Abbott tipped back his head, taking his eyes from the screen as he thought of the kids they’d saved last night. He wondered how many of them had gone through their own version of this particular scenario. He thought of The Freemasons Arms and how he’d left it standing for the simple reason that he wanted the cops to find evidence of abuse there, hoping that one of the kids would lead them to it.

Right now, though, he fervently wished he had burned it down to the ground.

He looked back at the screen. The woman had returned, smiling reassuringly at the boy, holding out a can of Fanta. Again, her lips were moving, trying to put his mind at rest, no doubt.

And then Abbott gasped, because for the first time he saw her face properly, and she was a lot younger than the woman he had met in Richmond, but it was still unmistakeably her.

It was Juliet Norton. Lady Norton.

Had he ever doubted that she was in it up to her eyeballs? Not really. But that was one thing. It was quite another to be confronted with the evidence, to see with his own eyes that any involvement she had was far from peripheral; that she did, as they say, get her hands dirty.

Worse was to come. The door opened and two men entered. One of them was a man he had last seen reduced to his constituent parts in a meat-grinding machine, Raymond Doyle, wearing a dressing gown and a smile, wiping his nose.

Behind him came another man that it took Abbott a second or so to recognise, until – of course – it was Charles Norton. Would he have been Sir Charles Norton then? Difficult to tell. The footage had to be around ten years old. Abbott’s next thought was to wonder who had set up the camera. And then he saw Ray Doyle’s eyes flick up, as though checking for it, which of course made perfect sense. Even if Norton had been plain old Charles back then, he was no doubt on the way up and Doyle had seen a means of making sure that his own fortunes were linked to Norton’s ascent. Chances are he had never needed to use his insurance. Norton’s loyalty had ensured that he had continued to live in the manner to which he had become accustomed. Possibly Doyle would have been reaching inside that safe soon, had Juliet not employed Abbott to take pre-emptive action on her behalf. She wanted Doyle out of the picture for the reasons she had told him at Richmond, but also because of what he knew about her and her husband.

What she hadn’t told Abbott was that if his brother Chris had lived and been delivered into the hands of Doyle then he might well have suffered the same fate as . . .

The kid in the video.