Its headlights were turned off, but it was low, sleek, streamlined. A sports car. What was more, though it filled the alley wall to wall, it accelerated towards them.

Cora jumped out of the way as Lucy slid sideways to a halt.

‘Here …’ Lucy handed her the helmet, and then clumsily manoeuvred the Ducati around so that it was pointing the other way. ‘Get on, quickly …’

‘God, Lucy … I feel sick.’

‘Be sick down my back, just get on!’

The approaching vehicle was two-hundred yards away, encroaching fast.

‘Quickly, mum … ’

Cora seemed oblivious to the threat. She struggled to put the helmet on, and half-heartedly looped one leg over the seat. ‘You know I don’t like—’

‘Do it! Wrap your arms round me and lean forward …’

Less than fifty yards away, the car banged its headlights onto a full, dazzling beam.

‘Oh my God, what’s that …?’

‘MOTHER!’

Chapter 39

Lucy hit 50mph before she reached the end of the alley, her mother riding pillion but clinging on for dear life with arms cinched around her waist. It was all the more dangerous that Lucy wasn’t wearing a helmet, though riding bare-headed could only help if it attracted the attention of a traffic cop.

With the pursuing vehicle only yards behind, they rounded a corner onto Walton Drive, another narrow, terraced street, made narrower still by the cars parked down either side. It was no problem for Lucy as she sped along it, her needle pushing sixty; at 8 p.m. on a Friday evening, she was unlikely to meet oncoming traffic, and the thoroughfare was easily roomy enough for her Ducati. The car behind, a jet-black Jaguar F-Type, had a harder time, though its driver was clearly unconcerned about his fifty-grand’s worth of high-performance vehicle, losing a wing mirror and flaying the paint from his nearside flank as he recklessly followed.

At the end of the road, to cut a corner, Lucy screeched the wrong way around the Battle Hill war monument, a brick obelisk encircled by walled-in rose gardens. On the other side lay Crannington Lane, a major artery in this corner of the borough. An approaching van had to take swift evasive action to avoid her, and veered sideways, squealing rubber. As Lucy also swerved to avoid impact, the F-Type roared into view around the other side of the monument, jamming its brakes on, swinging one hundred and eighty degrees. When she skidded to a halt mid-carriageway, she found herself gazing across twenty yards of tarmac at the face of its driver, which was the most hideous thing she’d ever seen: the same bruiser who’d tried to kicked her mother’s front door down, but his features now riven every which way, leaving a gory patchwork which looked set to slide apart.