“Now what?” asked the police sergeant.
“Now you stand here and stop cars coming south down this road. Ask the drivers if they have been on the road from as far north as Honington. If they joined this road south of Ixworth junction, or at it, let ’em go. Tell me when you get the first one to have come through the demonstration
Then Preston walked down to the A45 and looked to the right, toward Bury St. Edmunds. “Come on, Harry. Come on.”
The cars coming south stopped for the police uniform in their path, but all averred that they had joined the road south of the antinuclear demonstration. Twenty minutes later, Preston saw the Thetford motorcycle patrolman, siren wailing to clear a path, racing toward him, followed by the two watcher cars. They all screeched to a halt at the entrance to the A1088. The policeman raised his visor.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, sir. I don’t reckon that journey’s ever been done faster. There’s going to be questions.”
Preston thanked him and ordered both his cars a few yards up the narrow secondary road. He pointed to a grassy bank. “Joe, ram it.”
“Do what?”
“Ram it. Not hard enough to wreck the car. Just make it look good.”
The two policemen stared in amazement as Joe forced his car into the bank by the road. The car’s rear end stuck out, blocking half the freeway.
Preston directed the other car to move fifteen yards farther up. “Okay, out,” he ordered the driver. “Come on, lads, all together, now. Heave it onto its side.”
It took seven shoves before the MI5 car rolled over. Taking a rock from the hedgerow, Preston smashed a side window on Joe’s car, scooped up handfuls of the crystalline fragments, and scattered them across the road.
“Ginger, lie on the road, here, near Joe’s car. Barney, get a blanket from the trunk and put it over him. Right over. Face and all. Okay, the rest of you, over the hedge, and stay out of sight.”
Preston beckoned the two policemen to him. “Sergeant, there’s been a nasty pileup. I want you to stand by the body and direct the traffic past it. Officer, park your bike, walk up the road, and slow down oncoming traffic as it approaches.”
The two policemen had orders from Ipswich and Norwich, respectively. Cooperate with the men from London. Even if they are maniacs.
Preston sat at the base of the grassy bank, a handkerchief pressed to his face as if to stanch blood from a broken nose.
There is nothing like a body by the roadside to slow down drivers, or cause them to stare through the side window as they crawl past. Preston had made sure Ginger’s “body” was on the driver’s side for cars coming south down the A1088.
Major Valeri Petrofsky was in the seventeenth car. Like the others before it, the modest family hatchback slowed to the patrolman’s flapping hand, then crawled past the crash scene. On the grassy bank, eyes half-closed, the face in the photo in his pocket imprinted on his mind, Preston looked across at the Russian twelve feet away as his sedan swerved slowly past the two cars that almost blocked the road.
From the corner of his eye Preston watched the little hatchback turn left onto the A45, pause for a break in the traffic, and pull into the Ipswich-bound stream. Then he was up and running.
The two drivers and two watchers came back over the hedge at his call. An amazed motorist who was just slowing down saw the “body” leap off the ground and help the others to pull the over-turned car back onto its four wheels, where it landed with a crunch.
Joe climbed behind the wheel of his own car and backed it out of the bank. Barney wiped mud and grass off its headlights before climbing in. Harry Burkinshaw took not one but three strong mints and popped the lot.
Preston approached the motorcycle patrolman. “You’d better get back to Thetford, and many, many thanks for all your help.” To the sergeant on foot he said, “I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you here. Your uniform’s too noticeable for you to come with us. But many thanks for your help.” Then the two MI5 cars swept away toward the A45 and turned left toward Ipswich.
The bewildered motorist who had seen it all asked the abandoned sergeant, “Are they making a film for the telly?”
“I shouldn’t be at all bloody surprised,” said the sergeant. “By the way, sir, can you give me a lift into Ipswich?”
The commercial and commuter traffic into Ipswich was dense, and became thicker as they approached the town. It provided good cover for the two watcher cars, which constantly shifted position so they could alternately keep the hatchback in view.
They came into town past Whitton, but short of the town center the small car up ahead took a right into Chevallier Street and round the ring to the Handford Bridge, where it crossed the River Orwell. South of the river the quarry followed the Ranelagh Road and then took another right.
“He’s heading out of town again,” said Joe, holding station five cars behind the suspect. They were entering Belstead Road, which leaves Ipswich heading south.
Quite suddenly the hatchback pulled to the left and entered a small housing development.
“Steady,” Preston warned Joe, “he mustn’t see us now.”
He told the second car to stay at the junction of the access road and Belstead, in case the quarry came around in a circle and back out again. Joe cruised slowly into the complex of seven cul-de-sacs that make up The Hayes. They went past the entrance to Cherryhayes Close just in time to see the man they were tailing park in front of a small house halfway up the street. The man was now climbing out of his car. Preston ordered Joe to keep going until out of sight, then stop.
“Harry, give me your hat and see if there’s a Conservative rosette in the glove compartment.”