It was around 9.45 p.m. when Lucy and Cora arrived there, Lucy only finally feeling safe from pursuit when she turned onto the dirt road running through the fields. She’d made her way across the borough ultra-carefully, taking only the back roads to avoid any kind of detection. But when they pulled up on the Shed’s muddy forecourt, they were one among fifty-odd other motorbikes. Weird green lighting and thunderous metal emanated from the interior. Only one biker sat outside, an obese slob in his early forties, with a clean-shaved face but a mass of long, stringy hair. He wore jeans and a Low Riders doublet open on an outdated Black Sabbath tour T-shirt, which looked fit to burst, so vast was the ale-gut beneath it. He sat in a deckchair close to the clubhouse’s main door, smoking a joint, which he made no effort to extinguish even though he could clearly see that it was Lucy who’d arrived and was now helping a female passenger from the back of her machine.

Cora feebly removed the helmet. Beneath it, she looked white-faced and sickly.

‘What’s this place?’ she asked.

‘I don’t suppose you remember Kyle Armstrong?’ Lucy said.

Cora swallowed hard. She was clearly on the verge of being ill. ‘That reprobate … thought we were well shot of him.’

‘Well, Mum …’ Lucy led her by the arm towards the door, ‘we’ve all messed up when it comes to getting rid of the dodgy blokes in our lives, eh?’

The biker in the chair took the joint from his lips.

‘No helmet, officer?’ he said. ‘Riding without a headlight? Tut-tut.’

Lucy now recognised him from her teen years. ‘Tommy Five-Bellies.’

‘Juicy Lucy.’

‘Or is if Fifty-Five these days?’

He took another casual toke. ‘You here all official-like?’

‘Hardly.’ Lucy glanced around to check that the road across the fields was still empty. ‘Go on, Tommy,’ she turned back, ‘give us a drag … for old time’s sake.’

He grinned, showing brown teeth, and handed it over. ‘Gotta give me something for it.’

‘I will, advice … this is illegal.’ She dropped the joint and crushed it underfoot. ‘Next time I come here, it might be official. And then what’s going to happen?’

He looked surprised rather than angry, and gazed morosely at the flattened dog-end.

Lucy led her mother inside.

The music in there was deafening, the emerald light disorienting, and the smell of dope and beer and cigarettes so overpowering it was almost a miasma. Her vision took an age to adjust; all she initially saw was a smoky, green-tinged gloom, unidentifiable figures lurching back and forth, others sprawled on couches and armchairs, or sitting at tables.