She wasn’t happy with being slap bang in the middle of Stella’s rearview mirror, but she was torn between fear of losing her in unfamiliar streets and fear of being spotted as a tail. The decision was suddenly taken from her when a Porsche shrieked out of a side street, cutting in between her and Stella without even a wave of gratitude. “Pillock,” Lindsay muttered, but her heart wasn’t in it.

They carried on in the same direction, past streets she’d only ever heard of. Whitechapel Road from the Monopoly board. Cable Street, scene of the anti-Fascist riots of the thirties. Just when Lindsay was convinced the next junction must bring them hard up against the Thames, Stella swung left into a wide street. The Porsche roared off to the right, leaving Lindsay a gap to make up. As she turned, she saw the green car a few hundred yards down the road turning right into a narrow street. Swearing, Lindsay shot down to the turning and swung the car across the oncoming traffic in a blare of horns. She was in time to see Stella turn again. When she made it to the junction, Stella was gone, the green car somewhere in a maze of narrow streets. “Shit, shit, shit!” Lindsay yelled, smacking her hand hard against the steering wheel.

She pulled in to the curb while she considered. If Stella had spotted her and deliberately shaken her off, there was no chance of catching her now. She’d be back on the main road and miles away within minutes. But she’d shown no signs of trying to shake off pursuit, so the odds were that she’d turned off the arterial road because she was near her destination. Logically, Lindsay decided, if she drove around the nearby streets, she’d come upon the Fiat.

As she drove slowly through the twisting narrow corridors of Wapping, she remembered the one and only time she had been here before. It had been a Saturday night, so cold her breath had puffed in clouds before her. She’d been on foot, one of hundreds of journalists and print workers who had come to demonstrate against the mass sackings of their colleagues by Rupert Murdoch’s News International to make way for cheap new technology and the de-skilling of their craft. They’d come to protest but had ended up fleeing through the streets, driven ahead of mounted police gung-ho as Cossacks and with as much concern for those they pursued. The clatter of hoofs, the swish of police batons through the air, the screams of terror and the plumes of steamy breath from the horses’ nostrils were still lodged in Lindsay’s brain, erupting occasionally as nightmares. Somewhere in the mêlée, Lindsay had become separated from her lover, Cordelia. They hadn’t found each other until they’d both arrived home in the middle of the night. Terrified of losing each other in a more permanent way, they’d never gone back on that particular picket line.

Cruising that same patch in broad daylight was a different experience, even though the sun failed to penetrate as far as the pavement in quite a few streets. There was nothing threatening on this warm summer afternoon. Lindsay sighed. It was hard to imagine she was going to get instant access to the skeletons in Stella’s cupboard by driving round Wapping in the sun. About to give up, Lindsay made one last turn into a street that was more of an alley, curving like a scimitar and dead-ending by the ornamental canal. Tucked in a vanway between warehouses was the green Punto.