He pondered that. ‘As long as you know that if you refuse my help now, you’re completely on your own … though perhaps I can spare a few quid to help your mum with the funeral.’

Lucy stared at him dumbly.

‘That’s it?’ he asked her. ‘Mind made up? Okay.’

She gave a single nod in response, and then stood alone by the gap in the fence as, first of all, her father climbed into his Bentley, and the big car wheeled its way through a huge three-point turn and roared off along Felton Lane, and secondly, as Shallicker’s vehicle, a Peugeot 307, came barrelling through a gap between two boarded-up units opposite, and followed it.

She ought to have arrested them, she told herself.

Yeah, like that would have been possible.

But they’d spoken the truth. Robbery Squad personnel had been carrying out these violent raids. Robbery Squad personnel had tried to assassinate her because they’d feared she was about to uncover them. Robbery Squad personnel could be on their way here right now, wondering why their girl on the ground hadn’t reported back.

With uncannily perfect timing, a police siren commenced yowling in the near distance.

‘My God,’ Lucy breathed, scarcely able to believe what she was now contemplating.

Before she did anything else, she knew that she should go back down Jubilee Gardens and try to recover her phone, if for no other reason than to prevent it being found in the vicinity of a murdered police officer. Not that it mattered a great deal given that her DNA was clogging said officer’s fingernails. But there was no time for that now.

The next question, therefore, was what to do next?

When a second siren joined the first, the pair of them drawing steadily nearer, Lucy dashed to her Jimny, jumped behind the wheel and gunned it away from the kerb.

Chapter 37

The revelation about the blaggers’ identities was no consolation to Frank McCracken. In some ways it was good, not least because it meant they could finally bring this business to an end. But in others, it was a choker. It wasn’t just that going to war against the Manchester Robbery Squad would cause a ruckus the likes of which the Northwest of England hadn’t seen in decades, and that all their income streams would flatline as a consequence, at least temporarily; the main problem was how McCracken was going to explain all this to Wild Bill.

He couldn’t outline his discovery of the rogue cops without outlining how it had happened that Mick Shallicker shot one of them, which meant he’d have to clarify why Shallicker had been tailing a low-level divisional detective working from Robber’s Row police station.