And then another man emerged, older this time. He too looked at the blue lights of the law, didn’t fancy them much, and took off exactly in the opposite direction. They were all heading for the blackness that surrounded this final stretch of road.

And then the doors of the lorry were flung wide open and more were pouring out, perhaps a dozen of them, mostly men but also a couple of women in headscarves.

They all looked at the blue lights and legged it.

I approached the lorry just as the traffic began to move. The emergency services must have opened up a lane. Vehicles began to crawl away, then quickly picked up speed. Including the lorry. I bounced along the central reservation, level with the rear doors of the lorry, flapping wildly as it picked up speed. Men continued leaping out of the back and taking off into the black fields. One of them narrowly avoided a Nissan Micra doing thirty.

‘I’ve got them,’ Billy said, the passenger door already open, and I touched the brakes as he jumped out, furious horns of accelerating cars blaring all around him as he fell into the oncoming traffic.

I could see the stowaways legging it into the fields. Billy body-swerved a couple of accelerating cars and went after them. I saw him launch a rugby tackle at the nearest man and bring him down.

Then I put my foot down, swerving back on to the motorway, the lorry directly ahead.

It was pulling away from me. The emergency services had all three lanes open now and as I sped past their blue and red lights for the second time, this time in the opposite direction, I again caught a glimpse of the two heaps of smashed metal, glass and rubber, and the strained faces of the emergency service teams.

The lorry was getting further away from me.

So I put on my blues and twos. The lights pulsated under the BMW grille and the two-tone siren split the night.

The lorry immediately began to slow. It takes a lot of nerve to make a dash from the blues and twos. And the driver of the lorry didn’t have that kind of nerve.

He indicated, slowed down and pulled over to the hard shoulder. I parked just ahead of him, the X5’s rear bumper right up against his grille just in case he had a change of mind.

I walked back to the lorry, the motorway traffic hurtling past. I could not see Billy but figures were loping desperately across the fields, lit by moonlight.

By the time I reached the driver’s cab he had the window down and an ingratiating smile plastered on his round, rosy face. He looked like a man who had spent a lifetime sitting down.