‘Oh God, is it that obvious?’

He saw relief on her face, but the fear still sat heavily in her eyes. She was scared of something.

‘Bloody hell, that’s them!’ she gasped. ‘Turn around!’

‘What? Wait.’ He hurried after her in the direction they’d come from. When he glanced back over his shoulder, two men were standing on the corner, talking to each other. They didn’t look suspicious to him, but he also didn’t recognise them.

‘Tilly!’ He jogged to catch up with her and grabbed her arm. ‘Slow down!’

‘Not here.’ She looked terrified now.

‘Where then? What about your room?’

‘Will you go and get my stuff? I can’t go back there. Please!’ She was crying now.

‘Come on, I’ll take you to the office and then I’ll come back and collect your stuff.’

‘Oh shit, my computer’s in there. I need to get it.’

They looked back. The men had gone. Graeme put an arm round her, and they turned and headed in the direction of her accommodation. When they got there, he told her to wait while he went to her room.

‘Be careful!’

‘You can explain everything to me when I come back. Go into the shop; there’s CCTV in there. If you’re really sure that somebody’s out to hurt you, that’s the best place for you to be.’

She did as she was told and walked towards the small convenience store. Graeme went up the stone steps outside the B&B and up to her room, but stopped when he found the door open. He peered around it, and only when he was satisfied that no one was in there did he go in.

The place had been turned over. He searched for her laptop but couldn’t find it. Then it hit him: whoever had done this could now be searching for Tilly herself. He sprinted back to the shop and was relieved to find her peering at the canned goods aisle. She saw that he was empty-handed, but before she could question him, he took her by the arm and led her out of the shop.

‘You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, Tilly Knight. I’ve got a place out of town, I’ll take you there.’

Chapter 33

The animal had rotted pretty well. The police tape kept onlookers away but it wasn’t a dead body, just a monkey, so the crowds hadn’t lasted long. News of the find, in the Regent’s Canal, near Bow, had got back to Kelly and Matt, and it had been identified as a cynomolgus primate. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out where it might have come from. The poor thing was being autopsied by a vet. Toxicology and histology might indicate what the scientists were working on when the animal had lived.