He plucked contemptuously at his tie. ‘This clip-on tie, this polyester shirt… this uniform’s shit. Army kit’s much better quality.’

‘Why did you leave it then… the army?’

He paused for a few moments. ‘I was invalided out. I got injured.’

‘How?’

‘IED blast in Afghanistan.’

Improved Explosive Device. She’d heard the term on the news many times.

She looked him up and down. ‘You look fine to me.’

He pointed at his head. ‘I’ve got a metal plate in my skull.’

‘No shit.’ She peered at his head. ‘The surgeons did a good job. I can’t tell it’s there.’

He leant forward and pushed his sandy hair aside to reveal a long white surgical scar running around the right-hand side of his head.

‘It’s made of titanium,’ he said. ‘It’s moulded exactly to the same shape my head was before. It’s fitted on with four screws. They had to remove almost a quarter of my skull to let my brain recover from the injury. I spent the whole of 2014 in a medically induced coma in a military neuro-trauma unit in Plymouth while they fixed me up.’

‘Wow,’ she murmured. ‘It must be weird having that much metal in your head.’

‘I can sometimes pick up shortwave radio through it.’

‘Really?’

‘Nah,’ he smiled.

‘Does it hurt?’ she asked.

‘Occasionally. They got most of the shrapnel out, but there’s still a small piece lodged deep inside my brain. It would have been too risky to remove it so they left it in there.’

‘Any side effects?’

He smiled blankly at her.

Then something across the landing appeared to catch his attention. She followed his gaze. A female prison officer was standing there pointing at her watch. Dylan nodded to her, mouthed something and turned back to Bailey.

‘I’m due to be relieved so I can go on my lunch break. Have a good day now.’

He nodded politely to her, turned and walked off down the landing.

‘Bon appétit,’ she murmured to his departing back, thinking absently to herself that she kind of liked the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled. She tried to shake the thought away.

Following their exchange, she felt slightly frustrated at having been unable to properly fathom his capacity as the potential killer. He was just too unreadable. On the surface he seemed perfectly pleasant, but then there was that bit of shrapnel lodged in his brain, and who knew what strange and unpredictable effects that could have on someone’s behaviour? The upshot was that she couldn’t yet tell if she was on the right track with him or not, although there was nothing so far to make her explicitly doubt her theory either.

The key takeaway from their encounter, however, was the date.

2014.

As she walked back to her cell, she reflected on its significance. At the same time that the Hairdresser had been murdering prostitutes up in the Midlands, Dylan had been lying comatose in a military hospital in Plymouth.