‘Okay.’ McCracken pondered, but ultimately found nothing overly fascinating in what he’d so far learned about his daughter’s movements. ‘So that’s it, then? Nothing else odd?’

‘Nah …’ Shallicker broke off to swing the car across the busy road and veer sharp right, the grilled gate to the Astarte’s underground car park rolling upward to admit them. They cruised down a curving concrete ramp. ‘In and out the nick, going seeing people round town. Standard cop business. You know Leon Royton got pinched?’

‘Yeah, I heard,’ McCracken said.

‘Seems your Lucy was the arresting officer, but only because she was out and about and she got sent to the incident. She wasn’t investigating him for anything.’

‘You’re fucking joking … our Lucy managed to pinch Leon Royton?’

‘She’s a chip off the old block, Frank.’

McCracken didn’t reply.

Ever since he’d discovered that the daughter he’d always known he had but had never seen (except in a photo taken when she was sixteen) had become a police officer, he’d walked an uneasy line. Frank McCracken had never considered himself a family man, primarily because his own family had been the worst kind of low-level, alcohol-addicted, perennially underachieving Salford criminals, whose loser influence he’d divested himself of at the first opportunity. But also because, back during his younger years, his mean looks and strong physique, and his ruthless gangster energy had enabled him to wade through a sea of prostrate beauties – something he’d done ever since, in truth, even now, into his mid-fifties. Though Cora, the only one to get pregnant, might have meant a little more to him than most, her determination to leave him once she knew she was having a child was the kind of defiance he rarely faced, and so had intrigued him even more. But her and her child’s departure from his world had only aided and abetted his promiscuous lifestyle all the more. As such, he’d never made an emotional connection with either of them, and in fact had completely lost track of them. So, it shouldn’t have mattered last year, when he’d heard that his daughter wasn’t just a copper these days, but an undercover detective, and that she was getting in deep with the Twisted Sisters, a pair of brothel queens and Crew associates who would kill you as soon as sniff at you. It really shouldn’t have. But for reasons he still couldn’t fathom, Frank McCracken had in due course assisted her rather than allowed for her to be rubbed out.

Why he’d done that, he still didn’t know.

Ever since then, McCracken had pestered himself with the question: Am I a family man after all?