“All right, Dave. Pint?”

I get the drinks and let Dave talk about football while the envelope burns between us. He catches me looking.

“OK, mate, I can take a hint,” he says, “but first . . .” He rubs his fingers and thumb together a few times and I hand him the hundred quid.

“I’ll get the rest to you tomorrow.”

Dave looks at the notes in his hand, raises an eyebrow. “And there’s me thinking all you city lot were loaded.”

“I’ll get the rest to you, Dave, I promise.”

“To be honest, mate, I feel like I’m robbing you for the hundred, never mind two. Let’s call it quits.”

I nod dumbly. Acts of kindness always take me by surprise. Ruth would call me a cynic, say it’s the Londoner in me, but I prefer to be surprised by kindness rather than anticipate it.

“So, anyone in the records match the description I gave you?”

Dave’s stool wails beneath him as he leans across the table towards me and says, “Not exactly.”

“What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?”

“OK, so no one matches the description. No young man with a tattoo on his neck.”

My heart sinks. I realize how much I was hoping he’d find him. But Dave raises a finger.

“However,” he says, “one of my colleagues reminded me of the Craigs.”

Dave takes a pull on his pint, savoring the moment.

“The Craigs?”

Dave wipes a bit of foam from his top lip with the back of his meaty hand. “The Craig family have been known to Ashford police since well before my time. They’ve been petty criminals—shoplifting, that sort of thing—probably since shoplifting was invented. They travel around a bit, always keeping in the South West, mostly Cornwall but sometimes as far north as Taunton. It can be hard keeping tabs on where they’re living. They’ve given us the runaround a few times.”

“OK, so the guy with the tattoo is known to you, then? He’s one of these Craigs?”

“Not exactly, Jon. Stop rushing me.”

I feel my phone buzz in my pocket but it’s easy to ignore. The only important thing is happening right here, right now. Dave takes another lazy pull on his pint and slowly slides a thick finger under the flap on the envelope, pulls out a mugshot, and hands it to me. The photo is of a young man, wide-eyed but vacant-looking. He looks like he’s in his late twenties but could be older, his neck skinny and long as a cormorant’s, with a pronounced Adam’s apple and sharp cheekbones. His eyes are wide but full of regret, like a schoolboy after a telling-off.

“So he got the tattoo after this arrest?” I ask, bored by Dave moving so slowly, but he smiles at me and shakes his head.

“This is Anthony Craig, who’s been arrested by us twelve times since he was sixteen—drink, drugs, fighting. Arrested him myself once, found him a bit of a softie actually. That last time was for grievous bodily harm—beat some poor bloke to a pulp outside a pub. He pleaded guilty and got six months but was out in four.” Dave scrunches up his face before he glances over his shoulder, as though he thinks one of the old drunks propped up on the bar might be listening in, and says, “I don’t have a photo of Robert, or Robbie, Craig”—he pushes a finger into the bony chest of the kid in the photo—“Anthony Craig’s identical twin brother.”