by HRF Keating
And then she realised that Bolshy had actually caught Drummond up.
Is he repeating those statutory words I am arresting you on suspicion …?
The next moment she saw she was right. Bolshy was making the arrest. But it was immediately evident he was not making it the success it should have been. No, he was a police officer attempting to effect an arrest in the middle of a crowd of inflamed countryside protesters, anti-Parliament, anti-city dwellers, anti-police.
Then Bolshy went down. She saw it. Where he had been facing Drummond a moment before there was now a little angry whirlpool in the multi-coloured sea of protest.
God, I hope they’re not going to go for Bolshy. Riding boots slamming into his sides, the poles of placards brought down on his head.
But Drummond? Has he taken advantage …?
He has. He has. The black snake of his wake is there once more, plain to see from this height and moving steadily as before.
What to do? What to —
At that instant she knew. She plunged her hand into her pocket, pulled out her mobile.
What’s the number that man at Scotland Yard gave me?
It came into her head, obedient as a foxhound to a horn call. She thumbed hard at the buttons. The officer who answered sounded extremely harassed. But when she gave her name and rank, all in one breath, she got an immediate response.
‘Yes, we were given orders about you. I took special notice because another woman officer might be at risk.’
Rapidly Harriet explained the situation.
‘All right. I’ll get directly on to one of the ’copters. They’ll certainly see what they can do. You said you’re watching the whole scene from where you are, top of some building?’
‘I am.’
‘OK, keep the line open, and I’ll patch you to the pilot.’
Within a couple of minutes Harriet found herself describing to an officer high above her under thrumming helicopter blades the path which Drummond seemed to be taking.
But it was of no immediate use. Drummond was making less progress now, however powerfully he was using those boxer’s shoulders of his. The black wake that was indicating his position had all but vanished away.
Harriet, at the thought of his thrusting shoulders, touched her chin, and caused a spasm of blotting-out pain to run up into her head. But Drummond, she realised as she began to recover, was nowhere near getting to the edge of the huge mass of yelling and shouting protesters. He was far from any point where it might be practical for officers from the police cordon to grab him.
For a long time then she and the helicopter pilot, between them, tracked the new wake Drummond had begun to make as, turning this way and that, he sought for the easiest place to break out. They lost him once, and Harriet had difficulty keeping the tears out of her voice. But then she spotted him again, apparently trying now to make his way back once more to the end of Great George Street. Was he going to try the escape route he had earlier rejected?
But his progress was erratic and infinitely more slow than it had been in his first heady rush through the safe density of the main mass crowding Parliament Square. The black snake was getting shorter by the minute, and much harder to make out.
What if, before long, he lacks the energy to make any progress in any direction? Lets himself simply be carried this way and that by the mass of people around him? Will he come dully to find that when at last the demo peters out and the protesters trudge away he can somehow sneak past the police looking out for more obvious law-breakers?
And then her tireless helicopter came, booming and blasting, low over the forefront of the crowd, now making a frenzied effort to pierce the barrier erected outside the grey walls of Parliament. Suddenly, the pilot’s voice shouted ‘Got him. He’s there. Just on the edge.’
Harriet thrust herself further out of the window, twisted to see where below there raged the ugly, no-holds-barred battle, now separated, it seemed, from the almost innocent shouting and chanting of the main mass.
God, that’s war there, open war, she thought. Where have the decent British citizens gone, the Queen’s law-abiding subjects?
But then she saw Drummond, clearly as if she were looking at him across some wide garden.
‘Yes,’ she shouted to the pilot. ‘Yes, I can see him, absolutely.’
‘Right then. We’re going to do something naughty. We’ve been talking about it for minutes. It’s a manoeuvre strictly reserved for people drowning in the sea. But, if you can give us second-by-second guidance, we’re going to send down a one-man snatch squad and pluck your Mr Drummond right up into the sky.’
‘No,’ Harriet shouted. ‘No, listen, you shouldn’t do it. You’re putting your winchman into danger. Real damn danger. Don’t do it. Just don’t do it.’
‘You’d better look upwards, Super. It’s too late now.’
She looked up. Dangling out of the helicopter on the end of a steel cable there was a bulky man in a harness.
‘More to the left,’ she called into her mobile, abandoning any protest. ‘He’s more to the left.’
The noise the machine was making all but drowned now the screaming and crashing of the battle directly below.
‘No, come a little further back if you can. He’s seen there’s no hope the way he was going.’
She kept her eyes fixed on the man at the end of the cable, some sort of straitjacket held between his gloved hands.
‘Yes. Yes, that’s it.’
She calculated hard now, as if she were tapping in vital alterations to some crucial spreadsheet.
‘Now. Now, go. Down, down.’
The steel cable lengthened by a few feet. The officer dangling at its end spread his arms wide. And clasped them.
Valentine Drummond was swept up into … The arms of the law.
Hunt over.
*
‘Hunt over?’ John said. ‘That broken rule Thou shalt not kill surgically removed from the body politic, that it?’
In the chair opposite, it took Harriet a moment or two to reply.
‘Yes,’ she said at last, a long sigh escaping her. ‘Yes, I suppose, if you like to put it in that philosophical way, that’s what has happened. Not that it seemed like it to me at the time. I take it you saw the whole thing on the News?’
‘Yes, very dramatic, particularly for one of the few people who knew, or guessed, what was actually happening. At first I thought, like every other viewer I suppose, that the person being lifted out of that scrum of protesters was just someone the police particularly wanted, somebody dangerous. But then … Well, then I actually caught a glimpse of you leaning out of the window at the top of that tall building, and of course realised what it was all about.’
‘Oh God, I never thought some idiot cameraman would think of zooming up to where I was. If the ACC’s seen that, he’ll be having a fit.’
She laughed then.
‘And, do you know,’ she said, ‘I don’t care a damn.’
‘Such language. But — But, darling, don’t you actually care? Is it, really and truly, that you don’t care at all?’
‘Really and truly, I don’t.’ She straightened up in her chair. ‘Yes, this is it. I’ve totally proved to my own satisfaction that I’m every bit as good a detective as I was before —’
But now she choked, if only for an instant.
‘I’m as good a detective,’ she repeated slowly, ‘as I was before Graham, my so-to-speak successor in the Service, was killed on duty. All right, in the months after that terrible moment when we heard about him, I was, I admit, less sharp than in my Hard Detective days. But I deny that I was like that for very long. I was certainly altogether as much on the ball as I have ever been in tracking down Valentine Tigger Drummond.’
‘Of course you were.’
‘All right, we’re agreed. So now, or as soon as Drummond’s trial is over and MI5 have dealt with the rest of the Cabal, I can hand in my resignation.’
‘No.’
It was, plainly, John’s
first instinctive reaction. But in the shortest of moments he modified it.
‘All right, darling, I’m not going to stand in your way, if that’s what you genuinely want. But, as they say, do not act without due reflection. I mean, you’ve been successful for virtually your whole life in the Service. Do you really want to duck out before your time? Really want to?’
Harriet looked at him. Good, sensible John.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I will think. I’ll give it your due reflection. But I tell you this: however long that I think, I can’t at this moment promise anything.’
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