“I make a phone call, we wait for a little while and then it’s ‘Saturday night and I ain’t got no body’ time, ladies,” Danny said sarcastically. He reached into the hip pocket of his fashionably crumpled linen trousers and pulled out a slim mobile, flipped it open and keyed in a number with his thumb. It looked like it wasn’t the first time he’d used the technique. Lindsay wondered if he made a habit of holding a gun on people while he phoned his friends. Was this how it had been for Penny, the gunpoint hostage, then the setting up of the scene for murder made to look like accident?

A moment for the phone to connect, then Danny spoke, never taking his eyes off them. “It’s Danny. I’ve got a waste disposal problem at the office. Two loads. I want a team round, soon as . . . Yeah, it’ll have to be moved before it can be dealt with . . . See you.” He closed the phone, a smile thin as a filleting knife slicing across his face. “Sorted,” he said contemptuously.

“Let’s hope you make a better job of us than you did of Penny,” Lindsay said. In some strange way, hearing Danny transmit the order for her death had lifted the fear. It was inevitable now, there was nothing left to lose. It wouldn’t take long for the hired guns to arrive and once they were there she and Sophie were good as dead. If there was ever going to be any hope, it was now.

“Oh, I think that went off all right, actually,” he drawled, his urbanity restored now he was convinced everything was under control.

“The freak accident line didn’t hold for long, did it?”

A quick, careless shrug of the eyebrows. “Accident, murder, what does it matter what the filth think? I could have had her shot or stabbed or strangled or battered to death. I know specialists, men who know what they’re about. Professionals. But I thought, since it was costing me, I might as well get an earner out of it. So I took one of my boys along to her flat. She thought I’d come to talk terms. She never knew what hit her. But I had some great publicity for the new book. Which I figured she owed me, since I wasn’t going to be getting any more books from her.” As he preened himself, his wariness was slowly receding, forced back by a tide of complacency. Lindsay wasn’t the only one to notice it.

“It was a clever idea,” Sophie said. “Utilitarian.”

“I hate waste,” he said. “But I can’t think of any way of making a shilling out of you two. Shame, really.”

“Another reason to avoid killing us,” Sophie said, still managing to sound as calm as a midsummer pond.