He made an unconvincing show of getting comfy on his chair. ‘I don’t work for anyone.’

‘You certainly won’t be where you’re going next … which might not be ideal from your employers’ perspective. Not a good time to be losing their top men, I suspect.’

Chapter 25

While DS Banks headed to the DO to report back to Beardmore, Lucy found herself drawn upstairs to the Robbery Squad office. She went with some minor trepidation. The Squad had been busy as hell over the last few days. By all accounts, the robbery-homicide at the home of Andy Northwood had thrown up more complexities than anyone had expected.

To begin with, the violence had not just been directed at Northwood. A number of his male guests had also been shot and wounded, deliberately so, having first been lined up along a sideboard. And yet, they themselves were proving tricky to trace. It seemed that Northwood had been hosting some kind of drugs and prostitution party at the time, and none of those injured were so routinely involved in criminality that they were comfortable being named as participants; in fact, all of them, by various means, had managed to vacate the premises before the emergency services were even summoned, and doubtless were now receiving treatment from the usual roster of alcoholic, drug-addicted, child-abusing, or just plain incompetent doctors who’d long ago been struck off and these days existed solely for use of the underworld.

It went without saying, of course, that most of the females at the party – the strippers and prostitutes – had also scarpered before the police arrived, in their case with much less difficulty as they hadn’t been shot – one had even been reported separately by a passing motorist, who’d been dumbstruck to see a woman clattering along the pavement wearing only a pair of high heels. That said, two local barmaids who’d been hired by Northwood to work as waitresses, and whose status was more legitimate, had remained at the house, and in fact they were the ones who’d phoned the incident in. These two girls now constituted a vital if somewhat unwilling lead for DI Blake, who’d been working with them for several days in her attempts to establish the identities and whereabouts of the other witnesses. But despite this unexpected mass of extra work, Lucy couldn’t help feeling that she’d seen less of Danny Tucker for other reasons.