he reached Oxford Street did he glance over his shoulder, to see that the Rover was gaining on him. He looked right and left and noticed that there were two police cars moving towards him from the direction of Charing Cross Road. Ahead of him Berners Street was blocked; he could see police cars and uniformed men moving about on the pavement. Half a dozen of them moved towards him.
He turned the bike to the left, revved the engine and sped off down Oxford Street towards Oxford Circus.
The Rover came hurtling out of Wardour Street, wheels squealing on the tarmac as Foster struggled to keep it under control. He succeeded and the car roared off after its prey like a predatory animal in search of its next meal.
Traffic on both sides of the road had been halted; the only vehicles moving were the motorbike and the pursuing Rover.
Pedestrians stood, immobilised by shock, staring. From the safety of their own vehicles other drivers watched the chase, some with amusement, some with irritation. Always bloody traffic hold-ups in Central London.
A thought suddenly struck Davies.
He snatched up the two-way.
Ahead of them the Bonneville was slowing down, the rider swinging it round so that it was facing the shops. Onlookers scattered in terror as he revved up, looking towards the oncoming Rover.
'Is Ramillies Place sealed off?' Davies asked urgently.
'Negative. It isn't possible to get a car…'
The voice trailed off.
No, not a car.
The narrow walkway that led from Oxford Street to Ramillies Place wasn't wide enough to get a car through, but it would accommodate a bike.
Just wide enough for a bike.
The bike appeared to be aimed at the narrow alley next to Marks and Spencer but, as the police car drew nearer, Davies saw that it was not.
'What the hell is he playing at?' muttered Foster.
The motorcyclist revved his engine for what seemed like an eternity, the back wheel spinning, leaving great rubber slicks on the road as he held the power in check. He might have been daring the uniformed men to come closer.
The car was within fifty yards.
Exhaust fumes poured into the air around the bike, so thick that it appeared the machine was on fire.
Thirty yards.
He looked to his left and right and saw cars converging from both sides.
Fifteen yards.
He released the throttle and the bike rocketed forward.
The gap that would take him to freedom beckoned.
He was less than twenty feet from it when he turned the bike towards the window of Next.
The Bonneville hit it doing sixty, erupting through the thick glass, which exploded in a dense shower. Several shop window dummies were carried into the store by the impact, one trailing along, tangled in the front wheel of the bike by the garments it was dressed in.
The bike cartwheeled but the rider held on, like a rodeo rider anxious not to lose his mount, his face hideously cut by the glass.
Even when the bike exploded.
The blast shook the building, blowing out what remained of the front window, a searing ball of flame enveloping the machine and the rider. As he hit the ground his skull seemed to fold in on itself, the bone crumbling as he struck the floor with incredible force, sticky portions of brain bursting through the riven skull.
He lay beneath the remains of the bike, the flames devouring his flesh, stripping skin from his bones. Blisters rose, burst and then blackened as the fire engulfed him, turning him into a human torch.
Those who'd been in the store when he crashed through the window fought to escape the scene of devastation. Members of staff fled past fire extinguishers in their haste to flee what could rapidly become an inferno.
Uniformed men now forced their way in, held back by the flames that had engulfed the Bonneville and its rider, who now lay beside two blazing mannequins. As the fire destroyed them they dissolved, their false limbs melting in the ferocity of the inferno. One, still wearing the remains of a silk camisole and knickers, its false hair scorched off, seemed to roll over onto him, the heat twisting its plastic limbs into grotesque shapes, bending and moulding its arms so that they seemed to close around the dead man in a final fiery embrace.
FOUR
29 DECEMBER 1976
They had pulled three bodies from the wreckage.
The fourth they had found at the roadside, obviously thrown clear when the Metro first crashed.
The car was on its roof, a tangled mass of metal that looked as if it had been attacked by a gang of thugs wielding sledgehammers. The field in which it had finally come to rest was strewn with pieces of metal that had been torn from the chassis as the car had cartwheeled into oblivion. Other objects were also scattered around.
A high heeled shoe.
A handbag.
A couple of cassette tapes.
A watch.
A severed hand.
/> Wally Hughes gathered them all up, moving slowly round the wreckage, dropping the personal effects into a plastic bag. They might help with identification when the time came. The occupants of the car certainly couldn't. So bad were their injuries it was even difficult, at first glance, to tell which were male and which female. The driver had been impaled on the steering column. It had taken Wally and two of his companions over twenty minutes to remove the corpse, one of them vomiting when the body came in half at the waist as the torso was finally freed. Whoever had been in the passenger seat had fared no better. The head had been practically severed by broken glass when the windscreen had shattered. Portions of skin still hung from the obliterated screen like bizarre decorations.
Christmas decorations?
Wally shook his head and sighed, stooping to pick up a blood-flecked wallet. Death at any time of the year was a terrible thing, but at Christmas it seemed even more intrusive. In his twelve years as an ambulanceman he had noticed how the public seemed to take on an almost lemming-like mentality. Despite warnings every year not to drink and drive, to take more care in dangerous road conditions, men and women (sometimes children too) were pulled or cut or lifted piece by piece from car smashes. Huge pile-ups or single-vehicle accidents. What did it matter? Death was death, whether it happened to one or twenty at a time.
This time there had been four.
The car had come off the road at speed, obviously, hit a grassy bank, ploughed through a low stone wall, cartwheeled and ended up on its roof. How had it happened?
That was always the first question that came into Wally's mind as he approached the scene of an accident. He didn't even consider things such as, 'Will the victim be alive? If so, how bad will the injuries be?' Besides, it was usually simple to tell, on first glance at the scene of carnage, how likely it was that there would be any survivors. In this particular case he had taken one look at the wreck and decided that the ambulance would be driving straight to the morgue, not the emergency wing of the hospital.
He picked up a glove, dropped it into his plastic bag and straightened up, wincing slightly at the pain from his lower back. Rheumatism. The cold weather always exacerbated it and tonight was cold. There was a thick coating of frost on the grass and the road was icy, especially on the bend.
Perhaps that was what had happened. The driver had lost control on the slippery road. Perhaps he'd been going too fast. Perhaps he'd been drunk. Perhaps he'd been showing off.
Perhaps. Perhaps.
None of that seemed to matter now. They wouldn't know why it had happened, not for a few days. In the intervening period, Wally and his companions would have countless other accidents to deal with. At Christmas time the ambulance service in Greater London alone dealt with upwards of 3000 emergency calls a day.
Merry Christmas.
By the roadside two ambulances stood with their rear doors open, the blue lights turning silently. The glare of their headlamps cut through the blackness of the night, one set pointing at the wrecked Metro. In the gloom Wally continued with his task of recovering personal effects. He noticed that blood had sprayed over a wide area around the car; it glistened on the frosted grass, appearing quite black in the blinding whiteness of the headlights. There was little talk among the other men as they went about their tasks. There was a weary familiarity about the whole thing. It wasn't the first time they'd seen it and Christ alone knew it wouldn't be the last.
The head of one of the passengers in the rear of the car had hit the back of the driver's seat so hard they had found three teeth embedded in the upholstery. Now, as he flicked on his torch and shone it over the ground, Wally found two more teeth. He picked them up and dropped them into the bag.
A police car was also parked close to the bend, and one of the officers was making notes. As soon as identification of the victims was made it would be the job of the police to notify the next of kin. Wally was glad he didn't have to do that job. It was one, thing to pull a man from a car, a man who was still screaming despite the fact that he had no face, but it was something else to sit calmly opposite a mother and inform her that her son was dead. To tell a father his daughter had been crushed beneath a lorry, that it had taken twenty minutes to scrape her brains up off the road.
Wally shone the torch over the ground once more, then headed back towards the wall, stepping through the gap the car had made on its fateful passage.
He was heading towards the closest ambulance, glancing across at two of his companions lifting the fourth body on a stretcher, when he heard the shout.
'This one's still alive.'
FIVE
'We drew the short straw again.'
Detective Sergeant Stuart Finn fumbled in his jacket pocket for his Zippo, flipped the lighter open and lit the Marlboro jammed between his lips.
As the lift slowly descended he glanced across at his companion who was gazing distractedly at the far wall.
'I said…'
'I heard you,' Detective Inspector Frank Gregson told him, his eyes still fixed on a point on the wall.
Finn looked at his companion then across to where his gaze seemed fixed. He noticed a fly on the wall, sitting there cleaning its wings.
The lift bumped to a halt and Gregson glanced up to reassure himself that they were at the right floor. As he stepped towards the door he swung the manila file he held, squashing the fly against the wall, where it left a red smudge.
'I know how he feels,' murmured Finn as he stepped from the lift. The doors slid shut behind him. 'Flies eat shit, don't they?'
Gregson didn't answer.
'I certainly know how he feels,' the DS added wearily. 'Well, come on, Frank. Any ideas who this joker might have been?'
'How the hell am I supposed to know?' Gregson said. 'They drag the bloke out of a fire after he's been chased halfway across the West End. By the time they get him out he's so badly burned his fucking mother wouldn't even know him. If he's got one.'
Their footsteps echoed dully in the long corridor as they approached New Scotland Yard's forensic labs. Signs proclaimed: PATHOLOGY. Gregson looked down at the file again, glancing at the number in the top right-hand corner. That was all the man was to them at the moment. A number. No name and certainly no face. That had been burned away along with most of the rest of him. But he had to be identified and that job was to be done by the Yard's forensic pathologists.
Once identification had been made it was the task of Gregson and Finn to find out why the man had run amok.
Finn took a drag on his cigarette and swept a hand through his thinning hair. He was twenty-nine, a year younger than his superior but his bald patch (which worried him) made him look older. Gregson was greying at the temples but, he told himself, the light hairs were the result of stress and not the onset of more mature years. Both men were thick-set, Finn perhaps a little slimmer, although his belly strained unattractively against his'shirt. He'd put the weight on a few months ago when he first tried to give up smoking.
Gregson opened the door of the pathology lab. The two men walked in.
'Where's Barclay?' the DI asked a man in a lab coat who was fiddling with a microscope slide.
The man nodded in the direction of a door marked PRIVATE: NO ENTRY BY UNAUTHORISED PERSONNEL.
Both policemen made for the door. Gregson knocked and walked in without waiting for an invitation.
It was cold inside the pathology lab.
The cold and the smell were two of the things that always struck him. The acrid stench of death and sometimes decay. He had seen things inside this room that others only saw in nightmares. Call it an occupational hazard.
The chief pathologist, Phillip Barclay, had his back to the men as they entered. He glanced over his shoulder and nodded a greeting. Behind him banks of cold cabinets stood like huge filing drawers. A storehouse for sightless eyes. Freezers containing bodies or awaiting them. On one of six dissecting tables lay a body covered by a sheet. It was towards this table that the two policemen walked, th
eir footsteps echoing even more loudly in the high-ceilinged room.
'If you've come looking for answers I'm going to have to disappoint you,' said Barclay, turning to face them.
Gregson looked challengingly at him, watching as the pathologist swung himself off the stool on which he'd been sitting. He walked across to the dissection tables and pulled the sheet back.
'Shit,' murmured Finn.
The shape beneath the sheet was little more than a blackened skeleton. Flesh, crisped and blackened by the fire, still clung to the bones but it looked more like a coating of thick ash ready to fall off at the slightest touch. A few teeth gleamed whitely through the blackened mess, but much of the skull had been pulverised on initial impact. Finn could see tiny fragments of brain, also blackened, welded to the inside of the shattered skull.
'I've examined what there is of him, obviously,' said Barclay, pulling the sheet further back and stepping back, arms folded. 'But it's going to be a long job identifying him.'
'What about dental records?' Gregson wanted to know, his eyes never leaving the corpse.
'As you can see, most of the head is gone. Obliterated. He hit the window head first when he went through it. Actually, that's the strange thing. From the extent of the damage to the head and upper body I'd say he was leaning forward when he hit that window.'
'Meaning?' Gregson wanted to know.
'He intended to do it. He was making sure he killed himself.'
'Looks like he did a pretty good job,' Finn remarked, sucking on his cigarette.
Barclay looked disdainfully at him.
'Don't smoke in here, please,' he said.
Finn looked aggrieved.
'Why? It's not going to bother him,' he said, nodding towards the corpse.
'It bothers me,' the pathologist said, watching as Finn nipped out the cigarette, burning his fingers in the process. He dropped the butt into his jacket pocket.