If the matron was offended by Knox’s use of the word proper, she didn’t show it. And, as her hospital’s only doctor was out on house calls tending to a minor spring flu outbreak, there wasn’t anything she or her nurses could do other than patch Williams up and send him on his way with cleaned and dressed wounds and some very strong painkillers.

‘Don’t dilly-dally,’ the matron told Knox as he transferred Laing back into the passenger seat of the Jaguar, which was stained from his blood. ‘He needs properly stitching up, and a transfusion.’

‘I’ll make sure he gets both,’ Knox replied as he turned over the engine and pulled away from the hospital.

Knox drove them through the High Weald, along more narrow roads that wound through woods and fields and eventually connected to an A road that would take them back into London.

Aside from his occasional shrieks and groans, Laing had been silent since he’d been shot. Knox now decided this was the result of obstinacy rather than shock, and that it was time to shake him out of it.

‘How old are you?’ he asked.

Knox already knew the answer to his question, but he thought it might be a good way to break the ice that had formed between him and his second passenger of the day.

‘Twenty-six,’ Laing answered as he watched the blurred verges go by faster and faster as Knox sped them back to the city.

‘Not many people around that age.’

‘No.’

Knox hadn’t expected him to suddenly open up and tell him his life story, or even thank him for taking him to the hospital and probably saving his life, but he wanted a bit more from Laing than monosyllabic answers.

‘I would have made the same call,’ Knox said. ‘In Canada.’

‘What?’ Laing said, surprise replacing petulance.

‘I’m serious. I read your report and my instincts told me to do exactly what you’d done as well.’

‘But you didn’t. I did, and I was wrong.’

‘I’ve been wrong plenty of times myself. The only difference between the two of us is that I’ve made enough good bets to outweigh my bad ones.’

Laing moved his bandaged leg, shifting the weight that had crept onto it. ‘Did any of them get you shot?’

‘One did, actually,’ Knox said, unable to stop a wry smile spreading across his face. ‘As it happens, the last time I encountered Abey Bennett. Welcome to the club.’

Laing’s surprise turned to shock. ‘That was Abey Bennett?’