Sparkhill, just north of her parents’ in Hall Green, was almost entirely Asian, which was why Luke, the bigot, had reflexively chosen it for his scroungers. The shops and restaurants on Stratford Road were a mix of Balti houses and halal butchers, travel agencies and bakeries, the windows of the clothing stores full of salwar kameez and Pakistani suits in jewel-box colours. Maggie turned off by a Sikh temple Robin didn’t remember having seen before. Three storeys high with reflective windows trimmed with blue, it looked more like a call centre than a place of worship. Its red brick was the only thing it had in common with the rest of the street, a shabby collection of Victorian terraced workers’ cottages.

Stratford Road had been buzzing but just a few hundred yards off the main drag, the pavement was deserted bar a single elderly woman wearing an anorak over her sari. The houses had a dormant air, the only indication that anyone in them was awake – or even alive – the flicker of television through a ground-floor window.

Maggie brushed pastry flakes off her trousers. ‘Right. Time to come clean.’

‘About what?’

She laughed. ‘Your face! Relax, will you, I mean me, not you. There’s something I haven’t told you about the job.’

‘What?’

‘Obviously I trust you, it wasn’t that, but I’ve always worked strictly need-to-know on this side of things and because this is probably short-term, you and me, I didn’t know if it’d come up. Also, the fraud’s eighty-five, ninety per cent of my work, so you had to be all right with that. I mean, obviously you’re not going to be thrilled, are you, going from Homicide Command to hanging round Wickes’ car park waiting for scumbags. They’re hardly criminal masterminds, Barry Perkins and his ilk.’

‘Maggie. You know I’d be buggered without this. Without you having offered me a job.’ It wasn’t just the money, she thought; if she’d had to spend another day without doing something, belonging to the world of people who had somewhere to be, work to do, she might actually have gone insane.

‘Oh, stop, I don’t need gratitude.’ Maggie pointed at the bag at Robin’s feet. ‘Pass me those, will you?’ She took the pack of iced buns and pulled one out. The floor heaters had loosened the slab of icing, which slipped sideways across the top like an ill-fitting toupee. Her mouth encompassed the thing without it even touching her lipstick.