He was the perfect fit: twenty-one, but already an experienced house-breaker, and well-known for employing innovative methods. But he was an opportunist thief too, content to trawl for likely victims among the depressed housing estates of his hometown, Crowley. If that wasn’t enough boxes ticked, he knew Hatchwood Green and its residents well, having a girlfriend, Janet O’Dowd (with whom he’d had a child), who lived there.

A visit to Burke’s own address that evening, a poky little flat on the Bullwood estate, which he shared with his alcoholic grandmother, Karla Jones, paid no dividends. Jones, a wrinkled, gap-toothed wreck of a woman, who looked much older than her sixty years, was having a bottle of gin for her tea, but had not been obstructive. Well-used to police attention, she’d given them permission to look around, even inside Burke’s bedroom, which had been unoccupied for quite some time. Karla Jones claimed that she hadn’t seen her grandson for several weeks and that, not only was she unconcerned by this, she was actually glad; apparently, he was ‘a thieving little shit’, who always helped himself to her booze when he thought she wasn’t looking.

Their next port of call, perhaps inevitably, was Janet O’Dowd’s address. Given that the girl actually lived in Hatchwood Green, it seemed possible that, if Burke wasn’t currently crashing at her place, he was using it as a centre of operations. However, this time they weren’t simply knocking on the front door. Instead, it was a waiting game, the two cops parked just across the road from the house, hopefully innocuous among the various other vehicles there.

Though, so far, there’d been nothing. On first arrival, at around seven that evening, there’d been no one home at all, the house lights switched off. But some fifteen minutes later, O’Dowd, an overweight bottle-blonde in a lilac shell suit, had showed up, pushing a pram. She’d gone indoors, hitting light switches, but after drawing all the curtains, she’d been the last sign of life they’d seen. Now, five hours after their shift had supposedly ended, Harry was increasingly frustrated.

‘I mean … how can Burke even afford it?’ he complained, still referring to the mystifying fact that Jordan Burke didn’t just have this particular girlfriend to shack up with, but had had lots of others previously, and probably had others on the go even now. ‘Don’t you have to buy girls presents and stuff? A bunch of flowers now and then?’

Lucy didn’t respond, but the comment made her think about Kyle Armstrong, the only real boyfriend she herself had ever had. Okay, she’d only been a teenager, and Kyle certainly hadn’t been one for flowers and chocolates, but they’d had a wild time together, brief as it was.