For Kathy Gale with thanks for leading me, finally, in the right direction.
Lights glowed through the Yorkshire boarding of the big barn in front of them, gleaming on the cars, pickups and four-by-fours lined up on the wide expanse of the concrete cattle yard.
Detective Sergeant Pete Gayle, crouching in the shadows at the inner end of the short driveway that led to the yard, held up an open hand then closed all but one finger and waved towards the left. He held up the open hand again, then waved two fingers to the right. Eyes roaming the parked vehicles, he waited for the two flanking teams to report.
‘Bravo two, in position,’ came quietly through his earpiece..
‘Bravo three in position.’
‘Bravo one, received,’ he muttered into his radio. ‘Alpha. Sit rep?’
‘Give us forty seconds,’ DS Jim Hancock said quietly from the far side of the big barn, where he and his crew were approaching up an open field that sloped down steeply into the valley beyond.
‘Roger. Beta teams, close in.’ He raised himself up so he could see into the surrounding vehicles and began to move cautiously forward between them, his two PCs, Ben Myers and Jill Evans, pacing him on the other sides of the vehicles he was moving between.
Behind him, the two police Range Rovers he and his team had arrived in were parked nose to tail across the closed metal gates. There had been two heavily built men in waxed jackets and beanie hats guarding the gates, but they had been taken by surprise by another team emerging from a house across the road and arrested before they had a chance to warn the people in the barn.
Pete’s eyes were constantly on the move as he advanced slowly between the parked cars. Anyone who had stayed behind in one of them, or anyone stepping out of the barn, could raise the alarm in an instant, ruining the element of surprise they were relying on to minimise the possible response of the people inside.
He could hear the murmur of a crowd grow in volume. Male and female voices were raised in excitement. The barking of dogs cut abruptly through the noise. It turned quickly to growling and snarling as the enraged animals saw each other. Pete didn’t need to see what was going on in there. He could easily imagine it. Metal sheep hurdles locked together in the middle of the big space, people crowding around, excited, anticipation reaching a peak as the two dogs were led on short leashes from their cages. Muzzles removed, they had seen each other and reacted exactly as they had been raised to since they were pups.
Cash would be changing hands as bets were hurriedly placed before it was too late.
The excited shouting got louder as the hurdles were locked together, the two dogs held at opposite sides of the ring prior to being released.
Pete paused between two expensive four-by-fours in the front row of parked vehicles. He poked his head forward and peered left and right. His carefully raised hand was answered by others at either end of the row. He keyed the radio again.
‘Jim?’
‘In position.’
‘Roger.’
Inside, the two dogs were released. Their snarls changed tone as they met in the middle of the ring. The shouts from the onlookers reached a crescendo.
‘Go, go, go,’ Pete said into his radio, then ran for the big steel doors.
They were closed with a simple bolt that was accessed from inside and out through a square hole in the right-hand door. Pete flipped the handle and pulled it back, cracking the door open just enough. Ben and Jill preceded him through as the other two teams, having checked for possible exit points along the sides of the barn, closed in. Pete entered, followed by two more uniformed officers who had been chosen for their size. Looking past the crowd, he saw the door at the far side of the barn being closed behind Jim Hancock and his team.
They still hadn’t been spotted in the excitement of the crowd.
He raised an air horn in his right hand and pressed the button. A blast of noise erupted, instantly quelling the crowd, though the dogs were still snarling and yelping in the ring.
‘Police,’ Pete shouted. ‘Stay where you are. You’re under arrest.’
‘Back door,’ someone yelled in the crowd.
‘No, you don’t,’ Jim shouted.
‘Swamp them,’ another voice bellowed as people began running everywhere. A large part of the crowd came at Pete and his team. He snapped out his extendable baton just as a woman in a short black dress squealed and fell towards him, clearly pushed from behind. His instinct told him to save her, but training and practice stopped him. He stepped aside. She screamed, grabbing for his coat as she stumbled, falling, and the man behind her, dressed in a waxed jacket that looked brand new, tried to dodge past Pete on his other side. Pete lifted his baton slightly and pushed it forward between the man’s legs. He yelled as his own momentum took him down. With no time for niceties, people going every which way, Pete stamped on the man’s crotch and turned, baton raised.
‘Hold the doors,’ he shouted as his baton impacted with an older woman’s arm and chest, almost snatching it from his hand.
‘Whoah.’
He allowed the baton to swing and grabbed the back of her coat. She planted her front foot and spun towards him, fist swinging. Pete met her forearm with his baton, hearing the snap of bone, and she screamed, rage switching to agony on her weathered face. He used his foot to sweep her legs out from under her and she fell across the already downed man.
The girl in the short dress was scrabbling to rise at his other side. He swung the baton hard at the tendon just above her right knee. She screamed and fell flat on her face again. He used the baton to deaden her left arm as someone barrelled into him from the side. He tripped over the downed young woman, twisting as he fell and raising the baton. A heavy-set man in a leather jacket and jeans, head shaved but a bushy beard on his lower face and neck, was standing over him, legs spread, fist drawn back and about to swing.
From this angle, there was only one target. Pete raised the baton as hard as he could. The man’s eyes widened and he froze for a moment, then puked violently over Pete’s jacket and trousers. Pete sat up, the baton held two-handed now as he raised it like a bar, meeting the man’s throat and using it to push him across to the side, where he collapsed in a foetal position.
Another man tried to leap over Pete, but he reached up, catching his foot and using his whole torso to yank it backwards. The man yelled and came down hard on his face across the young woman’s back, pinning her to the swept concrete floor as Pete gained his feet.
A woman dodged around him and he glanced that way. Saw Jill, tiny though she was, extend her arm, catching the woman across the top of her chest with a forearm block that took her down as if she’d run into a steel bar. He heard the crack of her head hitting the concrete and hoped she wasn’t going to be seriously injured by the impact. It was her own fault, but it could ruin Jill’s career, justified or not.
He turned his head just in time. Two men were running at him, heads down, arms interlocked in a joint rugby tackle. There was nowhere to go, no time to step aside. He did the only thing he could: dove forward, going up and over them, hoping there would be something other than concrete to land on.
There wasn’t.
He twisted in the air, taking the impact on his shoulder. Even though he rolled into it, pain seared through the joint, spreading across his chest and back. Combined with the stench of sick on his clothes, it made his stomach heave, but he held it back and gained his feet again. A punch that had been aimed for his head caught him in the side instead and, despite the stab vest, agony lanced through him. He went to raise his baton, but his shoulder flashed agony. He bellowed, swapped the baton to his left hand and used the handle end as a ram, driving it sideways into his attacker’s