As Lucy and Tammy ran, a line of tall steel-mesh fencing loomed in front of them, beyond which lay a temporary slip road made from stones and clay. Lucy broke free of her charge and threw herself at it shoulder-first.
The fence was freestanding, so it collapsed immediately, falling flat. Lucy fell too, and rolled across it. Tammy tripped but kept her feet, and then Lucy was back up, dragging her on across the slip road. On the far side of that, increasingly evident as their eyes adjusted to the poor light, stood various pieces of heavy equipment: wheelbarrows; cement mixers; stacks of cones; several sections of concrete sewer pipe yet to be laid. They wove through this clutter and veered across more open ground towards the buildings, which up close were no more than a row of workmen’s cabins standing in darkness.
Another shot was fired.
It roared, the slug again whipping by with inches to spare, smashing a fist-sized hole in the nearest of the cabin doors. Whether this disabled the lock in some way, Lucy wasn’t sure, but she flung herself forward and the door banged open on impact. She toppled through into a black interior. Tammy whined with terror as she tumbled in behind. Lucy jumped back up and slammed the door closed, but even as she did, a second bullet-hole exploded in the middle of it, a shaft of yellow light spearing through.
Lucy gasped and ducked away, hitting the light on her phone and spinning round to find anything that might assist. It was the usual thing – plywood walls, a tarpaper floor, the combined smells of mud, oil, asphalt. But aside from a side-desk spread with paperwork and a row of hooks on which safety helmets and hi-viz jackets hung, the room was empty.
Meanwhile, a pair of heavy feet came pounding up to the door on the other side.
‘Hayley!’ Tammy scrabbled with the handle of an internal door.
Lucy dashed over. They barged through it and hared down a short passage from which various other offices opened, all tiny and bare, finally entering a more spacious room at the end. Extra hi-viz jackets and hardhats hung in here. There was a table in one corner, a filing cabinet, and a row of tools propped against the far wall.
Lucy lurched first to the tools, and snatched up a spade. It could be used as a weapon, she supposed, but it would be heavy and cumbersome. Besides, it might serve another purpose. She whirled back to the open internal door and glanced down the corridor. Yellow street lighting glimmered from the room at the far end, but then a male silhouette stepped into view, gun still in hand.
Lucy slammed the door and braced the spade against the inside of it, ramming its hilt under the door-handle and, tearing up a wedge of tarpaper flooring, jamming the blade against that. It wasn’t much of a barricade, but it might buy them a little time.
‘What’re we going to do?’ Tammy wailed. ‘We can’t stay here!’
Lucy glanced over her shoulder. There was a window behind her with mesh across it, and another external door. That was their way out. But there was no guarantee that safety really lay outside. From here they probably had a choice of running across open farmland or back to the East Lancs and along the hard shoulder. None of those options would offer much protection from gunfire.
A massive impact crashed through the room. The internal door shook in its frame, but the spade held it fast. Lucy backed away and jumped aside. It was pure instinct but it saved her life, as two more shots punched massive holes in the woodwork.
‘Jesus Christ help us!’ Tammy wept.
‘Just get out of here!’ Lucy yelled. ‘Get outside!’
Tammy attempted to comply, but could only shriek in dismay. Astonishingly, given that the others were all open, the outer door appeared to be locked.
Another massive shoulder-impact struck the internal door. Its frame shook; the jamb split. Only by a miracle was the spade still in place, but it wouldn’t last much longer – it was already sliding underneath the tarpaper.
Lucy again surveyed the tools: shovel, spade, a big rubber sledgehammer, spirit level, pickaxe …
Pickaxe.
She grabbed and hefted it.
It was heavy, not to mention awkward: an arc of thick but tapered steel on the end of a solid hickory handle.
Again it would be heavy and clumsy, but it would do in a crisis like this.
She spun back to the internal door. Vlad launched himself against it repeatedly, battering it slowly inward. The spade slid deeper under the tarpaper.
Lucy rushed forward, threw the pickaxe back over her shoulder and, giving it everything she had, swung it down, punching it through the wood at just about neck-height – a blow that coincided perfectly and deliberately with Vlad’s next shoulder-charge.
There was a muffled squawk on the other side, and then a bizarre silence, which lingered for several seconds. Briefly, and with some considerable effort – because its blade was lodged in place – Lucy had to strain all her gym-toned muscles to wrench the pickaxe head free. When she did, she blinked in shock; its bottom six inches of steel were dark with blood.
She certainly hadn’t killed the bastard – she could now hear him again on the other side of the door; what sounded like a low, pathetic keening, followed by a drunken stumbling of feet as he moved away. Was this total victory, she wondered, or just a breathing space?
She hurried across the room to where Tammy cowered by the locked outer door.
‘Out the way!’ Lucy instructed her.
Tammy scrabbled aside as Lucy swung the pickaxe again, mightily, sundering the lock with a single blow. The door broke open when she yanked at it, and then they were out into the night air. They were now at the rear of the cabins, another plain of grit and rubble stretching into the darkness ahead of them. It was anyone’s guess what lay in that direction. But Lucy had no intention of finding out. Dropping the pick and taking Tammy by the wrist, she circled warily back around the flimsy structures towards the front.
The ribbon of the East Lancs came into view.
Predictably, no police support had arrived as yet. But maybe it wouldn’t be needed. Only a hundred yards away, the Corsa sat skew-whiff where it had ground to a halt.
It would be a risk. There was a lot of open ground to cover before then, but skulking inside those wooden buildings was no guarantee of safety, especially as the wounded hoodlum was still in there too. Lucy jerked forward, walking quickly but quietly, refusing to relinquish her grip on Tammy’s arm, her eyes fixed on the cabins as they bypassed them and crossed the slip road – only to hit a nail-biting halt when the main cabin’s mangled front door burst open and Vlad the Impaler came see-sawing out, pistol hanging low.
It was like watching a broken marionette. His head lolled exaggeratedly; his legs wobbled like rubber. He barely seemed aware of Lucy and Tammy as he tottered for several yards and fell against the drum of a cement mixer, before slumping down to the ground, where he lay on his face.
The two women waited, hardly daring to breathe.
The prone form was approximately thirty yards to their right. That was close enough for them to see that he’d dropped his pistol – it lay beside his left hand – and to distinguish the extent of his wound: by the looks of it, the pickaxe had pierced him at the point where his neck met his left shoulder. Even from here it was plain that this was more than a mere gash. As Vlad had fallen, his black coat had flapped open and, though he was wearing a white muscle shirt underneath, it was darkly and wetly stained all down its left hand side.
‘Head for the car,’ Lucy whispered, pushing Tammy towards the Corsa.
‘And what’re you doing?’ Tammy asked, as Lucy edged towards the body.
‘We need the keys, don’t we?’
‘For Christ’s sake, we can hotwire it!’
‘No, Tammy … it’s a modern motor. It won’t be anything like as easy as that. And keep your voice down.’
‘He might not be dead …’
‘I’m hoping he’s bloody not!’
Lucy continued forward, only to hesitate again – this seemed like madness. What if the bastard was faking it? The temptation was suddenly to retreat, to turn, to run, to keep running. But no … head had to rule heart here. Even if this guy was out of the fight for good, there could be others of his ilk around. There was no argument: Lucy and Tammy needed those damn keys to make a clean getaway. It might also help if they got hold of Vlad’s gun.
‘Go to the car,’ Lucy said again, sidling forward.
Tammy did as she was told, walking over there but constantly glancing back.
Lucy stepped as lightly as she could, but cringed with each crunch of grit. The fallen Russian was now about fifteen yards away and evidently still alive; he shuddered as tendrils of pale steam wafted up from him. But the claret-coloured pool forming under his torso meant that he was losing blood profusely. It occurred to her that she ought to do something about that. Staunch the flow if nothing else. But then, the son of a bitch had been trying to kill them. It would be difficult playing doctor after that. The divisional support units she’d asked for might be struggling to locate them, but they’d get here eventually. He’d have to take his chances until then. Besides, she was more worried about herself. It would be bad enough having to search through pockets sodden with blood, but the bastard’s left hand still lay close to that pistol. Unconscious though he seemed to be, he was easily in reach of it. Even if she managed to nab it first, it wouldn’t be hard for him to snatch her wrist in the process.
She crossed the final few yards with extreme stealth.
Vlad shuddered again, and groaned.
Lucy halted, but told herself that it had been a nervous reaction.
She took another hesitant step forward. And then …
Putta … putta … putta …
In truth, she barely heard this automatic gunfire because it had been silenced. Even so, she glimpsed the stroboscopic flash in the corner of her eye.
When she spun round, another gun-toting figure had appeared, rising up on the other side of the Corsa. And though this newcomer wore a full head ski mask made from black leather, from its female outline it clearly wasn’t Gregor.
There hadn’t been two of them. There’d been three.
And Tammy – twenty yards from the car, with nothing to shield her – was still the main target. The unexpected fusillade, fired from what looked like a machine-pistol with a black tubular sound-suppressor extending its muzzle, raked her clean across the midriff.
She went down like a sack of meal.
Lucy went down too, diving and rolling, and in the process grabbing hold of Vlad’s pistol. She wasn’t an authorised firearms officer; she’d never carried guns on duty, though she had been trained to handle and disarm them. But this was a Glock 9mm, very common to police officers and ridiculously easy to use. As she came to rest on her front, she took aim with both hands at the masked figure advancing round the Corsa.
Lucy’s brow was slick with sweat. She already had a good idea who this new player was, though it was impossible to be certain. Either way, the machine-pistol, which had a massive magazine inserted into its underside, was still levelled on the curled-up shape of Tammy.
With no choice, Lucy squeezed off three quick shots.
The range was about sixty yards and she was untrained to shoot, so she missed, but each slug struck the Corsa, the first two taking out a window each, the third punching through its bonnet and caroming up from the chassis, either the ricochet itself or slivers of shrapnel ripping across the assassin’s neck, slicing open the ski mask so that braided orange tresses fell out.
There was no question now; it was Suzy McIvar.
She likes to take care of business personally, Geoff Slater had commented.
She was even wearing her trademark spike-heeled boots and tasselled leather jacket.
The murderess scrambled back around the Corsa to take cover, and maybe nurse her wound – though that could only be minor. Lucy fired again. Two more quick shots, each tearing holes through the Corsa’s bodywork. Then she jumped to her feet, pumping the trigger more as she dashed forward. The Glock’s standard magazine capacity was seventeen rounds; she knew that much. She didn’t know how full this particular weapon’s clip had been to start with, but there was no stopping now; she had to keep the bitch pinned down, at least until she could check on Tammy. So she kept firing as she advanced, hitting the car over and over.
The fallen girl was heavily bloodied, but made no sound as she lay in a ball, clutching her abdomen. It already looked horrific, and normally would require a professional and delicate response. But none of the usual protocols of first aid applied here. Lucy had to get the casualty out of range any way she could. But even as she slid to her knees alongside Tammy, the machine-pistol reappeared, periscope-style, above the Corsa’s bonnet, and another burst of strobe-like fire dazzled the night.
Fortunately, because Suzy wasn’t looking, the shots went wide. But there was still no time for an on-the-spot diagnosis.
The fireman’s lift was always the easiest way to carry an injured party out of a combat zone. It had been tried and tested in every battle in history. But it could only ever be a last resort. Even so, this was exactly the situation Lucy now faced. Ignoring Tammy’s gasps, she grabbed the wounded girl by the armpits, and, thankful that she was small and relatively light, threw her up and over her shoulder, clamping her in place by looping her left arm around the back of Tammy’s thighs. The prostitute squealed as her perforated midriff took all the weight. But Lucy couldn’t afford to respond to that. She might not just be hurting the girl, she might be killing her. But they would both of them die if they stayed here.
She turned and tottered away, struggling not to overbalance.
Another blast of stroboscopic light threw their combined shadows across the open ground. A frenzy of dirt was ploughed up around them, the floor erupting beneath Lucy’s right foot and tearing away the entire sole of that training shoe – leaving her with no grip on her right side. Subsequently, almost immediately, she slipped in the mud and fell forward, taking Tammy down with her.
Tammy hit the ground first, whimpering like a child as the wind wheezed from her lungs, but as she landed, trapping and twisting Lucy’s left arm underneath her.
Something cracked.
The pain was immense, sickening. It was centred in Lucy’s left forearm, but swiftly ran the entire length of her body, even into her head, where it popped like a light bulb.
Dizzied by the intensity of it, Lucy knew instinctively that she’d fractured a bone, probably her left wrist. But at present she was operating on pure adrenaline. More an automaton than a thinking being, she scrambled back to her feet, grabbing Tammy’s collar with her right hand and dragging her behind as she stumbled on, the sole of her damaged trainer flapping wild and loose.
She veered first towards the workmen’s cabins, but now heard Suzy McIvar’s feet come thudding in pursuit. There was another strobe-like burst, which raked the cabins from top to bottom, pummelling them full of holes, turning them to Swiss cheese, making it quite clear that there was no refuge to be had there.
Lucy released Tammy as she pivoted back around. She didn’t know how many shots she had left in the Glock – it couldn’t be many. But Suzy, about forty yards away, made a perfect target. Again, Lucy aimed and fired. She hadn’t expected to hit, and she didn’t – but Suzy went to ground, ducking and rolling fast, more and more of her braided hair flying loose.
Lucy jammed the Glock into the back of her jeans and staggered on, dragging Tammy behind her again as she swerved away over ground now strewn with wire and rubble. In the midst of it, protruding up at an angle was the concrete rim of a sewer pipe. She tottered towards it, panting. It was only about three feet in diameter and she had no idea how far it led underground, but in these circumstances any kind of cover was desirable. On reaching it, she lugged Tammy up into a sitting posture, hunkered down and, hooking her arm underneath the girl’s bottom, levered her a foot or so into the air. Though it was agonisingly difficult one-handed, she inserted Tammy over the pipe’s rim feet-first, gripped her under her right armpit and then let her go – so that she slid downward out of sight.
It was anyone’s guess what lay below. But it couldn’t be any worse than staying here.
Lucy grappled with her injured arm as she glanced quickly back. She’d thought it had gone numb below the elbow, but merely touching it lanced pain to the ends of her fingers.
Suzy was about thirty yards away, but on one knee. She’d dispensed entirely with her ruined ski mask and was in the process of cracking one clip loose from her machine-pistol and replacing it with another. Lucy didn’t wait to see more. She vaulted over the rim herself, and slid down the interior of the pipe. The worst possible outcome here would be if it was blocked a few yards down – perhaps with building or demolition rubble. Both she and Tammy would literally be rats in a barrel.
But in fact she continued to descend, bouncing over joints and repeatedly jarring her arm. She was about twenty feet down and feeling faint, when she dropped through another circular opening into a horizontal pipe, landing on top of Tammy, who now lay face up and perfectly still. Breath rasping through a throat turned raw, Lucy rolled sideways off the girl, to find the pipe filled to several inches with sludge and icy ditch water. She groped in total darkness, feeling first at the casualty’s neck – and almost choking with relief when she detected a pulse. Tammy moaned, but it was impossible to tell how badly she’d been hurt. Next, Lucy played her fingertips across the girl’s lower midsection. It was a mess of torn, slimy material. Tammy moaned again, this time with faltering breath.
‘Good God!’ Lucy muttered. She glanced overhead. At the top of the upper pipe, a disc of night sky was distantly visible. No silhouetted head was framed there, but it wouldn’t be long before Suzy appeared, pointed her weapon down and unloaded another clip. She wouldn’t even need to be a good shot; they were directly in the firing line.
Grunting anew, Lucy crawled away from the aperture, dragging Tammy by her feet into ever-deeper darkness. With thin squeaks, two loathsome furry bodies scampered off, their tales whiplashing Lucy’s face. She didn’t care, only coming to a rest when they were at least a dozen yards from the foot of the upper pipe. She dug into her pocket again, pulled out her phone and, though she couldn’t get a signal, hit the light, the milky glow of which shimmered along the cylindrical concrete passage in both directions,
As she did, she heard a faint scuffling behind her.
She glanced over her shoulder, wondering if this indicated more rats scurrying away into the depths, or feet descending from above. Dust trickled downward from the entrance to the upper pipe. For several taut seconds, Lucy was frozen rigid, wondering how much further she could drag the wounded girl, wondering if the pipe would run continuously straight so that bullets could pass easily along its entire length – but then the scuffles began to diminish, the plumes of dust to settle. She waited tensely, listening hard.
The urge was still to press on, but where to … into the bowels of the Earth?
She risked glancing down at Tammy.
The phone-light illuminated a face that was still as death and pale as ice.
Tammy’s eyes were lidded but motionless; clots of half-congealed blood trailed from either side of her mouth.
Further down her body, it was even worse.
Still with half an ear cocked to the passage behind, Lucy made a quick, cursory examination of the girl’s midsection, now with the aid of the light, and though she didn’t want to rummage too much through torn, gore-slick clothing, she rifled it sufficiently to spot at least two puckered, coin-sized bullet-holes several inches apart in the middle of the girl’s abdomen, from which, even as she watched, more and more blood was pulsing.
A slow realisation dawned that her part-time friend was not going to make it. No basic first aid would fix this.
Lucy did her best, finding a packet of clean tissues in her pocket and screwing them into the wounds, but there was nothing she could do about damaged internal organs. Gently as she could, she mopped stringy, copper-red hair from the girl’s sunken eyes, at the same time looking back along the pipe again.
There was still no sign of that bitch, Suzy. Whatever the delay was, it at least gave them a chance … but Lucy was increasingly hesitant to clamber on into the opaque blackness. Hauling the ailing casualty through God knew how much more bricks, filth and sewage would only cause her an awful lot of suffering.
‘Tammy?’ Lucy said quietly. ‘Can you hear me? Tammy … it’s me.’
‘Dunno …’ Tammy murmured. ‘Dunno …’
‘Tammy, it’s Hayley,’ Lucy said. ‘But my real name’s Lucy. I’m a cop, if you remember.’
‘Lucy … yeah.’
‘Tammy, listen … you’re pretty banged up.’
‘Feel sick, Lucy …’
‘That’ll pass soon, love. Look … I’m so, so sorry I brought you to this. It was never my intention to see you hurt.’
‘Suzy … did this …’
Lucy put fingers to her lips, shushing her.
She listened intently, ears pinned back. Fleetingly, she’d again thought she’d heard a scuffle of boots on concrete. It might not have been that of course. Another rat possibly?
As before, the sounds faded quickly. In fact, the silence was suddenly ear-splitting. Was it possible, she wondered … could it conceivably be that Suzy McIvar had opted not to venture down here, but to flee the scene instead?
Lucy hardly dared to hope.
‘No one screws with the Twisted Sisters, eh?’ she said, still keeping her voice down.
‘Should’a known … should’a …’ But the mere act of mumbling words brought pain to Tammy’s tortured, bloodless features. ‘I messed … up …’
‘You’ve done nothing wrong, love,’ Lucy said. ‘In fact, you’ve been great. You almost helped us crack a really serious murder case …’
Tammy’s lids inched open, the eyes underneath filmy and unfocused.
‘I did good …?’ she stuttered.
‘You did brilliantly.’ Lucy took her hand, and kept it in a firm grip.
‘Can do good …’
‘Just lie here, rest. Help’s on its way.’
‘Wanna … do good. Do’n wanna die … drunk …’
‘You’re not going to die.’
Though it almost choked Lucy to say this. It might have been her imagination, but the young prostitute seemed to be shrivelling up in front of her. And yet, almost imperceptibly, Tammy’s grasp on Lucy’s hand tightened until she held it in a near-fist.
‘K … kids,’ Tammy stammered. ‘Lucy … they’re selling kids.’
‘What … what’s that?’
‘In the brothel.’
‘No, love … you’re mistaken.’ Lucy shook her head. ‘I was undercover at SugaBabes for two weeks. There were no kids working there. Not even collecting glasses …’
‘No’ there … listen!’ Though it took effort, Tammy’s eyes widened until they were bright, bloody orbs. Wracked, she reached up her other hand and clutched the lapel of Lucy’s combat jacket. ‘Lucy, there’s … another place.’
‘Another place?’ Despite her exhaustion, Lucy felt a tremor of anticipation, a swift revival of her policewoman’s instinct.
The McIvars had another place.
Accessible, no doubt … via the SugaBabes Taxi Service.
Lucy checked one more time over her shoulder, but she was finally starting to relax on that front. Suzy had left them alone down here for so long now that it surely meant she wasn’t coming. Besides, what Tammy was now stammering was too important to put on hold.
In fact, it was so important that Lucy activated both the camera and the microphone on her mobile so that she could make an audible and visual record of it.
No cop ever wanted to be in a position where he or she was taking some kind of final statement or dying declaration. But what was necessary was necessary.
‘Tammy, I’m recording this … okay?’
‘Sure … wanna … help.’
‘Who do you think shot you tonight, love?’
‘Suzy … Suzy McIvar …’
‘I think it was Suzy McIvar too, but why would she do that?’
‘Protect …’ Tammy’s eyes fluttered closed.
‘Protect what, Tammy? What was Suzy trying to protect?’
The eyes opened again, perhaps by half a centimetre. ‘The other place …’
‘And what’s the other place, Tammy?’
‘Taxi takes you … from SugaBabes.’
‘Is it another brothel?’
‘Child brothel …’ Tammy coughed and struggled to breathe. With a glottal gurgle, more thick blood spewed from her lips.
‘A child brothel?’
‘Uh …’
Lucy glanced backwards one more time. Still there was no sign of pursuit.
‘Tell us more if you can,’ she urged her. ‘Tammy?’
‘They run …’
‘Who’s they, love?’
‘Jayne … Suzy McIvar. They run … taxi.’
‘A taxi?’
‘Not real … SugaBabes Taxi …’
‘Tammy … how do you know about this?’
‘Was … part of it.’
‘You mean you were a prostitute at this other place?’
‘Yeah … when I started …’ Tammy gave a deep groan. ‘Oh, Lucy … so sick …’
‘Try and concentrate, love … tell us everything you can.’
‘Not … not all customers. Just some. High payers … pervs, paedos. Check in … at SugaBabes, then … taxi. Blindfold … so they never know where …’
‘But you know where, don’t you?’ Lucy trained the phone-cam on the girl’s haggard face.
Tammy gave a vague nod. ‘Ordinary house. But … feels bigger on inside.’ Bizarrely, even in the midst of her pain, she chuckled at that.
‘And what’s the address?’ Lucy asked.
‘41 …’
‘41 …?’
‘Trestlehorn Avenue … Whitefield.’
‘Okay, 41, Trestlehorn Avenue, Whitefield. And let’s just be clear, Tammy … that’s a brothel where underage prostitutes are working?’
Another vague, barely perceptible nod. ‘Kiddies …’
‘And you were there, you say?’
‘Nine years old …’
‘You were working as a prostitute for the McIvar sisters at the age of nine?’
‘Others too. How they make … big money … right?’
‘How long were you there for, Tammy?’
‘Kicked me out when I … sixteen. Too old …’ She tried to chuckle again, only for additional blood and foam to spatter from her mouth. ‘Put me in SugaBabes … only ’bout a year. But … like a drink. Not impressed. Bitches … alright plying me wi’ booze when I was … nipper, eh? Keep me docile, suppose. But … doesn’t suit ’em later …’
‘Let’s be quite clear about this, Tammy. You were a child prostitute, working for the McIvar sisters in an underage brothel located at 41, Trestlehorn Avenue, Whitefield. And as far as you’re aware, that place is still in operation?’
Tammy nodded again, but grimaced. More blood oozed out. Thicker this time, darker.
Lucy cut the interview and glanced again at Tammy’s wounds. The temporary dressings were already sodden crimson. It was a horrendous sensation, knowing there was nothing else she could do – but now, very abruptly, she noticed something else, namely that the light in the sewer had changed. As well as the pale glow cast by her phone, a faint blue iridescence came flickering along the pipe. By the looks of it, as she craned her neck to peer backwards, it was filtering down from the upper world.
Lucy could have shouted with delight. After many years of tough scrapes and close calls, she’d learned to appreciate the arrival of the blues and twos.
‘Okay, Tammy,’ she said urgently. ‘You just sit tight. Believe it or not, help’s finally got here. And not before time. Just hang on, you hear me, girl?’
Tammy tried to say something, but it was inaudible. Her eyes had closed again. The steamy breath from her bloodied lips was thinner, weaker, but at least it was still visible.
‘I promise I’ll be as quick as I can,’ Lucy added.
She scrabbled back until she was underneath the upper pipe. If it had been difficult coming down, ascending back to the surface was murderous. It wasn’t too steep, but there were no grips, no footholds. The only way she could manage it was by working her way upward with her knees pressed into the facing wall and her back braced against the one behind. Again and again, she caught her left arm on the concrete. The jolts were frightful, like electric shocks; they knocked her giddy, almost sent her tumbling back down. But she persevered, because this wasn’t just a case of escaping the subterranean realm – now someone’s life depended on it.
When she reached the top, of course, she had to exercise additional care. There were likely to be firearms men on the plot, and she didn’t want her head blowing off by accident. So she peeked cautiously over the rim rather than climbed straight out.
Amid a flood of swirling blue light, several mobile units were parked along the hard shoulder of the East Lancashire Road. All looked like uniform cars, though there was no sign yet of an ambulance. Then she spotted the upright oblongs erected between them. Ballistics shields, she realised. The figures moving frenetically around behind these looked to be wearing helmets with visors. That was the shots. By the looks of it, they’d got here before the medical personnel, which wasn’t ideal but it was better than nothing. What was noticeably absent was the Vauxhall Corsa. Lucy wouldn’t have thought it driveable after the number of slugs she’d put into it, but Suzy McIvar had clearly got it going – and when Lucy glanced towards the workmen’s cabins and saw that the prone shape of Vlad was also missing, she realised that the queen-bitch had even managed to take her wounded sidekick with her.
That also was less than ideal. But just having survived this was something of a result.
As Lucy’s left wrist was the injured one, she anchored herself at the top of the pipe by hooking her upper left arm over the rim, and used her right to fish her phone from her pocket, flick its light on again and wave it from side to side. At the same time, she shouted: ‘Over here, but don’t shoot! I’m a police officer.’
There was a flurry of movement behind the shields. Lucy called out again.
‘Police officer! I have a civilian casualty with severe gunshot wounds. We need an ambulance quickly!’
More frantic movement. No one advanced to meet her, but strong torch-beams swept the rubble-strewn siding.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ she shouted. ‘Shake your bloody arses!’
‘PC Clayburn?’ came the tinny-toned voice of a loud-hailer.
‘Over here!’ she cried, now hoarse. ‘Surely you can bloody see me!’
‘PC Clayburn! Are there any other armed persons here, to your knowledge?’
‘I don’t think so, or at least not any more,’ she called. ‘But it’s full body armour, okay? And keep those bloody guns handy, or whatever it is you do. But for God’s sake, do it fast. We need medical assistance!’
When the next response came in the affirmative, Lucy scrabbled back down the pipe. It was an even bumpier ride than before. Again and again, she struck her arm on the side – until she was ready to throw up from the pain. But at last she came to the bottom, where she hunkered onto her hands and knees, and splashed back through the silt towards Tammy.
‘It’s alright, love,’ she said. ‘If you can just hang on a bit longer, help’s coming.’
But Tammy made no reply, and when Lucy turned her light on again, the girl’s eyes had glazed. Sluggish blood no longer ran from her mouth and no breath issued from her cold, dead lips.