Ben walked over to the police car, stepping over the unresponsive PC Brown. He opened up the driver’s side and groped about under the steering wheel until he found the bonnet release latch, tugged it and heard the pop of the lid. Then he walked over to the edge of the road, where Brown’s torch lay. He picked it up. A solid fistful of black metal tube, about a foot and a half long. Just the job, for what he had in mind. He carried the torch over to the car and tucked it between his knees while he lifted the bonnet lid the rest of the way up and held it in place with its support strut. Once that was done he snatched the torch back out from between his knees, turned it on and shone the strong beam around the engine compartment in search of the battery.

Ben was no kind of an expert car mechanic, and had pretty much forgotten everything of the army courses he’d been made to take back in the day, the aim of which was to teach Special Forces operatives how to reactivate derelict old motors they might need for transport deep behind enemy lines, when things got rough. Or how to sabotage working vehicles in order to compromise enemy movements, which was more to the point in this instance. But even a nonmechanic like him knew what a battery looked like. A square plastic box with two metal terminals about twelve inches apart, positive and negative. Brimming with volatile chemicals and large amounts of latent electrical energy that could all too easily be abused, for destructive purposes. That was one army course Ben remembered well.

He yanked the red and black plastic covers off the battery terminals. Laid the metal torch sideways across the battery so that it was touching both contacts, shorting out the battery. Sparks fizzed, and kept fizzing. The current flowing across the shorted terminals would generate a lot of heat very quickly. Ben closed the bonnet lid, jamming the torch in place. As he turned and started walking back towards Grace and the Mercedes, thick acrid smoke was already billowing out from under the bonnet, followed seconds later by the first flash of flame. It wouldn’t be long before the patrol car caught fire. He grabbed PC Brown by the ankles and dragged him a few feet further from the vehicle, so he wouldn’t burn to death. Sometimes you needed to show consideration for your enemies.

Grace watched the flames pouring and curling out from under the patrol car’s bonnet with her hands on her hips and a raised eyebrow. ‘Couldn’t you just have slashed the tyres or something?’

‘It’s a chilly night,’ Ben said. ‘We wouldn’t want your police colleagues to get hypothermia.’

‘Not to mention that you have a flair for the dramatic. Admit it.’