They had both my hands and now there was a knife near to my face. The light caught it and I saw it was smeared with blood. I tried to calm my breathing. I couldn’t reach my phone or radio. Should I scream? They were nervous, jittery, probably not used to doing this kind of thing. The sort that might panic and actually stab me. I couldn’t risk screaming.

A pulse throbbed in my ear. ‘What do you want?’ I tried to keep my voice steady.

The one with the knife shifted round so he could see my face. I couldn’t see his, because of the balaclava. He was the most confident, the most intimidating. ‘We want to show you we’re serious,’ he said. ‘So you know what’ll happen if you let the Animal Vigilantes get away with what they did.’

I wrenched my hand, trying to scratch the gorilla that had hold of it so we’d have DNA, but he gripped tighter and the only bits I could reach were covered in leather gloves. The ringleader shifted the knife nearer to my neck.

‘This isn’t helping us find Violet,’ I said. ‘She may be alive and now we’re wasting resources on people like you.’ I wanted to say more, and with more colour, but the knife was too close. Whose blood was on it?

The fourth man walked over to the Moses basket and fished something out of it. A phone. He tapped the screen. Twisted it so I could see.

A video was playing.

I could hear the men breathing. A car door slammed in the distance. I wondered again if I should scream. But I daren’t take the risk of panicking them when I had a bloodstained knife hovering around my jugular.

The mobile phone was close to my face. I watched the video.

It showed a field at night, lit brightly by the moon. A pig – one of those short, fat ones whose bellies drag on the ground – was dozing outside in the warm night. A man was sneaking up behind it. The pig had heard him – I could see from the twitch of its ear – but it was trusting, and it didn’t move. The man lunged forward and grabbed it by a hind leg. It kicked out but he held fast. He was in the same black clothing and balaclava as these people. There was flash of metal from his knife – long and sharp, glinting in the pale light. I felt sick.

A squeal.

I couldn’t watch. It was the trust the pig had displayed that really did for me.

The blood on the knife at my throat made sense.

My breath came faster. ‘Did you do that?’

‘Yeah. And we’ll do more.’