Bone Field 02 The Hanged Man by Simon Kernick

Author:Simon Kernick [Kernick, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-eight

Dan and I now had a serious quandary.

British law clearly states that a police officer who’s the victim of a crime must not continue to investigate that crime because he’s now directly involved, and therefore his presence on the investigating team would be prejudicial to proceedings. So if we wanted to continue our conversation with Ugo in an interview room we were both going to have to forget the fact that he’d tried to kill us, which meant he was going to wriggle his way out of two attempted murder charges. The problem was, these attempted murder charges were probably the best reason for him to cooperate with us, but by then we’d be off the case and relying on other officers to do the questioning for us.

It wasn’t a position either of us wanted to be in.

‘What are we going to do?’ Dan asked as we walked back through the estate in the direction of the flashing lights. A few civilians moved about in the shadows of the buildings, staying well back as emergency vehicles continued to stream into the estate. ‘We almost got killed nicking that arsehole, and now he’s off limits.’

‘We need to think about this,’ I said, looking round to check we were on our own. ‘Did your camera record?’

‘It should have done. I switched it on when we left the car. The footage goes straight to my mobile.’

He fished the phone out of his pocket and flicked through files until he came to the one he wanted. He switched it to mute and pressed play as I stood next to him. It was high-quality footage showing a slightly shaky view of the route we’d taken in pursuit of Ugo. Dan moved it forward until it showed him rounding the corner on the first-floor walkway just at the moment when Ugo was taking two steps backwards and pointing the gun directly to my head, while I stood in front of him, my hands held up in a defensive gesture. Ugo then turned round rapidly in the direction of the camera, still holding the gun, as Dan rushed towards him. The gun went off with a muzzle flash a split second before Dan hit him head on. The footage was then a blur as the two men crashed to the ground, before showing a bleeding and dazed Ugo.

Dan pressed stop, and pocketed the phone.

‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘how did he miss you? Any jury seeing that’s going to convict him of at least one count of attempted murder.’ I took a deep breath. Watching the footage had brought home to me how close we’d both come to death. ‘You saved my life, mate,’ I said, wondering whether I should give him a hug or something. In the end, I settled for a simple thank you.

‘I’d expect the same from you,’ he said.

‘And you’d get it. Even so, charging him like that when you knew he was going to pull the trigger was a brave thing to do.’

‘You know what it’s like.

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