The first thing Jack did after getting up to speed with the Prowler case, was call a retired detective constable called Mike Haskin – the man who’d spent three weeks chasing down the Alley Burglar back in 1995, to tell him what he could remember . . .

*

After three weeks of sitting on gravelled rooftops and behind thorny bushes, DC Mike Haskin’s team was tired, cold, pissed off and the laughing stock of the station. But they followed him regardless, because they were certain that he was right.

Mike had returned to each of the burgled premises and interviewed the owners for himself, learning along the way that, as well as the twelve burglaries they knew about, another seventeen had gone unreported. This was down to the fact that this working-class community did not believe for one second that the police were capable of finding their own arse with both hands – let alone finding a burglar who had already evaded them for several months.

Tonight, Mike’s team were just forty-eight hours away from having the plug pulled on the investigation – something they would never live down. The Alley Burglar was now just two days away from getting a free pass by having his escapades scaled right down from a full-on surveillance op to a distant memory.

The target zone was in lockdown, with a covert officer on every possible ground exit. They knew the footprint of his target zone but had no intention of going in after him – his nickname of Alley Burglar was well-earned. The vast expanse of shops and residential properties gave him far too many unlit escape routes, places to hide and short-cuts to take.

It was the ‘rat in a maze’ principle – if you follow the suspect into the maze, you’ll get lost; so, you tactically cover all exits because, eventually, the suspect has to come out.

With rooftop vantage points and ground-level runners ready for their moment in the spotlight, Mike was confident this time they’d get their man. He had to be. He was running out of time.

Mike’s team were all using basic-issue radios, meaning that their communications were competing with every other officer’s on duty that night, and ‘radio silence’ was impossible. So, the volume was turned down on everyone’s handset until the second the chase was on. They needed to be invisible and silent.

The rooftop lookouts were so far away from background noise such as traffic and footfall that every crinkle of their jackets could be heard in the surrounding silence. This meant hours of sitting in exactly the same position in the hope that, when the time came, they’d still be able to move their legs and run.