Lucy watched it perhaps for the fiftieth time. And there was no mistake.

Under this man’s hood, he was wearing what looked like a woollen face mask.

A ski mask.

She shook her head as she tried to think this thing through.

It was hardly a smoking gun. It didn’t necessarily connect him to Andy Northwood’s killers, and with the footage in black and white, she couldn’t tell whether that mask was red or not – which was the ultimate frustration. But it was surely worth looking into, especially with other factors slowly coming into play. Without holding any of it in her hand, it was impossible to tell which of the items of jewellery purportedly seen in possession of the town’s vagrants might be stolen, but the gem-studded bracelet allegedly spotted on Sally Skegg’s wrist had not matched anything recently reported – that was a complete conundrum, unless you considered that it might have been part of the jewellery stolen from the sex workers during the raid on Andy Northwood’s house. They’d fled the scene straight afterwards. The house was awash with cocaine at the time, and they likely had form for drug use, or were on parole and such. And this could be the same reason they hadn’t reported their missing valuables.

Lucy gave an exasperated sigh.

Okay, when she tried to lay it out like that, it felt tenuous; it was still possible that it was all coincidence. She needed more before she could take this to DI Blake and tell her that she thought she’d caught one of their killers on CCTV.

Which was why she was here now.

She’d been parked on the brick-strewn lot of the boarded-up social club off Hollycroft Lane for the best part of an hour. It was one o’clock in the afternoon. She’d hoped and expected to find her target out and about, in which case she’d simply have driven up alongside him and told him to get into her car. But if he didn’t turn up soon, she’d have no option but to knock on his front door, no matter what his objections.

She was looking for Jerry McGlaglen, and this was his home housing estate, though in truth it was little more than a single loop of council properties, with barren slag heaps to the north and west, and Borsdane Wood to the south.

McGlaglen lived at 49, Hollycroft Lane, which was only three or four houses away from where she was parked, so when she suddenly noticed that he’d emerged from the house without her realising, and was already a hundred yards away, she decided that she’d let herself get too distracted by the CCTV.

It was definitely McGlaglen. The distant figure wore a heavy blue overcoat with a Victorian-style cape, and a scarf, but was mainly distinctive for its tall outline and the grey feather-duster mop where its hair should be.