The Chase

by Paul Finch

  ‘Shit!’ Farthing shouted, heading across the road to his car.

  ‘What’s on the other side of that fence?’ Heck replied, going for the gate.

  Farthing was now busy filching his radio from its harness. ‘What … oh, wasteland. Industrial wasteland …’

  ‘Can you get the car round there?’

  ‘Not without changing the tyre, obviously …’

  ‘Sod the bleeding tyre!’ Heck ran through the gate. ‘And get us some support!’

  On the other side, a beaten earth path wove crazily down a shallow slope, looping between dense stands of Indian Balsam, their September seedpods now loaded to capacity and exploding as Heck barged against them. The path unfurled ahead of him for dozens of yards, but there was no sign of Cooper, which was disconcerting given that he was in his fifties, though what was it they’d said about him – that he’d formerly been an athlete? Heck swore under his breath. He’d known fitness fanatic coppers who were still ripped and energetic in their mid-sixties.

  He fished his own radio from his pocket as he circled a thicket of hogweed and found himself following a rusty wrought iron fence. Thirty yards ahead, there was a gap in this; on the other side of that muddy lane led beneath a dripping black railway arch. Heck kept running, doing his damnedest not to slip and slide in his leather, lace-up shoes.

  ‘Alpha-Echo control from DS Heckenburg, Operation Bulldog, over?’

  ‘DS Heckenburg?’

  ‘I’m pursuing a suspect in the neo-Nazi murders. I could use some back-up, and some geographical guidance, over?’

  It was several seconds before he received a response, which was no surprise as the passage under the arch ran forty yards at least. When he re-emerged into the open, he found himself on a dirt track strewn with bricks and twists of wire, which led past a broken-down gate onto the forecourt of a nondescript derelict building.

  ‘Excuse me, sarge … can you confirm that you’re pursuing a suspect in the Hendon murders, over?’

  ‘That’s affirmative. His name is Ernest Cooper, male ICI, tall, six/two or six/three, late fifties, over.’

  ‘Whereabouts are you, over?’

  ‘That’s the problem. I don’t bloody know.’ Heck could have beaten himself up at that moment. He hadn’t even memorised Ernest Cooper’s address, so he had no point of reference at all. All he knew was that he was somewhere in Sunderland’s East End.

  ‘Can you contact, PC Jerry Farthing?’ Heck hadn’t memorised Farthing’s collar number either, which was another black mark against him. ‘He’ll tell you where we are, over.’

  ‘Affirmative. Stand by.’

  ‘I can hardly stand by,’ Heck said under his breath, as he walked through the gate onto a broad, cindery parking area. About thirty yards ahead, the scabrous edifice of the main building was visible. Its upper windows were yawning cavities. A protruding lattice of rusted metalwork ran along the front, about fifteen feet up; the relic of a canopy beneath which wagons would have idled. Fragments of mildewed signage remained, but were unreadable.

  Heck hesitated to go further. Was it feasible that Cooper, fit as he was, could have got this far ahead? The problem was there didn’t seem to have been anywhere else he could run to. It was all a bit worrying, of course, because if Cooper was the perp, and it now seemed highly likely he was, there were only three reasons why he’d run like this: either there was somewhere else he could go, some bolthole where he could lie low before commencing a new life elsewhere; or his personal liberty was less important to him than finishing off the work he’d set himself, i.e. eliminating Nathan Crabtree’s gang; or both of the above.

  In no doubt that he needed to catch this guy right now, Heck advanced towards the building, scanning it for any identifying marks he could pass to Comms. Most of its ground-floor entrances were covered by wooden hoardings, but the most central one had collapsed, exposing black emptiness.

  He stepped through this, ultra-warily.

  Total darkness enclosed him – but only for a second. Very rapidly, dimmer light sources became apparent, and his eyes attuned to an area that was like small lobby, half flooded with water, crammed with broken bricks and masonry. Anyone attempting to dash through here would likely have fractured an ankle. Instead, he tiptoed through it, balancing on planks and fallen joists. A secondary door led into a cavernous inner chamber, the entrance to which was only accessible at the end of sixty yards of cage-like corridor, lagging and bits of cable hanging down through its mesh ceiling.

  Again Heck halted. Going further on his own was asking for trouble. Cooper had the khukuri knife – and he was clearly a dab hand at using it. With a single blow, he’d disabled a police car. Speaking of which – Heck gritted his teeth with fury at Jerry Farthing. Any bobby with his experience ought to have known that checking damage to a company vehicle was of less importance than apprehending a suspect. In fact, he would have known it. The reason he’d refused to join the chase was a lack of motivation. Whether that was down to fear or laziness, Heck wasn’t entirely sure, but the bastard was clearly past his best.

  Then, to his surprise, he heard the chugging of an engine outside.

  He scrambled back through the brick-strewn lobby, and felt a vague pang of guilt at the sight of Farthing’s Astra wallowing to an unsteady halt on the forecourt, its front nearside tyre hanging in ribbons. He walked quickly over there. ‘Have you put Comms in the picture? I wasn’t able to …’ His words petered out.

  Farthing, white-faced and sweating, climbed slowly from the driver’s side, while someone else climbed from the passenger side. The newcomer was slim but tall, about six-foot-three. He was in his late fifties, with lean, angular features and pale blue eyes. He had grey hair cut so short that it was really no more than a circular patch on top of his head, and a clipped grey moustache. He wore a fawn tracksuit, and a khaki belt, into the left hand side of which the khukuri knife was tucked. This was a truly admirable object – its blade shone wickedly and there was a carved steel lion’s head at its pommel. But he also wielded a firearm: a Luger nine-millimetre, that most iconic weapon of the Third Reich, which he now trained squarely on Farthing’ s head.

  They’d been fooled, Heck realised. He’d gone straight through that gate in the fence without considering that their quarry might be somewhere closer to home – hiding under the police car perhaps, maybe squatting around the back of it.

  ‘Please tell me you managed to get a call out first?’ Heck said to Farthing.

  But Farthing was too busy jabbering to his captor. ‘Mr Cooper … this is ridiculous. You’re not going to shoot us. I mean come on, you can’t …’

  ‘Shut up,’ Cooper said, quietly but curtly.

  ‘Look, we were only here to ask you a couple of questions …’

  ‘I said shut up!’

  ‘Jesus, man … you can’t just fucking shoot us!’

  ‘Don’t do anything rash, Mr Cooper,’ Heck advised.

  ‘Rash implies unnecessary, pointless, futile.’ Cooper’s accent was noticeably Sunderland, but more refined than most. He waggled with his pistol, indicating that Farthing should walk over and stand alongside Heck, which he duly did. ‘I assure you, Sergeant Heckenburg … the action I take here today will be none of those things. Now empty your pockets, please. Every weapon you’re carrying, every communication device. I want them placed on the ground. When you’ve done that, put your hands up.’

  Heck stooped, laying down his radio, mobile phone and handcuffs. Cooper watched him intently and yet unemotionally. His pale blue eyes were like teddy bear buttons; it was quite the most unnatural colour Heck had ever seen.

  ‘That looks like an original 1940s Luger to me, Mr Cooper,’ Heck said. ‘Another spoil of war?’

  ‘Inside!’ Cooper indicated the yawning doorway behind them.

  Heck held his ground, fingers flexing. He glanced around. There wasn’t a building overlooking them. The only high points in sight were the towering hulks of disused cranes. Directly overhead, the
sun had gone in, tumbleweeds of cloud scudding through a colourless sky.

  Cooper pointed the Luger directly at Heck’s face. ‘I said move.’

  Heck turned, hands raised. Farthing did the same, half-stumbling, the eyes bulging in his sweaty, froglike face.

  ‘I’m guessing you haven’t tried to fire that before?’ Heck said over his shoulder.

  ‘It’s fully loaded, I assure you,’ Cooper replied.

  ‘Yeah, but what do you think’ll happen if you fire it now … for the first time in seventy years?’

  ‘Keep walking,’ Cooper instructed.

  Farthing whimpered as the dark entrance loomed in front of them. Heck glanced sideways; tears had appeared on the chubby cop’s milk-pale cheeks.

  ‘You still need a way out of this, Mr. Cooper,’ Heck said. ‘Shoot us now and, and what happens next?’

  ‘That hardly matters to you.’

  ‘But what about you? Won’t be much chance of getting the rest of Crabtree’s gang if you’re sitting in jail. It might be the other way around. Crabtree’s lot will have friends on the inside …’ Bricks and other rubble clattered under their feet as they stumbled into the mildew-scented interior.

  ‘If I feared retaliation, I’d never have embarked on this course,’ Cooper said.

  ‘And what course was that?’ Heck wondered. ‘Bumping off some Nazis? Carrying on your father’s good work?’

  ‘Father was the finest of the fine. During this nation’s darkest hour, fighting men like him shone.’

  ‘Pity he didn’t restrict himself to the fighting, eh? Pity he became a war criminal.’

  ‘It’s no crime to execute those responsible for heinous deeds.’ Cooper’s voice had imperceptibly tautened. ‘Father was always an honest man. He believed in justice and a firm response to wickedness. Along there … all the way to the end.’

  They now faced the meshwork corridor with its hanging cables and rags of lagging. The open spaces beyond it were hidden in funereal gloom.

  Farthing all but sobbed aloud.

  ‘And what wickedness were Nathan Crabtree and his cronies committing?’ Heck asked, starting forward, eyes darting right and left.

  ‘The mere fact you have to ask that condemns you … but their main fault is simply being who they are.’

  ‘You don’t share their views? I’m surprised.’

  ‘Which again shows how little you know, sergeant. Animals like that … they call themselves British. And yet they terrorise the weak, punish the innocent. They call themselves patriots … even though they defame our flag, besmirch our name …’

  ‘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 fucking bullshit!’ the PC snapped, swinging around. ‘You noncey old fucker! If you’re going to do it, do it! Don’t fucking 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!’

  Chapter 4

  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 cluttered with further rubble, but still there was nowhere to hide.

  ‘Oh … shit!’ Farthing stammered.

  Heck pushed him towards another double-sized doorway, and beyond this into a tall timber passage that was broad enough for forklift trucks to drive along 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 large enough for HGVs. 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 sc
rambled 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 grabbed his arm and 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 even now was he creeping up?

  ‘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, I’m telling you!’

  Heck motioned him to wait just a second, and slipped out into the corridor, walking to the nearby corner. Around it, the passage led twenty yards to what looked like a fire-exit. He hurried up there and shoved down on the escape-bar, but there was no budge in it. As he pondered this, there came a series of thundering blows from behind. He knew that it was Farthing – hammering on metal.