The crash barrier ended, and he bullocked back into the traffic, pulling a handbrake-turn as the lights switched to green, smearing rubber about thirty yards behind him as he raced up Danson Road. In her wing mirror, Lucy saw another flashing blue light encroaching from behind. It looked like another divisional patrol. Up ahead, the Hyundai made an unexpected move, slicing sharp left, through an open gateway onto the slip road leading into the Tesco Superstore car park.

They both instantly knew what this meant.

It was midday, so the place would be busy; there’d be lines and lines of cars and lots of shoppers with trollies, which had catastrophic potential. But the reason the fugitives had taken this desperate action became clear a second later, when a divisional police van appeared from the opposite direction, reaching the Superstore entrance before Lucy and Harry did and swinging onto the slip road.

This was a slower, clumsier vehicle than Harry’s BMW.

‘Out the fucking way!’ Harry bellowed as they trundled behind it.

When they entered the car park proper, the van went left, Lucy and Harry going right, accelerating past the entrances to the aisles lying between the rows of parked cars.

‘Tesco Superstore, off Danson Road,’ Lucy yelled into her radio. ‘As much support as you can give us, please. We might get the bastards boxed in. And don’t forget that Trojan!’

If the three suspects were armed, they hadn’t pegged any shots at the pursuing cops yet, but Lucy didn’t expect that they would unless they found it essential. She’d already identified Royton as a Crew soldier; highly likely the other two were similarly employed, which meant that they were professionals and had been sent to O’Halloran’s to do a specific job, not to indulge in freewheeling criminality. Shooting at the police would be the last thing their paymasters would want. The assault on Harry’s windscreen had probably been as much about trying to slow their pursuers down as wanton vandalism.

Harry banged his foot to the floor as they blasted up the next aisle. The Hyundai was at the far end, in front of the supermarket’s paved forecourt, where shoppers were still milling about, unaware of the encroaching police activity. Its driver spotted Harry in his rear-view mirror and pulled another left, before squealing to a halt and hitting reverse. A second divisional police car, an Astra this time, had also entered the car park, racing up the exit road the hoodlums had thought they were going to use to escape, cutting them off.

‘Got ’em!’ Harry hollered.

But of course, it was never going to be that easy.