‘Just take it easy, sir. There’s nothing to worry about.’

He felt faintly ridiculous as soon as he said it. He could see from the expression on Lowther’s face that the man had plenty to worry about. Real or imagined, it was all there in his eyes and in the twist of his mouth. Fear, verging on panic.

‘You’re quite safe, Mr Lowther. I’m here to help you.’

Trying to inject a calmness into his voice that he didn’t feel himself, Cooper spread his hands in a reassuring gesture. His fingers touched the edge of the parapet, and he saw the stone was yellow with encrusted lichen.

‘Is there a dog here somewhere?’ said Lowther.

Cooper smiled then. Bizarrely, it sounded like progress. ‘You recognize me, don’t you, sir? You remember me? I’m DC Cooper. We talked yesterday. I was with a colleague, and you told us about your neighbour’s Alsatian.’

‘Tyrannosaurus.’

‘And we showed you a wooden dinosaur, that’s right.’

‘You don’t have to believe what they’re saying.’

A gust of wind brought the sound of children’s voices up the valley from Gulliver’s Kingdom. Laughter and screams. Kids hurtling over the switchback, plunging into the log flume, their mouths open, their clothes flying.

Lowther inclined his head. ‘They’re there,’ he said. ‘Not far away now.’

Cooper was concentrating so hard on the other man, tensed for a sudden movement, that he was hardly aware of movements on the edge of his vision, the increasing number of sounds around him. He reminded himself that John Lowther saw the world differently, and was probably already in an entirely abnormal state of mind where he saw things that didn’t exist and heard voices that Cooper couldn’t.

For some reason, Cooper couldn’t stop his thoughts wandering. He remembered thinking about the indoor area at Gulliver’s Kingdom, the place his nieces wanted so much to visit. The Wild West, an ice palace, jungle adventures. It was just there, in the distance, prominent among the trees. He could see it without taking his eyes from Lowther’s. Right now, Cooper could imagine himself in the middle of a Wild West shoot-out, that nerve-jangling moment when two men waited for each other to make the fatal first move. Or maybe that wasn’t it. Perhaps he was in the ice palace. Skating on very thin ice indeed.

‘There’s nothing to worry about, sir,’ he repeated. ‘Let’s just go down to the bottom of the tower, and we can talk. We can talk about whatever you like.’

Lowther shook his head. ‘It’ll soon be Monday,’ he said.

‘Monday?’

Frowning, Cooper found the lines of a song going through his head. An old Boomtown Rats classic.

‘So what don’t you like about Mondays?’

‘Not Mondays,’ said Lowther. ‘Next Monday. The thirty-first of October.’

‘Oh.’

Of course. Halloween. The time when the forces of evil were at their most powerful, the night when the doors to the underworld stood open and it was possible to communicate with the dead. Another belief that died hard, despite the efforts to make it all about pumpkins and apple bobbing.

‘I can’t be alive by then,’ said Lowther. ‘I can’t.’

‘All we need to do,’ said Cooper, ‘is get you down from here and take you to see a doctor. They can stop the voices, John. You know they can. They’ve done it before.’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Lowther, shaking with agitation. ‘Mum said you understood, but you don’t. When people talk to me now it’s like a different kind of language. It’s too much to hold in my mind at once. My head is overloaded and I can’t understand what they say. It makes me forget what I’ve just heard because I can’t hear it for long enough. It’s all in different bits, you see, which I have to put together again in my head. Until I do that, it’s all words in the air. I have to try to figure it out from people’s faces. But their faces always say something different from their voices.’

‘Mr Lowther, please calm down and stop talking for a minute.’

‘I have to keep talking, to drown out the voices.’

‘We’ll get you some treatment, to make the voices go away.’

‘They’ll never go away – not completely. They’ll always be there …’ He seemed to be listening to something. Whatever he heard terrified him, and he shouted the next few words. ‘It’s Lindsay’s voice. Lindsay – and the children. I heard them scream. I’ll always hear them scream.’

‘Look –’

What happened next, Cooper wasn’t quite sure. He’d been trying to concentrate on what John Lowther was saying, so he could respond and reestablish a connection. He’d been trying to maintain eye contact, to hold the man’s attention and keep him talking. But something had spooked him. Lowther jerked backwards against the parapet as if he’d been shoved in the chest or pulled back by an invisible hand.

Then he was going over, and Cooper was diving forward to grab hold of him. He found only clothes to clutch at, smooth material that slipped through his fingers and left him nothing to grip. He felt Lowther’s weight shifting inexorably outwards as gravity seized him and dragged him over the edge.

‘Georgi! Help me, quick!’

Kotsev came thumping up the steps, gasping as he reached the top.

‘Dyavol da go vzeme! Oh hell!’

But Kotsev was too late. Cooper felt his muscles scream against the effort of holding on to Lowther’s coat, fabric stretching and tearing between his fingers. Lowther was doing nothing to help himself. Before Georgi could reach over the parapet to help, Lowther slipped out of Cooper’s hands. His arms and legs flailed in the air, and his body bounced once off the stones of the tower as he fell, his mouth open, his jacket flying.

It was only in the final second that John Lowther’s screams joined those of the children that he could hear. A second of screaming, and then the impact. And all the voices were silenced for ever.

34

When the call came in, the helicopter unit had been responding to a Casevac request, the recovery of a paraglider who’d made a heavy landing on the slopes of Kinder Scout and broken his ankle. By the time the casualty had been evacuated to a hospital in Chesterfield and the aircraft was free to be re-tasked, the suspect vehicle was already on the M1 and heading south.

Anthony Donnelly was on the run in his beige C-class Mercedes. The first sign of a police car in his street in Swanwick, and he’d legged it. A sign of experience, that, having the car warmed up and ready to go, facing the right direction. Without the helicopter, he might have got clean away before he even reached the motorway.

Normally, Oscar Hotel 88 could be airborne in three minutes from a call, with an average transit time to an incident of seven minutes. It took far longer for officers dealing with an incident on the ground to decide they needed the helicopter deployed.

But now the helicopter unit was airborne a mile west of the M1. On board, the observer was following the Mercedes on his video camera, the zoom facility picking the car out easily from the surrounding traffic. Even the officers following at a distance in an unmarked Omega had no idea the helicopter was there, until its call sign cropped up on their talk group.

If he’s heading for the airport, we need to intercept him before he enters the terminal.

We don’t have units in place yet. We’re waiting for Firearms Support.

How long are we going to wait?

As long as it takes. We have to assume the suspect is armed.

Understood.

Listening to the exchange, Fry could detect the underlying anxiety at the prospect of an armed confrontation in a public place. And it would be a very public place, if the suspect got as far as the concourse in the airport terminal building.

She checked her map. Coming south from Sheffield, the M1 passed through part of Derbyshire, entered Nottinghamshire near Pinxton, then crossed back over the border again for the last stretch towards the airport. The confusion of jurisdictions made no sense in policing terms. It was an anomaly that someone always pointed out when the subject of merging police forces came up.