Hiding behind the carefully constructed artifice of respectable citizen, family man, champion of the underprivileged and charitable benefactor, Lucky Mickey was aware, better than anyone, what an utterly ruthless man Gready was. The invisible mastermind behind a string of children and vulnerable young adults, many with mental health issues, coerced through drug addiction – engineered by him – into acting as his dispensable foot soldiers. He had cuckoos in towns across the South Coast – addicts forced by the threat of withdrawal of their drugs into using their residences to deal from. Mickey knew this because he ran the whole operation on behalf of Terry.

Just as Gready had used a bent copper in his pay to get him acquitted eighteen years ago – and to ensure his ongoing loyalty – perhaps the solicitor had his eyes and ears throughout the police and prison system today. Had word got back to Gready that he had been in discussions about grassing him up to further reduce his own sentence?

Although he’d been using a different brief to broker this, had he or someone else told Fox? They were both from the same firm, after all.

By the time he was back in his cell, which stank of shit, and the door had banged shut behind him, he had convinced himself.

‘Sorry,’ his cellmate said, from the other side of the plastic curtain which screened off the toilet. ‘Got the runs.’

But Starr barely heard him. He perched back down on his bunk. Terence fucking Gready. There was no one else. He’d seen it in the twitch of Fox’s eyebrow. He was certain.

And he knew the one thing he could do to take revenge.

43

Saturday 11 May

Meg stood in the kitchen, staring at the photograph, still holding the planted phone. Laura and Cassie.

ECUADOR IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WORLD

At the far end of the world, it seemed at this moment.

She was shaking. Shivering. The room felt icy as if a ghost had entered. Rain tapped hard on the windows and the glass of the conservatory off the kitchen. Her eyes darted around.

Someone had been in here. They might come back at any time. She hurried, stumbling up the stairs and into her den. Then she googled ‘Hotels in Brighton and Hove’.

Twenty minutes later, having fed the animals, Meg left the house with a few things in an overnight bag, including her own phone and the new phone, and checked into a budget hotel she had found just off the seafront, a mile from her house. The interior was as gloomy as the exterior was drab, the room furnished with a small double bed, a side table, an ancient television, a clock radio and a Corby trouser press, and there was barely enough light from the feeble bulbs to be able to read.