I took Precious’s hand. She stared at me as if noticing I was there for the first time. Her long slim body leaned into me as we followed the waiter to the room. There was a splash of red wine on the wedding dress.

‘Please, sir,’ she said. ‘I want to go home.’

The waiter opened the door and Precious lurched inside.

I followed her and somebody hit me from behind with a hammer. It cracked across the back of my neck, hard enough to buckle my legs with shock and pain but not accurate enough to put my lights out.

So they hit me again.

The hammer struck the back of my skull this time and my vision immediately exploded into a billion tiny lights. I was suddenly down on my knees without having any idea of how I got there, and the sickness that comes with excruciating pain was rising up inside me. When my vision cleared, I saw that I was in a room with a large shallow bath and a single bed. The bath was empty. Precious was on the bed, the wedding dress hiked up over her thighs.

And Troy was standing above me – Troy of Imagine, who I had last spoken to in the Grande-Synthe camp and who I had last seen stomping on the face of the young uniformed policeman during the riot outside West End Central.

His tattooed face split with a delighted grin.

‘Good evening, Constable,’ he said. ‘We’ve been expecting you.’

A CCTV camera fluttered its black-and-white images high on the wall behind him. I could see the Mercedes and the man with the iPad. I did not even need Bianca to betray me. They had seen me coming all the way.

‘Get his clothes off and hand me that hammer,’ Troy said.

30

The dreadlocked goon that I recalled from the Grande-Synthe camp tore off my clothes and rolled me into the shallow bath where I settled on my back, the pain in my skull radiating out through every limb in my body.

Without water, and with Troy’s grotesquely blackened face hovering above me, moving in and out of my blurred vision, the bath felt like a shallow grave.

Precious was moaning a request.

‘Please, sir,’ she said. ‘I want to go home now.’

Troy gestured at her, the hammer already in his hand.

‘Shut that bitch up while I do the pig,’ he said.

The goon moved towards Precious on the bed and after that she was silent. I closed my eyes and fought down the bile in my throat. When I opened my eyes, Troy was kneeling above me, perched on the edge of the shallow tub. Behind him, high on the wall, the CCTV revealed dark figures pouring into the lift to the penthouse.