Before she was anywhere near home, Lucy had already decided that she would go official with what had happened. There was no option but to try and avoid implicating her father or his sidekick, so she was going to claim that an unknown shooter had put Ruth Smiley down at the end of their brutal fight in the house on Jubilee Gardens.

They might find it hard to believe, but they wouldn’t be able to prove otherwise. And anyway, everything else was true. She’d got to the Archways through legitimate means, as part of her own investigation, and then they’d tried to murder her. All the evidence would point to Smiley being one of the killers, while Lucy was clean. They could strip-search her if they wanted, but they’d find no gunfire residue on her person. Of course, it was wrong on so many counts, trying to protect a pair of villains like McCracken and Shallicker, even if they had been trying to help her – but if it would also protect her job, what the hell?

The real question was how could she ensure that this truncated version of the truth arrived with the right people. The obvious person to call would be Kathy Blake, but Lucy thought again about Operation Countryman, which had ultimately failed to convict anyone because, or so the rumour-mongers held, the corruption was so extensive within the suspect departments that it was in no one’s interest to see it happen. It was almost impossible to imagine that so respected a senior officer as Kathy Blake could be involved in something as crazy as this, but she and Lucy had only become acquainted relatively recently – so there was no certainty there.

In contrast, of course, there was one top cop Lucy knew she could trust, and that was Stan Beardmore.

He wouldn’t be on duty now; he’d be at home – but she’d called him at home many times, and he didn’t mind. There was one small problem, however: all the contact numbers she had for the DI were listed on her phone, which was still on the Archways. She hadn’t memorised any of them. In fact, there was only police number she had memorised because she’d needed to call it so often, and that was Harry Jepson’s mobile – but she couldn’t even call that until she got to a landline, which was why she was now headed home.