They approached the bottleneck and Adrian was forced to slow the car down. The cars in front all started to pull away from the centre of the road as the siren approached. He drove the car through the centre and continued to gain ground on Pike, wherever he was. The traffic after the Amesbury bypass was steady and moving at a decent pace; they were gaining ground.

‘We’re only a few miles from the roadblock now. He is somewhere between there and here,’ Imogen said.

Adrian put his foot down again. The stretch of road in front of them was long and tilted upwards and to the right. He could see a long way ahead. His eyes narrowed on the cars up in the distance. At some point, their flashing lights would come into view of Pike’s car and he would make a move for it. Natural instinct when you are being chased. As Adrian weaved in and out of the traffic, he realised he had been almost completely ignoring Imogen. He had to admit to himself that he was feeling guilty for lying to her; he didn’t need a police-mandated shrink to tell him that. He didn’t see that he had any choice though. The selfish thing would be to tell her the truth, so they could share the burden, but he wasn’t going to be selfish, he was going to take this on himself.

‘Look!’ Imogen said, pointing at a car a mile or so ahead of them; it was speeding up.

It was entirely possible, of course, that it was some other shady character on the run from the law, but it was much more likely that it was Marcus Pike, finally feeling the noose closing around his throat.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Adrian muttered under his breath to no one but himself.

Pike’s car disappeared around the bend up ahead and Adrian accelerated to catch it, his heartbeat thrumming in his chest. He was almost there, he had almost got him. They were closing in on Pike and it wasn’t far until the roadblock. They were coming up to Andover. As Adrian pushed forward, he saw smoke up ahead. A car – Pike’s no doubt – had tried to swing round on the slip road onto Weyhill and slammed into another car coming the other way, the right way. Adrian pulled up to the car and they both saw the driver’s side was open. On the passenger side, a woman who must be Kimiko Pike was groaning, bloodied head against the window, the airbag deployed in front of her.

‘I’ll see to her. You see if you can find Pike; he must be on foot somewhere. He’s clearly not up this slip road.’ Imogen got out of the car and slammed the door. Was she annoyed with him?

‘He went that way!’ a man in a car further back called out. He pointed back towards the A303.

Marcus Pike was running, to where Adrian didn’t know. Starting the car again, Adrian drove forward the two hundred feet Pike had travelled and stopped the car. He jumped out. Pike was an old man and so he was never going to outrun a car. As Adrian rushed forward, Pike climbed a brick wall. Adrian realised that they were on top of a railway bridge that ran over the London-bound train tracks.