I walked over to where Chico had indicated and found Anton Valance behind one of the small ruined walls. He was still unconscious and was lying on his left side with his right leg pulled forward, as if Chico had placed him in the recovery position.

I’m not sure I’d have bothered.

He was still breathing, the air rasping in his throat, but I could see by the flashlight that some blood had oozed out of his right ear, a sure sign of major damage done within, quite likely a fractured skull. Chico must have hit him harder than I’d thought.

I felt in his jacket pocket for his mobile phone. I was sure I had seen him use fingerprint recognition to switch it on when he had called ‘the boys’ in the wooden building.

I lifted his right hand and placed his thumb on the ‘home’ button.

Try again, read the screen. Next, I used his right index finger and, as if by magic, the phone came alive.

I checked the list of calls made. The most recent was the one I was interested in.

Placing the phone on the ground and using the forefinger of my left hand, I typed in a short text and sent it to the same number: No longer needed. Go home.

I wouldn’t have been able to do that with a plastic hand, I thought. There would have been no conductivity between it and the touch screen.

While I had Valance’s phone unlocked, I also took the opportunity to select all his stored videos and delete them.

I had no real expectation that the videos of Marcus counting the money or Jimmy having sex with the girl in Liverpool weren’t also stored somewhere else, or that simply deleting them from the phone’s video library would mean they weren’t somehow still retrievable from the depths of its memory, but at least they wouldn’t be the first things the police would see.

I put the phone in my coat pocket, along with the Webley, and went back to where Chico was standing over Asquith, the large piece of stone from the castle wall now in his hands, as if he was willing the older man to move.

‘Valance needs an ambulance,’ I said. ‘I think you may have fractured his skull. Not that I care much. Have you got your phone? They took mine.’

To Asquith’s relief, Chico put the heavy stone down and then removed a mobile phone from his trouser pocket. He went to pass it to me.

‘Dial 999 for me, will you. I don’t think I can hold it and dial at the same time.’