Sacrifice. Paul Finch

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 space, 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