She drove across the Brenner estate, her home neighbourhood, slowly and carefully, constantly checking in her rear-view mirror to ensure that no one had pulled out from a parking space in pursuit. It was 7 p.m., and only twenty minutes had elapsed since she’d left the Archways. On reflection, it seemed doubtful that those sirens had been responding to a lack of communication from Ruth Smiley, as that would mean the bastards were blowing the whole thing wide open before they’d even had a chance to get their story straight. Even when they found her body, they’d have to confer to try and cover their backs, and only then would they feel sufficiently secure to alert the top brass, who, totally bewildered, would want a much fuller explanation before they consented to put out an all-points on one of their own officers. Most likely, the office would try to contact her by normal means first, to get her to come in voluntarily, and if that failed, would instruct mobile patrols to try and find her discreetly rather than going at it with the blues and twos. Lucy would have expected all that to take several hours.

But the truth was, she couldn’t be absolutely sure.

She cruised to a halt at the end of her road, Cuthbertson Court.

It was vintage suburbia; a quiet cul-de-sac of detached and semi-detached houses, most with front gardens, cars on their drives and curtains drawn against the autumn darkness.

Lucy lived in a bungalow at the far end. But she didn’t drive straight down there.

Okay, an official police response to Ruth Smiley’s death, with Lucy as the prime suspect, might take hours to get going, but just suppose the Robbery Squad had opted to circumvent all that? Suppose they were simply going to hit her again? She didn’t think it possible that anyone who’d turned up at the Archways after she’d left, and had then headed straight here, could have overtaken her – but it wasn’t impossible that they’d stationed someone here anyway, just in case.

She edged forward a dozen yards, and halted.

She could now see her bungalow beyond the curve at the far end.

It sat there as normal. There was no sign of anything out of the ordinary. Every car parked between here and there, she felt certain she could account for as belonging to neighbours.

And yet why did she feel so damn uneasy?

Warily, she edged forward. Still nothing moved: in the front gardens she passed, in the darkened spaces alongside the houses, in her rear-view mirror.

She finally pulled onto her own drive, and applied the handbrake.

She sat listening, probing gingerly at the four deep rips in her left cheek, but too preoccupied with scanning the front of her property to pay it any attention, in particular the side passage. There was a wrought-iron gate there, but it was closed and only darkness lay beyond.