‘So how’d you do it?’ Heck asked. ‘Lure them to their doom. I’m guessing they didn’t know they had a runner on their hands?’
‘What are you doing?’ Farthing blurted, suddenly jerking out of his tearful reverie. ‘We don’t want to know, okay Mr Cooper? We don’t want to know anything.’
Cooper appeared not to have heard the outburst. ‘I propositioned the two henchmen. Made sexual remarks to them. One while he was using a public lavatory. The other while he was crossing a public park.’
‘As easy as that, eh?’ Heck said.
‘Dumb animals follow their instincts. As for Crabtree, I presented him with certain photographs I’d discovered on the internet. Offered them for sale to him in a pub. I knew he would pursue me for as long as was necessary.’
‘And in each case, when you got to the pre-prepared spot, you just turned around and pulled your Luger?’
‘The brutes are so easy. They were even easier to render unconscious. If your forensics people were ever to examine my khukuri, they’d find as many blood flecks lodged in its lion head hilt as they would in the grooves or bevels of its blade.’
‘They aren’t going to find it, Mr Cooper,’ Farthing said in an attempted manlier tone. ‘You have my word on that. Look … we couldn’t stand Crabtree and his Nazi pals either! We’re glad they’re dead. We weren’t investigating this case very hard …’
‘I’d like to believe you, PC Farthing,’ Cooper said, ‘I really would. But in modern Britain, the establishment – an amoral, drug-addled band born of the 1960s and 1970s, of whom you are the willing servants – have proved numerous times how uninterested they are in finding justice for the oppressed, and in fact have expended much more energy defending the rights of the vile. So no, I don’t believe you.’
Heck said nothing. They were now approaching the end of the meshwork passage, though just before that a sheet of grimy polythene part-hung down overhead.
‘Okay … you don’t like us.’ Farthing’s voice turned whiney again. ‘But what good is killing two bobbies? Look … I’ve got a wife and three daughters! What’s it going to do to them if they never see me again? How will they cope?’
‘Widows and fatherless children were left equally bereft in the years following the war,’ Cooper replied. ‘They managed.’
‘Oh, cut the crap!’ the PC snapped in a strangled tone. He swung sharply round, the eyes bulging like wet marbles in his pallid, frightened face. ‘If you’re going to do it, do it! Don’t bore us with your good old stiff-upper-lip “who-d’you-think-you’re-kidding-Mr-Hitler” bullshit!’
Heck spun around too, taking advantage of the distraction to grab the edge of the hanging polythene and yank the entire thing down; a crumpled mass of water-laden sheeting, which covered their startled captor head to foot.
Cooper didn’t fall beneath the weight of it, but it hampered him and blinded him. He never even saw the rocketing punch that Heck threw at his face, but grunted on impact. There was a splat of scarlet on the other side of the sheeting, and yet he remained upright. Already he was fighting the encumbrance off, levelling his Luger.
‘Leg it!’ Heck shouted, snatching Farthing by the sleeve.
‘What … where to?’
‘Anywhere! Just bloody leg it!’
They ran together, but in no particular direction. The wilderness of the shop floor lay all around them, littered with rubble – but it was wide open. There was nowhere to duck or hide. Heck glanced back. Cooper was stumbling out from the mesh corridor.
‘Down here!’ Farthing squawked. To the left, a steel stairway dropped through an aperture into dimness.
They descended without thinking. Some ten feet down, it deposited them in a concrete corridor with numerous doors leading off it, though at its farthest end, maybe eighty yards away, there was a smudge of light. They ran towards this, but only seconds later heard the heavy clunking of feet on the stair behind.
‘Oh Christ!’ Farthing gasped.
Passing door after door, they saw nothing but mould-streaked walls, rotted pipe-work. Heck glanced back again. The tall, rangy form of Cooper was pursuing them along the passage, silhouetted on the light seeping down the stair. He was walking rather than running, but with long, loping strides. Heck was confused as to why, in this narrow field of vision, he hadn’t already opened fire. Possibly, just maybe, it was his eyes. Cooper was nearly sixty, and perhaps didn’t have his glasses with him. It was certainly the case that he’d had to get close to his other victims. This gave them a chance, of sorts.
Heck bundled Farthing around the corner onto another shop floor. This one was dimmer than the first, and strewn with further rubble, but still there was nowhere to hide.
‘Oh … shit!’ Farthing stammered.
Heck pushed him towards a double-sized doorway, and beyond this into a tall timber passage that was broad enough for forklift trucks to drive down it. Their footfalls echoed as they hammered along, emerging fifty yards later in what had once been an internal loading bay, a series of concrete platforms abutting into a hangar-like space where HGVs were once accommodated. It was filled with litter and old leaves, and stank of oil.
There was no further access from here. Panting, Heck could only gaze at the huge folding steel doors that separated them from the outside. Again, they heard feet reverberating along the service passage behind.
‘Fuck!’ Farthing hissed.
They scrambled through a smaller-sized doorway on the right, entering a confused sprawl of interconnecting offices and corridors. Again, all were cluttered with rubbish and cross-cut by shafts of light penetrating from various external windows, though most of these had been closed off with corrugated metal. They turned several corners, before blundering into a final room, and finding there was nowhere else to run.
They slid to a halt, sparkling with sweat. Farthing made to double back, but Heck motioned for silence.
Seconds passed as they listened.
Suddenly, there was no other sound.
‘Let’s kick our way out,’ Farthing said, lurching towards the window, which no longer sported glass beneath its metal cladding.
‘Wait!’ Heck whispered.
They froze again. Still there was no sound. Had the maniac lost them? Or was he creeping up even now?
‘Fuck this!’ Farthing said, but Heck grabbed his arm.
‘Just wait! He’s had a couple of chances to pop us, and he hasn’t taken them. It may be he needs to get close.’
‘So?’
‘So hang on! We don’t know how solid that shutter is. It could take us five minutes, and if we make a racket it’ll bring him right to us.’
Farthing licked his lips. ‘You go see where he is … I’ll try and get it loose quietly.’
Heck padded back to the door, stopping alongside a low shelf, on which someone had left a wrench. It was old and rusty, but still satisfyingly heavy. He grabbed it, and peered out into the half-lit corridor. To his left it right-angled out of sight; to his right it ran straight for forty yards before vanishing into shadow. He glanced back, to where Farthing was feeling around the edges of the corrugated metal. With a slight creak, it shifted. The PC gazed at Heck.
‘Couple of kicks and this is gone,