Nightmare

70

‘Can’t we go any bloody faster?’ asked Superintendent Chalmers. He pointed at the disappearing lights of the armed response vehicle ahead of them. ‘If they can do seventy, why can’t we?’

The driver pressed his foot down but the country roads were narrow and winding and even at sixty miles an hour he had trouble maintaining control of the vehicle. Chalmers took several deep breaths. His heart was racing, not because of the high-speed drive through the Surrey countryside but because he was finally going to see Jack Nightingale where he belonged: behind bars.

This time there was no way that Nightingale could escape justice. Three eyewitnesses had seen him shoot a man dead in cold blood as he lay in the street, and then drive off in his MGB. There had been another man shot at close range in the front of a car, and Nightingale’s assistant had been found in the kitchen of her home with her throat ripped open.

Chalmers was holding his iPhone and he stared at the screen. It showed a map of the area and a dot marked the position of the car he was in. When he’d visited Gosling Manor he’d marked the GPS position on his phone and now he was able to use it to follow his progress in the dark.

‘We’re coming up to the gate,’ he said. ‘About half a mile on the left.’