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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 crap!’ the PC snapped in a strangled tone. He swung sharply round, the eyes bulging like wet marbles in his pallid, frightened face. ‘If you’re going to do it, do it! Don’t 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 strewn with further rubble, but still there was nowhere to hide.
    ‘Oh … shit!’ Farthing stammered.
    Heck pushed him towards a double-sized doorway, and beyond this into a tall timber passage that was broad enough for forklift trucks to drive down it. Their footfalls