With a flurry of legs and curses, a woman threw herself into the passenger seat and slammed the door. I almost stalled in my surprise. “Just keep fucking driving,” she yelled at me.

I obeyed, of course. It seemed the only sensible thing to do. If she was carrying a blade, I wasn’t going to win a close encounter

I pulled in to the curb and demanded, “What the hell is going on?”

She looked nervously behind us, then visibly relaxed. “I didn’t want anybody to see me talking to you. Kim would shop me soon as look at me.”

“OK,” I nodded. “So why were you so keen to talk to me?”

“Is it true, what you said back there? You’re not after Moira for anything?” There was a look in her pale blue eyes as if she desperately wanted to trust someone and wasn’t sure if I was the right person. Her skin looked muddy and dead, and there was a nest of pimples round her nose. She had the look of one of life’s professional victims.

“I’m not bringing her trouble,” I promised. “But I need to find her. If she tells me she doesn’t want to make contact with her friend, that’s fine by me.”

The woman, who in truth didn’t look much older than nineteen, nervously chewed a hangnail. I was beginning to wish she’d light a cigarette so I’d have an excuse to open the window—the smell of her cheap perfume was making me gag. As if reading my thoughts, she lit up and exhaled luxuriously, asking, “You’re not working for her pimp, then?”

“Absolutely not. Do you know where I can find her?” I wound down the window and gulped in fresh air as unobtrusively as possible.

The girl shook her head and her bleached blonde hair crackled like a forest fire. “Nobody’s seen her for about six months. She just disappeared. She was doin’ a lot of smack and she was out of it most of the time. She was workin’ for this Jamaican guy called Stick, and he was really pissed off with her ’cos she wasn’t workin’ half the time ’cos she was out of her head. Then one day she just wasn’t around no more. One of the girls asked Stick where she’d gone and he just smacked her and told her to keep her nose out.”

“Where would I find Stick?” I asked.

The girl shrugged. “Be down the snooker hall most afternoons. There or the video shop down Lumb Lane. But you don’t want to mess with Stick. He don’t take shit from nobody.”

“Thanks for the advice,” I said sincerely. “Why are you telling me all this?” I added, taking thirty pounds out of my wallet.