Dead Man Walking Read Online Free PDF Page B

attention – but they wouldn’t want to let them get too far ahead either. And right on cue, only half a minute later, the Hyundai itself came slowly in pursuit.
    Heck dashed back to his Citroën, gunned it up the track to the main road and swung left. It was only a matter of distance now. With a single deflating tyre, it was possible an innocent motorist would keep driving, failing to notice, but with two, that was highly unlikely. Around the next bend, the road spooled out clearly for about two hundred yards, at the far end of which Heck saw the BMW wallowing to a halt beneath a twisted ash. The Hyundai prowling after it hadn’t reached that point yet, but was already decelerating.
    Heck hit the brakes too, swinging his Citroën hard up onto the nearside verge so that it was out of sight. He jumped out, vaulted over the wall, and scrambled forward along undulating pasture, staying parallel to the road but keeping as low as he could.
    This was the ideal spot for an ambush, he realised. Brown Howe was a lowering presence on the left, Pike of Blisco performing the same function on the right. Utter silence lay across the deserted, bracken-clad valley lying between them. The dull grey sky tinged everything with an air of wildness and desolation. No tents were visible, no hikers; there wasn’t even a shepherd or farm-worker in sight.
    Heck advanced sixty yards or so, and moved back to the wall, where a belt of fir trees would screen him. The two cars were still visible, the Hyundai parked directly behind the BMW. Four people now stood by the vehicles’ nearside. A dumpy balding man and a thin white-haired woman, both in matching sweaters, had clearly been the occupants of the BMW. But Heck also saw the girl in the blonde wig, and the lean young man in the woolly cap, who even now was stripping off his cagoule, no doubt offering to change one of the BMW’s mangled tyres. Heck could imagine the advice he’d be giving them – mainly because the exact same spiel had been dealt to those others who’d suffered this fate in the Yorkshire Dales and the Peak District.
    ‘A double blow-out’s a bit of a problem,’ the good samaritan would opine. ‘But if you use the spare to replace the front one, you should be able to get down to the nearest town, where a garage can fix the rear one for you.’
    Wise advice, delivered in casual, friendly fashion – and all the while, the third member of the trio, the youth, who the victims wouldn’t even know was present, would be sliding unobtrusively out of the back of the Hyundai’s rear and crawling around to the target vehicle’s offside, from where he could open the passenger door and help himself to whatever jackets, coats, handbags and wallets had been dumped on the back seat. A classic distraction-theft, which even now – as Heck watched – had gone into play. The lad, still in his neutral grey clothing, snaked along the tarmac, passing the Hyundai on all fours.
    Heck stayed in the field but ran forward at pace, climbing a low barbed-wire fence, and hissing into his radio. ‘Thieves on, M-E! Thieves on! Move it … fast!’
    Mary-Ellen responded in the affirmative, but it was Heck who reached the scene of the crime first, zipping up his anorak as he jumped the wall and emerged on the roadside, coming around the twisted ash before anyone had even noticed.
    ‘Afternoon all,’ he said, strolling to the rear of the BMW, where the youth, still on hands and knees, but now with a purse, a wallet and an iPad laid on the road surface alongside him, could only gaze up, white-faced. ‘This is illegal, isn’t it?’
    The elderly couple regarded Heck in bemusement, an expression that only changed when he scooped down, caught the lad under his armpit and hoisted him into view. At once the younger couple reacted; the girl backing away, wide-eyed, but the bloke turning and sprinting along the road.
    He didn’t get far before Mary-Ellen’s Land Rover, blues and twos flickering, spun into