There was a copy of the Yorkshire Post on the counter. The Graphite Assassin took up the top half of the front page. He felt a strange flicker of disappointment to discover that his picture wasn’t on it; the Twitter revelations had come too late for the morning edition. On his phone, though, the Post’s website was full of him:

Yorks detective drinks as Graphite Assassin strikes for second time.

He decided to take a quick sounding of the vox populi. Holding his phone up close to his face, he squinted at the small picture of him and Chris smiling into the camera.

‘Crikey, it does look like me!’

The man next to him appeared to be only marginally interested.

‘The detective in this Assassin business,’ Joe explained. ‘People have been telling me all morning. I’m a dead-ringer.’

‘Coffee, is it?’ the woman asked Joe as she handed a large bread roll filled with bacon to the man in the suit.

‘Yes, black, please.’

The guy opened up his sandwich and squeezed so much ketchup onto it that the bacon disappeared from view.

‘He does it with a pencil!’ he said, grinning.

‘I think the second one was also bludgeoned with a hammer,’ Joe said, pretending to consult his phone to confirm the fact.

‘Leave him to it. Let’s have a couple more!’

‘You reckon?’

He shrugged, holding the sandwich up to his mouth.

‘Who gives a shit about scum like that? Good on him!’

There was a TV on the wall at the back of the café. The sound was muted, but Joe could see someone giving the weather forecast.

He looked at his watch. Good timing.

‘Would you mind turning that up for a minute, please?’

She glanced at the screen.

‘It’s gonna rain, love,’ she said, as she turned up the sound, then piled three large, grease-dripping rashers into a white tea cake and handed it to him.

The national news had just finished, and the BBC now switched to its regional bulletins. Look North’s lead story was the Graphite Assassin. A double image of Shaw and Beverage flashed onto the screen as the case was summarized in half a dozen sentences.

The sound of traffic made it difficult to hear what was being said, but all three of them watched footage of Rita speaking to the press. Then another face: Danny Cullen. He was exactly where Rita had stood, on the steps outside Kirklees HQ. He was wearing a dark blue blazer and an open-neck white shirt. And he was surrounded by supporters, all of them male.

‘Right according to plan,’ Joe muttered to himself.

He didn’t even bother listening to what the leader of the English Patriot League had to say. It didn’t matter. They’d got their publicity. And what was the phrase? The camera loved him. There was no denying it. Cullen looked the part: respectable, authoritative, intellectual even.