Jack's Back

by Mark Romain

  Reeve grinned. “No one likes a sore loser,” he said, nudging Stedman with his elbow.

  ◆◆◆

  The Disciple heard voices, and then came the unmistakable crackle of a radio.

  He froze.

  The police were outside his van.

  They couldn’t possibly be looking for him, could they?

  He looked down at his wife; afraid she would call out and spoil everything. To his relief, she was still unconscious. He covered her mouth, anyway, digging his nails hard into the flesh in case she woke up and started crying out. He tried to control his breathing. If he just stayed still, without making any noise, the Old Bill might go –

  BANG, BANG, BANG. He flinched as they hammered on the side of his van.

  An authoritative voice shouted, “Police. Come out of the van, now.”

  What should he do?

  If he went out, they would arrest him.

  If he didn’t go out, they might open the driver’s door, which he had stupidly left unlocked, and find him here in the back with the third bitch responsible for ruining his life.

  Was there any way out of this?

  There had to be. It was his destiny to complete the rituals and ascend to a higher level of being.

  Moving quickly, he slipped the knife into the rear of his waistband. He grabbed the gag and stuck it back in her mouth, cringing when she made a low moaning noise in protest.

  BANG, BANG, BANG. His heart missed a beat as they hammered again, more forcefully than the first time.

  “Hurry up. We can hear you moving about. Come out now.” The voice sounded impatient, angry even.

  “I’m coming,” he called back, frantically wiping his sweaty hands on his wife’s clothing and then climbing back through the divider into the cab.

  “Can I help you, officers?” The Disciple asked, having wound down the driver’s window.

  “Is this your van?” PC Wallis asked.

  “Yes, it is.” He smiled, trying to act naturally.

  “Step out of the vehicle, please,” Wallis said.

  “But it’s raining,” The Disciple protested.

  “Step out of the vehicle,” Wallis repeated, and it was clear from his tone that there was no room for discussion. The Disciple grudgingly obliged, standing with his back to the open driver’s door.

  “What are you doing here, then?” PC Jay Smith asked, openly suspicious.

  “I just stopped for a moment to secure something that had worked its way loose in the back. I’m finished now though, so I’ll be off if that’s okay.” The Disciple made to climb back behind the wheel.

  “Hang on, mate. We’re not finished with you yet,” Stedman told him, firmly. Maybe Reevo was right about this van. Maybe something hooky was going on here.

  “But I really ought to be going,” The Disciple protested.

  “You’re not going anywhere, sunshine. I reckon you’ve got a prostitute in the back of your van,” Smith said. He couldn’t understand why anyone would want to pay for sex, especially with some of the gremlins that worked around here. If his entire body were covered in a condom, from head to toe, and they were paying him instead of the other way around, he still wouldn’t let one of the local working girls anywhere near him.

  “No. I told you, I stopped to adjust something in the back,” The Disciple said lamely. His eyes darted about nervously as he weighed up his chances of escape.

  Wallis saw this, and he and Smith exchanged a knowing look. Something smelled wrong to them.

  “Can you switch the engine off and step away from the van,” Wallis said, moving in closer to cover him.

  “I can’t. There’s – there’s a problem with the battery. If I turn it off then I won’t be able to start it again,” The Disciple lied. His only realistic hope of escape lay in keeping the engine running. If he could just find an excuse to get back in the driving seat, he might just have half a chance.

  “Just step away from the vehicle, please,” Wallis repeated, dashing his hopes. After a moment’s hesitation, the killer reluctantly obeyed.

  Smith opened his notebook “What’s your name?” His tone was openly hostile.

  “Mr Bradley,” he said, picking the name out of thin air.

  “What’s your full name?”

  The Disciple looked down at his shoes, thinking: fuck you, you Nazi.

  Smith nudged his arm and said, “I asked you your name.”

  The Disciple shifted his feet uneasily. “David Bradley,” he said. David had been his father’s name.

  Their pompous attitude was turning his fear into anger. He was determined to escape, if only to humiliate these fools. They clearly didn’t have a clue that the arrest of their collective careers was almost within their grasp.

  “Have you got any driving documents on you, Mr Bradley?” Smith asked. He wished that he’d thought to bring a flashlight off of the carrier with him. There was something odd about the guy’s face, but it was too dark to see exactly what it was.

  “No, I’m sorry, I haven’t,” The Disciple shrugged apologetically. The trick now would be in getting them to drop their guard. If he could just convince them that he was a nerd and not a threat.

  “Is the van registered to you, Mr Bradley?” Sergeant Beach asked, speaking for the first time since he’d got off the bus.

  “Er, no, it’s not. I’ve not had it long, you see.”

  “That’s what they all say, pal.” Wallis sneered. “Open the back, please. Let’s see who’s in there, shall we?”

  “I’ve told you, there’s no one in there.” The Disciple said this a little too quickly and immediately regretted it. A trickle of sweat ran down the centre of his back, and he licked his lips, suddenly aware that his mouth was dry.

  “Then you won’t mind opening the back to show us, will you?” Smith said, forcefully. He grabbed hold of the rear door handle and twisted.

  Nothing happened.

  It was locked.

  Smith frowned. The van had just rocked slightly. Had someone just moved inside or was it merely where he’d pulled the handle?

  And then he heard a muffled voice. It sounded like someone stifling a sob. Without a doubt, it came from inside the vehicle.

  “What was that?” Beach asked, having heard it too.

  “Okay, wise guy, I’ve had enough of your lies. There’s someone inside this van. Open the bloody thing, right now,” Smith said, moving towards the killer aggressively.

  “Okay, okay. Look, it’s true. I’ve got a girl in the back of my van, but we haven’t done anything, I swear. You stopped us before we could.” The Disciple wrung his hands together as if begging for mercy.

  Smith rolled his eyes. These kerb crawlers were so pathetic. He’d be begging them not to tell his wife and kids next. “Open the van up, Mr Bradley,” he said flatly. The killer nodded, eager to please, or at least eager not to upset them more than he already had.

  “Okay, but the back door’s jammed. I’ll have to climb through the back and open it from inside. Unless one of you wants to do it?” he knew that none of the officers would want to get in the back, not with the whore there.

  “Just get on with it,” Wallis said. He was pissed off with this insignificant little twerp. The quicker they dealt with him, the quicker they could get on with searching for the murderer.

  The Disciple started walking towards the driver’s door. He made himself walk very slowly. It was important not to appear too eager. He paused with one foot inside the cabin, looking back at the group of officers gathered by the rear doors. “Are you sure one of you chaps doesn’t want to do this?” he asked.

  “Just get on with it, will you,” Smith snapped impatiently.

  “Well, if you’re sure,” The Disciple said to himself.

  He slid onto the driver’s seat and carefully put the van into gear, praying that the gearbox wouldn’t crunch, as it was sometimes prone to do in first.

  It went in perfectly.

  He shook his head in disbelief. Thi
s was almost too easy, not that he could afford to relax just yet. He took a deep breath, released the handbrake, and then ground the accelerator into to the floor. The van rocketed off towards the main road. The last thing the killer saw in his rearview mirror was the small cluster of policemen standing in a cloud of black fumes, a look of total shock on their faces.

  ◆◆◆

  The TSG officers all scrambled for the carrier, furious with themselves for having been hoodwinked. The Sherpa had a good head start on them, and their vehicle was facing in completely the wrong direction.

  “Shall I put it up on the Main-Set, Sarge?” Reeve asked breathlessly.

  “Are you kidding? It’s bad enough that we let the fucker give us the slip, without telling the whole world about it,” Beach snarled. “Ron, you had better catch him up or I’ll be using your gonads to play conkers with.”

  Stedman grimaced at the thought. The power steering and superb turning circle of the Mercedes Sprint made manoeuvering relatively easy, but they would have to drive like the very wind if they were to have any chance of catching the Sherpa, which was no more than a speck in the distance.

  “Did anyone get the registration number?” Beach shouted above the wail of the siren. “Please tell me one of you got the registration number.” He looked around expectantly.

  “Don’t worry, skipper. I’ve got it.” Smith said, tapping his notebook.

  “I wonder why he’s doing a runner?” Wallis asked. “Surely it’s not over a poxy hooker?”

  “Stranger things have happened,” PC David Dixon put in. He had remained on the wagon when the others had alighted to check out the van, figuring it didn’t require six officers to handle one suspect

  “Yeah, well, when we catch him, and after I kick his nuts into his neck, you can ask him,” Smith told them viciously. In ten bloody years of frontline policing, he’d never let a suspect escape; he didn’t intend to start now.

  “Can’t you drive this bloody thing any faster, Ron?” he yelled.

  ◆◆◆

  The Disciple picked up speed once he entered Commercial Street. He watched as the needle crept up to fifty, then on towards sixty. His wife rolled around in the back, tossed from side to side as the van swayed like a small boat in high seas. He ignored her screams as he headed for the Aldgate one-way system, cursing the slower moving traffic that impeded his progress.

  “Come on, arsehole, get out of my way.” He flashed his lights and sounded his horn at the car in front until it moved over and let him by. He figured that, with luck, he had a thirty-to-forty-second start on his pursuers. If fate was smiling on him that might be just enough time to lose them, especially in this rain – was it his imagination or had the downpour gotten worse since he had driven off? Pritchard knew he needed to make some more headway. If he could make the one-way system before they caught up with him, his chances of escape would be doubled.

  With that objective in mind, he pulled onto the wrong side of the road, zigzagging around a half dozen cars, trucks and buses before returning to the correct lane. Luckily, there wasn’t much traffic coming the other way. But that would change soon enough. There was a main arterial road up ahead. He looked in the mirror and saw tiny blue lights appear in the distance. For a second, he thought that they had turned right instead of left, that they had gone the wrong way.

  But he was mistaken.

  They were coming after him, speeding along the road outside the line of vehicles in which he was now stuck.

  Damn!

  The Disciple floored the accelerator again and the engine roared. There was no point in subtlety now; they would catch him up in seconds unless he acted quickly and decisively. He pulled onto the wrong side of the road again, forcing an oncoming motorcyclist up onto the pavement. Red traffic lights loomed ahead but he didn’t ease off the gas pedal. The carrier was still a fair way behind him, but it was much nearer than it had been the last time he looked.

  ◆◆◆

  “There he is!” Reeve pointed as the Sherpa suddenly pulled out of the line of traffic way up ahead.

  “I told you he’d gone left, didn’t I?” Stedman roared triumphantly. In all the confusion of turning their bus around, they had suffered a temporary loss of vision just as the van had reached the junction with Commercial Street. Vital seconds were lost while they argued amongst themselves whether to turn left or right. In the end, Stedman had ignored them all and gone with his gut instinct. As they sailed past the sluggish line of vehicles heading for Aldgate, he allowed himself a grim smile. His decision had been vindicated and they were back in the game. “Come on, baby, don’t let me down now,” he coaxed, stamping his foot to the floor. The carrier was diesel powered, and although it wasn’t too bad once you got the speed up, it was hard work trying to get it there in the first place.

  “You can get on the Main-Set now, PC Reeve,” Beach shouted from behind.

  CHAPTER 38

  Kelly Flowers was heading back towards the office after a gruelling two-hour long Family Liaison meeting with Geraldine Rye’s elderly parents, who had flown in from Murcia a few days ago to identify the body and make funeral arrangements. She sometimes wondered why she had ever volunteered to become a FLO because each deployment seemed to drain so much out of her. Maybe she should…

  The sudden transmission on the Main-Set startled her.

  “MP, MP, active message, Uniform 366. We’re chasing a dark green Sherpa van, Commercial Street towards the Aldgate one-way system…vehicle possibly concerned in the abduction of a prostitute…”

  “Shit!” She said, pulling over. That wasn’t far away, and they were heading straight towards her current location. The pursuing vehicle’s operator had clearly said that the bandit vehicle was a Sherpa van, like the one their suspect was using. But the Ripper’s van was white, not green. Could he have started using a different vehicle?

  “I wonder…?” she said, reaching for her mobile phone.

  ◆◆◆

  The Sherpa, skidding along the wet tarmac, was locked on a collision course with an island that separated the two busy streams of traffic where the main road narrowed before joining the Aldgate one-way system. A deadly looking lamppost protruded from the island’s centre, where it waited patiently to cleave the van in two. The impact would prove fatal; of that he was sure, but a wonderful calmness had descended over Pritchard and, somehow, he knew it would all be okay.

  All four tyres screeched, and the rear of the van fishtailed crazily, as he stood on the brakes. At the very last moment, he came off them and gunned the accelerator, spinning the steering wheel hard to the right at the same time, just like he’d seen Stig Blomqvist do in one of those rally driving videos that he so enjoyed watching. The van might not be on a par with Stig’s rally spec Audi Quatro, but all four wheels remained grounded as he dragged it clear of the island and into the one-way system, and that was good enough for him.

  Entering the one-way system against the flow of traffic, there was no time for conscious thought. The Disciple simply buried the accelerator into the floor and drove straight at oncoming vehicles, trusting that the dark deity he worshiped would part them so that he could escape his pursuers, just as the Hebrew God had parted the waters of the Red Sea for Moses as he fled the Egyptian army.

  Horns were sounding all around him; loud, angry, sustained blasts that he regarded with complete impunity. Fear was imprinted on the faces of the oncoming drivers who swerved to avoid him, but he remained calm, secure in the knowledge that celestial forces were watching over him.

  The police carrier was still following, but more cautiously now. It was beginning to drop back again.

  YES!

  He could do this. He could lose them and still kill the third bitch responsible for ruining his life exactly as scheduled. He would have to get rid of the van, of course, but he had a contingency plan for that. After months of preparation, he prided himself on having a strategy to deal with every possible eventuality. “Don’t you worry, my Queen of Whor
es,” he shouted into the back. “We’ll play our little game, yet.”

  ◆◆◆

  “The TSG are doing what?” Dillon said into the phone, which was clamped against his right ear. He could hardly hear Kelly’s response, so he rammed a sausage-shaped forefinger into his left ear to block out the background noise. “Say that again” he instructed. Flowers repeated her news about the chase on the Main-Set and asked him what she should do.

  “We’ll be right over, Kelly, love. Just you wait there,” he told her excitedly. Hanging up, he began to pull his jacket on.