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.’
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 back in again a few minutes later and sodomise the prisoner. When this second sex act was complete, the van’s rear doors were opened again, Pettigrew was forced to kneel up, facing outwards – into what looked like isolated woodland – and was shot in the back of the head. It was a miracle he survived, but an entire day passed before a woman walking her dog discovered him; like the others, he had been dragged into a ditch and covered with branches and moss.
This was a major break for the police, because it explained the M1 Maniac’s modus operandi. There was no DNA, just as there never was with any of the other cases, because the killer always wore protection, but at least Pettigrew was able to describe the van and the assailant, even if this latter description amounted to little more than a man with blue eyes and red hair, wearing a black anorak hood.
Unfortunately, none of this did much to make the public less frightened, because the murders continued. The fact that it was red-blooded young men who were the object of the viciousness made it all the more disturbing. There were athletes among them; one had even been a junior boxing champion. Additionally terrifying, the Maniac’s victims had been grabbed off the street while going about their everyday business. A criminal psychologist on the radio exacerbated the situation when he voiced a theory that the perpetrator was probably not gay; that in fact he was straight and that his sexual sadism was simply a means to assert his dominance. Women could be next, he said.
Needless to say, others were less sure about this, and as the panic rose the public order situation deteriorated: anti-gay graffiti appeared, gay nightspots were stoned. Vigilante justice became ever more brutal and indiscriminate – a prominent gay spokesman was dragged from a podium and beaten while attempting to address a public meeting.
In the midst of all this, the police came under mounting criticism. It was noted in the popular press that speed-cameras had assisted in the prosecution of thousands of motorists in the time since the reign of terror had begun, but that they seemed incapable of playing any role in the apprehension of this ‘real criminal’, even though road-use was integral to his method.
Such an incendiary atmosphere was soon going to explode. It looked increasingly unlikely that the hunt for the M1 Maniac would end in anything less than a disaster.
Though perhaps no one realised how much of a disaster,
