She tutted angrily and ended the call, then grabbed her sweater and left the flat to go to the corner shop for cigarettes. She had dreams of making a splash in cutting-edge investigative journalism. She envisaged awards, accolades, and documentary-makers begging her to sell her stories to them for million-pound productions snapped up by the big TV networks. At this rate, she’d remain a nobody, shopping at Lidl, wearing the same pair of trainers she’d had for three years and shaving her legs instead of waxing. It wasn’t just about the money, although she did wonder if she’d forever live in a rented two-bedroom flat in Leyton. She was thirty years old, and she had no idea what tomorrow would bring. It wasn’t supposed to be like this; she should have a husband and a couple of kids in a semi-detached house in Hampstead by now, but that life hadn’t come knocking.

The shop was a mere five-minute walk, as was the Tube station, which was why she’d chosen the flat. The traffic was incessant. It felt sometimes like she lived in the middle of a movie set and she was an extra; the frame went round on a loop of buses, cabs, four-by-fours, commuter shares and police vehicles choking the A12 artery into London, with an action hero about to pop up from behind a red bus, chasing a villain, frustrated by the thick jam of obstacles in his way. Leyton was like that, a concrete suburb dissected by an A road, and it saw its fair share of gun and knife crime. But Tilly kept herself to herself.

She was well known to the shop proprietor, and he reached for her brand of cigarettes automatically. She picked up some milk and a chocolate bar, paid and left.

Before George had gone off the radar, he’d given her a few nuggets of information, and it was her intention to pursue those today. She had nothing else in the pipeline for the time being. A women’s magazine had commissioned a piece on the spate of stabbings in the city, but they’d put a tragic spin on it from the point of view of one mother in particular who’d lost her son. It wasn’t a broadsheet, but it paid some bills.