The girl had stopped screaming, but tears were still streaming down her face, and she cowered like a terrified puppy when the woman stared at her and asked what had happened.

‘He – he say he not w-want sex,’ she stammered. ‘And he was ask about men who bring us here.’

‘Is that right?’ The woman narrowed her eyes and glared at Evan.

Guessing that he was about to be ejected, he held up his hands, and said, ‘It’s OK, I’m leaving.’

Before he could move, the bruiser lunged at him and hurled him across the room, and stars exploded behind his eyes when his head smashed into the wall. The last thing he heard before blacking out was a scream, followed by the whip-crack of a slap.

Big Shirl gazed down at the man on the floor and prodded him with the toe of her boot. Getting no response, she jerked her head at the bouncer, saying: ‘Put him away.’

The bouncer nodded and, scooping Evan up off the floor as if he weighed nothing, slung him over his shoulder and carried him out onto the landing. When he’d gone, Big Shirl turned back to the now-sobbing but no-longer-screaming girl, and demanded to know exactly what had happened.

When the girl had told her everything, Big Shirl locked her in the room and made her way downstairs, tapping a number into her mobile phone as she went.

‘It’s me,’ she said when her call was answered. ‘We’ve got a problem. You’d best get your arse back here ASAP!’

30

On a dark backstreet on the outskirts of the city centre, Nick shoved his phone into his pocket and looked around for Gaz. They had driven over here to collect money from the street girls after dropping the foreign ones off at the brothel, and he’d been about to punish one of the junkie slags for trying to conceal a twenty in her shoe when Big Shirl’s call came through. The cagey bitch had refused to tell him anything over the phone, but it sounded urgent, so he reluctantly let the tart off with a warning and summonsed Gaz with a shrill whistle before jogging back to the van.

Arriving at the house ten minutes later to find all the security gates locked, Nick hammered on the metal bars with his fist until Big Shirl opened up. Gesturing for him and Gaz to come inside, she quickly relocked the gate and then locked and bolted the door.

‘What’s happened?’ Nick asked, wondering if one of the girls had OD’d.

‘A bloke turned up and picked one of the new ones,’ Big Shirl explained over her shoulder as she walked down the hallway and slotted a key from the huge bunch she was carrying into the lock of an internal door. ‘Only he tells her he don’t wanna fuck, he wants to talk.’