According to gangland hearsay, this was how they liked to dispose of their enemies – by putting them in a car which then went into a giant industrial baling press to be crushed into a compacted cube of scrap metal. That was to be her fate.

She listened to them arguing about who was going to do it, and as she lay there in the boot of the car, she knew that she had an ever-decreasing window in which to try and make her escape.

Eventually one of them was nominated to drive the forklift truck and take her to the crusher. She squirmed around desperately in the cramped blackness, probing in vain for some means of escape. A short while later there was a loud crunching sound as the prongs of the forklift truck smashed through the side windows of the car. She felt the car being lifted up and carried along.

Summoning up her last reserves of energy, she pushed with all her might at the lid of the boot… but it was locked shut. Then she remembered that, with some cars like this, it was possible to push down the back seats in order to create extra storage room. So she turned her attention to the back seats, feeling for some kind of lever or latch that would push them down. But she couldn’t find anything. In the end, brute force sufficed. She dug down deep inside herself to find the strength in her weakened legs. Squeezing herself into a position of maximum leverage, she repeatedly slammed her feet into the back seats until something finally snapped and one of them went down.

Peering through the gap, she could make out the stacks of rusted cars passing by as they trundled through the scrapyard on their way to the crusher. Eventually they came to a halt, and with a jerk and a crash, the car was dropped to the ground next to the crusher.

From her vantage point in the boot, Bailey could just about see what it looked like – a giant metal box-shaped contraption which had a booth at one end with a huge hydraulic arm with pincers that would pick the car up and drop it into the opening at the top.

She pushed her head out a little further and saw that the forklift truck driver had parked the truck and was now walking over to the crusher. By the looks of it, fortunately, he was now the only person in the vicinity. This was her only chance.

She watched him begin to climb up the metal ladder into the crusher’s control booth. As he was doing so, while his back was turned, she furiously squirmed out of the boot, into the back of the car and then wormed her way out of one of the broken passenger windows. She rolled away through the mud and the puddles, scrambling for cover beneath a towering stack of rusty cars.

From her concealed position, she watched as he operated the hydraulic arm, lowering the metal pincers onto the car’s roof, clamping them shut with a metallic crunch, lifting it up and then dropping it into the crusher. She saw him smiling to himself as he methodically worked the levers in the control booth, the crusher wheezing and groaning as it chomped the car one way and then the other with the deafening sound of rending metal.