She didn’t move. She waited until she heard the door clang shut, and then she opened her eyes, glad to be by herself again. She couldn’t help feeling like she had won something. It was a small victory, but it was a victory nonetheless. She spat the blood out of her mouth. She could feel the throb of her eye as it started to close, and the stinging from the cut on her lip. She tried to pull herself up into a sitting position, but she couldn’t manage it. She welcomed the pain from her face; the fresh hurt took her mind off her other ills. She lay there, unable to move her body any more, praying to God for sleep to take her. While she was asleep she couldn’t feel pain, she wasn’t reminded of the state she was in, or the fact she was going to die chained to a bed. She couldn’t think about how she had neglected her little son, or how she had wasted her young life, and all because she had seen the dark side of her parents’ lives. Jake had been a constant reminder of her mistakes – she had always seen him as a symbol of her stupidity. Now, after this, she would give anything to turn back the clock, and do everything right – do what her father had urged her to do from the very beginning: stand up and face her responsibilities. She had fought him every step of the way and now it seemed so fucking futile. She had lain here and thought it over in depth, and accepted that she had not hurt anyone except herself.

She looked up at the ceiling. Her tears were rolling down her face – she could feel them dripping into her ears, and she didn’t even wipe them away.

Chapter One Hundred and Thirty-Three

Chapter One Hundred
and Thirty-Three

‘Right then, people.’ Arthur Hellmann was oblivious to most of what had been going on around him; that was his biggest failing as a human being, and his biggest asset as a computer whiz. ‘From what I can work out, the person you’re looking for is located within a one-quarter mile radius. He is in Essex, within two miles of Romford. The phone itself is registered to someone called Malcolm Briers, whose address, believe it or not, is within two miles of Romford. The address is White Farm on the Rainham Road. It was a clever fucking scam, I tell you. If I didn’t have access to every fucking mobile number on the planet, we would never have located the fucker. He was well hidden. And if he had not left his phone on, I would never have found the bastard.’