Paul Finch - Hunted

In comparison to that, Lansing didn’t come off half badly.

His own vehicle, which was also dragged out and flung on its roof along the scorched tarmac, was of course reduced to mangled scrap, but though he was slammed brutally against his belt and airbag, and his legs twisted torturously as the Bentley’s entire chassis was buckled out of shape, he survived.

For what seemed like ages afterwards, he hung upside down, dazed to a near-stupor. The only thought that worked its way through his head was: The mirror … the road was clear, I saw it. He cursed himself as a damn fool for having played the music in his car at such volume that he’d failed to hear the howl of the approaching engine. But that shouldn’t have mattered, because the road was clear. I saw it with my own eyes.

And then another thought occurred to him: about the smell that was rapidly filling his nostrils, and the warm fluid running down his face – which he’d at first assumed was blood. He touched his wet cheek with his fingertips. When he brought them away again, they were shiny and slippery.

Dear God!

The petrol tank had ruptured. Its contents were already seeping in rivulets through the shattered vehicle’s interior. And outside on the road of course, though Lansing’s vision was fogged by pain and shock, pools of flame were burning, some of them in perilous proximity.

Though nauseated and shivering, head banging with concussion, he fought wildly with his seatbelt clip. When it finally came loose, he still didn’t drop, but was held fast by the legs, the agony of which infused his entire lower body.

‘Bloody broken legs,’ he burbled through a mouth seething with saliva.

He could still get out. He had to.

So he wriggled and he writhed, and he grunted aloud, biting down on shrieks of pain as he finally shifted his contorted lower limbs sufficiently to fall like a stone, landing heavily on his shoulders and upper back, but still managing to lurch around and worm his way out through his side window. Even as he slid onto the glass-strewn tarmac, there was movement in the corner of his eye. He spied glistening fuel winding treacherously away towards the burning vegetation on the verge.

Crawling on his elbows, teeth gritted on blinding pain, Lansing dragged himself further and further away. When the car blew behind him, it didn’t go with a BANG as much as a WUMP . He imagined fire ballooning above it in a miniature atom cloud, engulfing the branches overhead. Searing heat washed over him. But heat didn’t hurt you, flame did. And flame didn’t follow.

Realising he was safe, Lansing slumped face down on his folded arms, tears squeezing from eyes already reddened by smoke and fumes. Somewhere nearby he heard the approach of another car, but this one was slowing down. Tyres crunched on a road surface littered with wreckage; an engine groaned to a halt; a handbrake was applied; doors opened; what sounded like two pairs of booted feet clumped on the tarmac. Though it took him a stupefying effort, Lansing rolled over onto his back.

At first, he couldn’t quite make out what he was seeing. When its fuel tank had exploded, the twisted, blazing hulk of his Bentley had righted itself with the force, landing on its wheels again. But more important than this, a heavy vehicle of some sort – green in colour, like a jeep or Land Rover – had parked about ten yards behind it, and two men had climbed out, both dressed in what looked like grey overalls. Instead of coming over to check if Lansing was okay, the first of these two men, the taller one, was standing with hands in pockets, surveying the burning wreck. The other had walked round to the far side of it and, through the flickering orange haze, seemed to be attempting to remove the mirror from the tree trunk.

‘H-hey!’ Lansing stammered. ‘Hey … I’m over here …’

The one with his hands in his pockets casually looked round. Despite the momentous events of that morning, despite the delayed shock that was running through Lansing’s broken body like an icy drug, he was so startled by the face he now beheld, and so horrified at the same time, that he cried out incoherently.

The shorter chap meanwhile was still fiddling with the mirror – not trying to remove it, as Lansing had first thought, but trying to remove something that had been laid over it. Or at least, laid over its glass. Was that a picture? A large, circular picture fitted inside the mirror’s frame?

Good God …

With slow, purposeful steps, the tall one with the face that Lansing couldn’t believe walked across the road towards him.

‘You surely are the luckiest bastard alive, Mr Lansing.’ His voice was muffled, though the words were perfectly clear. ‘But sadly no one’s luck lasts forever.’

‘I’m … I’m hurt,’ Lansing stuttered.

‘I can see that.’

‘Please … get me an ambulance.’

Now the other one came across the road; the one carrying the circular picture he’d torn away from the mirror. His face too brought an astonished croak from Lansing’s throat, but no more so than the picture did – it was a still photograph of this very road, albeit empty, free of oncoming traffic.

‘Look,’ he burbled, ‘this isn’t a game. I’m badly hurt.’

‘Not badly enough, I’m afraid,’ the taller of the two men said. ‘But don’t worry – we can take care of that for you.’

They picked him up, one at either end.

Lansing fought back. Of course he fought back; he knew they weren’t trying to help him. But despite his struggles, they carried him around his vehicle like a sack of meal. At this point he bit one of them; the shorter one, whose latex-covered hand had taken a tight grip on his sweaty, petrol-soaked shirt. He sank his teeth deep, almost through to the knuckle. The assailant yelped and tried to yank his hand free, but Lansing – a dog with a bone, because he knew his life depended on it – wouldn’t let go.

They remained calm, even as they rained blows on his face to try and loosen his clenched teeth. Each impact resounded through Lansing’s skull. His nose went first; then his cheekbones and eye sockets; finally his jaw.

Though his vision was filmed by a sticky crimson caul, he was still aware they were carrying him. The heat of his vehicle washed over him as they halted in front of it.

‘Pleeeaaath,’ he mumbled through his shredded lips. ‘Pleeeaaathe … no …’

‘Think of this as a favour, Mr Lansing,’ the taller one said. ‘You’ve always been a handsome fella. Would you really want to carry on looking the way you do now? Anyway, hypothetical question. A-one, a-two, a-three …’

As they swung him between them his burbled pleas became gurgled wails, which rose to a peak of intensity when they released him and he bounced across the blistered bonnet and clean through the jagged maw of the windscreen into the white-hot furnace beyond.

Even then, it wasn’t over.

Lansing’s clothes burned away in blackened tatters, along with his skin and the thick fatty tissue beneath. Yet he still found sufficient strength to scramble out through an aperture where the driver’s door had once been – to amazed but amused chuckles.

‘This bloke, I’m telling you,’ the taller one said, as they again hefted Lansing by his wrists and ankles, unconcerned at the flambéd flesh coming away in their grasp in slimy layers. As before, they transported his twitching form to the front of the vehicle and launched him across its bonnet, back through its flame-filled windscreen.

At Nottingham Crown Court, the presiding judge, Mr Percival Shears, thought long and hard before passing sentence.

‘James Hood,’ he finally said, ‘you have been found guilty of murdering five elderly women in this city. Women of good repute, who were never known to have hurt or offended against any person. Not only that, you murdered them in the most heinous circumstances, forcing entry to their homes and subjecting them to sustained and hideous abuse before ending their lives … and for no apparent purpose other than to gratify your perverted lusts. So grotesque are the details of these crimes that, were this another time and another place, and were it within my power, I would have no hesitation whatsoever in sending you to the gallows.’