Evan felt a fresh fire burn his cheeks as he looked at the girls. The two at the bar appeared to be a fair few years older than the others, and one was blonde, while the other was a red-head, so he dismissed them and turned his attention to the ones on the sofa. He’d hoped he might recognize the one he’d glimpsed through the van window the previous night, but they all had the same dark hair and olive complexions.

‘Come on, son, don’t stand there gawping all night,’ the woman said impatiently. ‘You’re not fuckin’ window shopping.’

‘Sorry,’ Evan muttered. ‘I’ll, um, take her.’ He nodded at one of the girls.

‘Up you get,’ the woman barked, kicking the girl’s foot when she didn’t immediately move. ‘And make sure you give him a good time for his money.’

Evan picked up the warning behind the words – and he guessed the girl did, too, because she was visibly trembling when she stood up. She raised her eyes briefly before quickly lowering them again, and he was surprised to see that they weren’t brown, as he’d expected, but light blue; the pupils two tiny pinpricks in a sea of ice. His gaze instinctively slid to the crook of her elbow, and his suspicions were confirmed when he saw faint puncture marks and bruising.

‘Summat wrong?’ the boss woman asked, narrowing her eyes when she saw what he was looking at.

Evan remembered why he was there, and shook his head. Seeming to buy it, the woman turned back to the girl, and said, ‘Room two. Half hour.’

Following the girl up a steep set of stairs and into a bedroom, Evan looked around in disgust when she closed the door behind them. The threadbare carpet showed no hint of its original colour beneath the grime of a thousand punter-footsteps, and the grubby bedding didn’t look as if it had seen the inside of a washing machine in decades. A lamp with a red chiffon scarf draped over it sat on the bedside table alongside a box containing tubes of KY Jelly, condoms, and antiseptic wipes. It was depressingly clinical, and he suspected that the metal bars barricading the window were designed to keep the girls in rather than intruders out.

Expressionless, her gaze on the floor, the girl sank down on the edge of the thin mattress and started unhooking her bra. Evan’s frown deepened. He enjoyed the female form as much as the next man, especially when it belonged to a girl as pretty as this one probably was when she wasn’t stoned out of her mind. But this wasn’t what he’d come for, so he held out his hand to stop her.

‘You’re all right, love; you don’t need to take it off. I only want to talk.’

The girl looked up, her hands still behind her back.

‘You no want sex?’