To anyone paying attention, they were just two ordinary people taking a cheap room for a few hours with no questions asked. No ID required. Luggage free. The mainstay of the motel business model.

For Dempsey and Grace, it offered exactly what they required. Privacy. A place to hide while they awaited Elizabeth Kirk’s call, away from prying eyes and possible identification.

Neither expected to be here for long.

Grace had been silent since they had stepped into the room almost twenty minutes earlier. Dempsey had made no effort to change that. After what they had just been through, he understood her need to regain her calm and to consider her next steps. Because now they were out of immediate danger, those steps would not necessarily mirror his own.

And so Dempsey had occupied himself in other ways, leaving Grace to her thoughts. To be ready to move as soon as the necessary arrangements were in place, there was work to be done.

The black leather jacket he had taken from The Stratford was dumped untidily on the room’s only bed. Without it, Dempsey’s torso was exposed, along with the burns that had sealed the two bullet wounds in his left shoulder.

The dank, mouldy motel bathroom had hardly been ideal sterile conditions for what had followed, but Dempsey had had no choice. They had stopped at a local pharmacy en route to Queens, where Grace had purchased toiletries, basic medical supplies, water, food and a few items of cheap clothing. Dempsey, the most likely of the pair to feature as ‘wanted’ on any televised news bulletin, had again remained in the car.

Once in the privacy of their room, and with Grace’s attention elsewhere, Dempsey had used the medical supplies to do what he could to clean his wounds and to calm the burns that had cauterised them. It was almost certainly not enough, he realised. But it would have to do. With that decision made, he went on to then bandage his shoulder.

The injury was beginning to be a problem. The range of movement in Dempsey’s left arm was severely impaired. He could lift it to a few inches below shoulder height through sheer force of will. But that movement was slow, his arm refused to go any further, and the pain involved in achieving even that made it next to useless.

To carry that injury with what was going to follow was far from ideal. But it was the reality Dempsey had to face, and it forced him to make a decision he did not like. He needed to fashion a sling.

First he pulled on the heavy, loose-fitting jeans and one of the cheap white T-shirts Grace had picked out. Then, using the remaining bandages from the medical kit, he made a field-style sling that freed his damaged left shoulder from the weight of its arm.

The whole exercise – cleaning and dressing his wounds, changing his clothes and finally bandaging his arm – took almost twenty minutes. Done, Dempsey was moving back from the bathroom and into the bedroom when Grace finally spoke.