Laughing Boy (36 page)

The road was well-lit and deserted, millions of watts of off-peak electricity being used to illuminate the way home for the odd late-night reveller and the man who changes all the prices outside the filling stations when nobody’s about. A young couple emerged on to the pavement, holding hands, pulling against each other. There was a zebra crossing and he took hold of the pole, swinging her around it. Dave hit the horn button and we shot past them, horn blaring, as
they suddenly sobered and watched us disappear into the distance.

“Heading west on Milltown Road,” I told control, on my mobile. “In pursuit of suspect. He’s in a blue Peugeot 306.” I told them the number. The road curved to the left and we lost sight of our quarry. When we came out of the curve its rear lights were two specks nearly a quarter of a mile away.

“We’re losing them,” I reported. “Just passing the Yorkshire Outlets place – Texas, Curry’s – nearly at the bypass. At a guess they’re heading for the motorway.”

Dave said: “If they’ve been to London and back they could be low on fuel.”

“Good point.” I relayed the information to control. If they turned on to the motorway we, or someone else, would just have to follow them until they ran out. A bread delivery van came out of a side turning without looking, like he’d done at the same time every morning for the last twenty years. Dave gave him the horn treatment and a minor cardiac arrest. I nearly wet myself.

The bypass, built only a few years ago, runs across Milltown Road, and the junction is controlled by traffic lights. They were at red. We saw the Peugeot’s brake lights come on as he slowed and moved from side to side, deciding which way to go. He didn’t stop for them, no chance of that, and went straight on, through the reds.

“Perfect,” I heard Dave whisper to himself as we hurtled towards the junction and the red lights.

“He won’t get on the motorway that way,” I said.

At a hundred and ten miles per hour it takes less than two seconds to cover a hundred yards. I worked it out, later. At that moment I didn’t think I’d ever have a later. I saw the traffic lights, bright red, racing closer and closer, growing redder and redder as Dave kept his foot firmly down against the floor. A Post Office van moved across the junction. I saw my left hand reach out towards the dash board, felt my right foot press down on the carpet, wishing there was a
brake pedal under it. With a hundred yards to go, at the point of no return, the lights flipped to amber and I breathed again. The suspension bounced and bumped as we hit the change in camber, then the crossroads were behind us. The streetlights were less bright now, and the Peugeot was only fifty yards ahead.

“He hasn’t taken the bypass,” I reported to control. “Heading south. Get the chopper airborne. We need the chopper.”

There’s an in-between land where the urban development runs out but the moors haven’t started. A thousand years of agriculture have wrested a patchwork of handkerchief-sized fields, hundreds of them, from the encroaching heather and cottongrass. They hug the low ground in a jigsaw puzzle of irregular geometric shapes, bounded by stone walls and straggling hedges. The road, laid out when the only traffic was horse-drawn, zigs and zags between them. I braced myself against the door as the tyres scrabbled for grip. The G-forces tried to propel me from the vehicle and the
headlights
illuminated a moss-encrusted wall as it raced across the windscreen in a green blur. We’d left the street lamps behind but the sky was lightening in the east. Dave let the gap stretch to a hundred yards or more, throwing my car into the bends with an enthusiasm that can only be experienced when driving somebody else’s car with the law on your side. I gritted my teeth as he explored the limits of adhesion.

“It’s a maze,” I said. “Where’s that chopper?”

Fletcher didn’t know where he was going, either. He took corners and side turns haphazardly, left and right, without apparent reason. His only aim was to lose us. Around one corner we found dirt and a big stone lying in the road where he must have clipped the wall.

We came out on a wider road and as we turned to the left I saw the pale surface of a lake swing into view, the sky reflected in its flawless surface.

“We’re on a middling road,” I told control, “heading south again, and there’s a reservoir to our right.” There are dozens of them up here.

“It’s Ringstone,” Dave told me. “Ringstone Edge.”

I passed the information back to Heckley nick. “Looks like you’re on Saddleworth Road,” I was told, “heading towards the Scammonden Bridge.”

“We’re heading towards Scammonden Bridge,” I told Dave. It was one of those roads that looks straight on the map, but maps are flat. We were up to the ton again, with the car leaping from bump to bump, brow to brow, as we kept up the pressure.

“Look!” he replied.

“Where?”

“Straight ahead”

All I could see was Tarmac rolling under us, then we cleared another brow and the sky came back into view. Blue lights were flickering against the clouds like a summer
lightning
storm.

“Traffic!” I said.

“Got the bastards,” Dave added, taking his foot off the accelerator.

There was nowhere else for them to go. Brake lights came on as the Peugeot reached the bridge and slowed. The two big traffic division Volvos stopped at the far end of the bridge, their sirens and light bars rending the dawn and washing the surroundings with blue as they formed into a roadblock. We were way back, creeping forward now,
watching
in case Fletcher turned round and came at us. He didn’t.

We dropped on to the bridge and stopped. Down below us the traffic on the M62 looked like a procession of Dinky toys, streaming endlessly in both directions. Fletcher was out of his car, dragging a woman by the hand. We got out and slammed the doors. Another blue light was behind us. I turned and saw Geordie arrive. Fletcher had his back against the rail, still holding the woman, as we converged on him.

“I’ll kill her,” he shouted at us. “Get back or I’ll kill her.” We all stopped. He was grasping her hair, pulling her head back and holding a knife at her throat. I was fairly certain she was the woman who’d been with him when he came to the police station to report the white pickup. The noise of the traffic down below was a monotonous roar and the air was cold. It’s the coldest part of the night, just before daylight.

So where was the other woman? The nurse from Hatfield? Fletcher wasn’t going anywhere so I walked over to the Peugeot and pressed the button on the boot lid. She was lying inside, huddled in the foetal position in the tiny space. Her hands and feet were tied with plastic-covered line and her mouth covered in gaffer tape. Only her nose was free for her to breathe through and her face was resting in a pool of mucus. Her eyes were wide with terror like a trapped animal’s, and she was convulsing, fighting to pull some air into her lungs. I don’t think she could have lasted much longer.

“One of you over here,” I shouted, and they turned to me.

“I’m a police officer,” I told her, clearing the mucus from her nose. “It’s over, love. You’re safe now.” I tried to find the end of the tape covering her mouth, but couldn’t, and my fingers wouldn’t go under it. She had a choking fit and I tried to steady her.

“Knife?” I demanded of the traffic officer who had joined me, and he produced a small penknife. Within a few seconds I had sawed through the tape and she was breathing through her mouth.

I cut the rope around her hands and feet and we massaged some circulation back into them. When she was looking
better
, breathing as normally as we could expect, I lifted her out. She wrapped her arms around my neck and clung to me like a koala bear clinging to a tree. I carried her to one of the Volvos and the driver helped me load her into the back seat. I told him to take her to Heckley General and let Heckley
nick know that she was safe. They’d pass the news on to her boyfriend.

“It’s over, love,” I told her again. “It’s all been a bad dream, but it’s over now.” I squeezed her hand and she
nodded
.

Fletcher had upped the stakes. He’d climbed over the railing and was poised a hundred and fifty feet above the westbound middle lane, still holding the knife to her throat although she was on this side. His leg was hooked through the railings to stop him falling backwards. Dave, Geordie and the two remaining traffic officers stood in a semi-circle around them.

“Joomp then, yer bastard,” Geordie was urging him. “Gan on then, joomp. Do the decent thing for once an’ joomp.”

I put my hand on his arm and pushed between him and Sparky. The two from traffic dropped back. This wasn’t their field. It occurred to me that I was the only one of us who knew who the woman was. That she was a full partner, and not an unwilling victim. I decided to withhold that piece of information from Geordie.

“We’ve met before,” I told him. I should have had a
setpiece
speech prepared, but I didn’t. I’d have to make it up as I went along. “It’s cold, and I haven’t had my breakfast. Drop the knife and climb back and I promise not to let this big lout loose on you. Otherwise…”

Otherwise, I don’t mind one way or the other if you do jump. That’s what I started to say, but I didn’t get the chance. The woman turned on him and clawed at his face, her fingernails digging into his cheeks, pulling his bottom eyelids down and leaving livid stripes behind.

He yelled with pain and fell backwards as we all leaped forward. Dave bundled her to one side, I grabbed the front of Fletcher’s anorak and Geordie grabbed me.

He was leaning out over the drop, supported only by me grasping two handfuls of anorak and his hands trying to find
a grip on the leather sleeves of my jacket. Geordie had one arm round my neck and one round my waist, so Fletcher couldn’t take me with him, but the rail was chest high and it would have taken a superhuman effort to hoist me over it. Still, madmen have the strength of ten, or so we’re told. Somewhere behind me I could hear his partner shouting that it wasn’t her, he’d made her do it.

“Keep still,” I told him. “Keep still and relax.” I was
looking
straight into the face of the man who had killed seven people and terrorised the North of England. The claw marks down his face were symmetrical, like animal markings. The lesser-striped psychopath. He had blue eyes, like me. All I had to do was open my fingers…

“Now,” I said. “Gently does it. Come this way.”

It wasn’t until afterwards that I remembered. Or thought I remembered. I was heaving him upwards, gradually pulling him towards me, when his toes slipped off the ledge. For a second or two I had all his weight and he stared at me with terror in his eyes. His blue eyes. Then the anorak slowly swallowed him. His face sank into it as his fingers slid down my arms in a hopeless quest for grip and his hands were
consumed
as the sleeves of the anorak turned inside out.

He screamed. I was glad about that. I was left hanging over the rail, flapping a blue and lilac Regatta anorak at the traffic, as his scream was lost in the screech of tyres and brakes as thirty-two tons of Yorkie bars heading for Liverpool went into a terminal jack-knife.

Geordie heaved me back and I fell over on to my arse.

“This’ll get us on Radio Four if nothing else will,” Sparky said. The jack-knifed lorry had completely blocked the road and we were watching the traffic come to a standstill, a wave of hazard flashers slowly spreading back down the
motorway
like a nasty rash. I told Dave to look after the cars and deployed Geordie and one of the traffic officers to take Mrs Fletcher, if that was her name, to the nick. As they loaded
her into the car, still protesting that he’d made her do it, I saw Geordie reach down and rub his ankle. Then he eased himself into the driving seat and pulled the door shut.

I climbed the sheep fence and set off at a jog to find a place where I could scramble down the banking and
identify
Timothy Fletcher’s mortal remains. A crowd had
gathered
around his body. He was lying on his back, half on the embankment with his head dangling in the drainage channel. One arm was doubled under him at an impossible angle and blood had dribbled upwards from the corners of his mouth, giving him a clown’s painted grin. I remembered the picture on his wall that I’d seen barely an hour earlier.

I told everyone that I was a police officer, asked them to sit in their cars and be prepared to supply names and addresses when asked. The inevitable businessman with an urgent appointment came forward but I brushed him aside. Others had planes to catch, so I told them ten to fifteen minutes, that’s all. The lorry driver was taking it badly. His windscreen had a big crack running diagonally across it where he’d hit the falling body and he was gabbling about not having a chance.

The ambulances and police cars came the easy way, on the empty road from the wrong direction, and within minutes the air was filled with flashing lights and the buzz of radios. I led the driver to the ambulance and sat him inside it.

One of the paramedics produced a blanket. “Shall I chuck this over Laughing Boy?” he asked, nodding towards Fletcher.

I looked from him to the body, still grinning at the sky, and back at him. “No,” I replied. “Leave him be.”

Motorists were leaving their cars to come and look at him. They’d peer at the broken body, grimace and turn away. Let them look, I thought. Let them have something to tell their families when they go home. This is what happens to people who think they can kill for their own gratification, or cause, or gain. People who believe that they have some
God-given
right to deprive others of life for their own pathetic reasons. Once upon a time he would have been suspended in a cage until his bleached bones disintegrated and fell through the bars. Well, we don’t do that now, we’re more civilised, but let him lie there for a few more minutes and let the
people
come and look at him.

“You OK, Mr Priest?”

It was a traffic sergeant from Halifax. “Yeah, fine,” I said. “Never felt finer.”