It was all in the job, of course; juggling several investigations at the same time was part and parcel of routine inner-city policing. But it meant that it felt as if Jordan Burke was slipping out of their grasp, which made this a frustrating duty as well as a monotonous one.

‘Get many trick-or-treaters round your neck of the woods last night?’ Harry asked.

They were parked up again on the waste-ground off Duke’s Row, just opposite Janet O’Dowd’s house. The last few times they’d planted themselves here, they’d alternated cars so as not to make it too obvious, but today they were back in Harry’s BMW. It was an unusually bright morning for the first day of November. A cloudless blue sky arced overhead, though it was cold; the dashboard barometer read only five degrees.

‘Mum gets them … not so many round my neighbourhood,’ she replied.

‘Used to take our three trick-or-treating,’ he said. ‘Well, Abi and Toby. Sal was too tiny.’

He spoke with a melancholy air and yet a dreamy expression, as he gazed into a past that must have seemed light years ago. In the week since Lucy had rebuffed his advance, he’d never mentioned it again. Oh, he’d been sullen for the first two or three days, but gradually, as usual, this had lessened until now he was back to normal. Not that it was ever easy to be sure what ‘back to normal’ meant with Harry Jepson. It could be the softer him, the one Lucy was seeing now: relaxed, affable in his conversation. But then, in an instant, everything could change, and the harder, more embittered personality could emerge.

‘Unusually decent weather,’ Lucy said, trying to steer the conversation away from her partner’s unhappy personal life. ‘Even makes the Hatchwood tolerable.’

‘You want to know what would make it more tolerable? An eighty-megaton blast …’

‘Whoa!’ She snatched his wrist.

They watched as a lone male figure, wearing jeans and a ragged sweater, sauntered casually up the street, an old-fashioned gym bag dangling over one shoulder. He stood five-eight and was lean to the point of being lanky, with a mop of red hair. More important than any of this, he walked with a pronounced limp.

‘That’s him, isn’t it?’ Lucy whispered. ‘Burke?’

Harry rustled through his paperwork. ‘Thought we were looking for a workman?’

‘His overalls are probably in that bag … along with his burglary kit.’

The redhead reached the entrance to No. 8, glanced once over his shoulder, and walked up the path to the door, which he opened with a key.

‘Perfect,’ Harry said quietly.

There were no warnings for Jordan Burke on the PNC. He wasn’t considered to be a weapons-user, or known for his violence or his determination to always escape. But he clearly had boltholes he could disappear into – so they didn’t take any chances.