Heading towards my car, I dig into my trouser pocket and press the car-key fob. Thankfully, there’s no need to take it out. I open the door with slow, steady movements – nothing rushed, nothing suspicious. Immediately locking the doors from the inside, I wait for a gap in the traffic to pull out. A sudden rap on my window makes me start. The tall brunette woman, with doll’s eyebrows and a vivid red-lipstick smile, is peering in at me. She indicates that I should lower the window.

‘Can I help you?’ I take a surreptitious glance in the driver’s mirror. There’s a bus behind me indicating that it’s about to pull into the kerb.

‘Could you wind down your window, please?’ the brunette says, one hand still inside her jacket. ‘You’ve got a lettuce leaf stuck to your arse.’

‘And you think it’s yours?’

A tap on the passenger window. The blond guy has joined her in flanking my car. He taps again on the window and points downwards. The bus pulls in, momentarily blocking the traffic. I floor it, wrenching the steering wheel round to dart out into the street. The woman beside my car leaps out of the way, only just in time. I see the two of them racing after me, arms outstretched, guns pointing in my direction.

A single shot shatters my back window and whizzes past my ear out of the front windscreen, leaving a hole with a spiderweb of cracks around it. Rude! The traffic light up ahead turns amber, then red. I’m practically standing on the accelerator now. My car roars over the junction just as the oncoming traffic starts moving. I hear the squeal of brakes and a colossal bang as one car rear-ends another, but I don’t look back. What the hell just happened? That was clumsy. I can’t believe I was amateur enough to let Eva’s minions almost get the drop on me. And, worse, they’d seen my face.

I must be losing my touch. Another reason to get the ransom money quickly and run. Proof positive that I’m getting too old for this shit. I’ll need to ditch the car and report it stolen. Damn shame. I like it. Time to regroup and do some fast thinking. First and foremost, I need to find out who it was in Ava’s nightclub who’d just gone to meet their maker. If it was Hedda, then I only have a couple of days to voluntarily vamoose. My to-do list for the next twenty-four hours has to be strictly priorities only.