Lucy nodded. She’d heard this kind of promise before, but to be fair to McGlaglen, he rarely offered anything that wasn’t at least interesting. She clutched the horizontal bar at the top of his seat as they swung around a tight bend.

‘A particularly unpleasant fellow,’ McGlaglen added, ‘a true reprobate and degenerate is in town.’

He’d been given to using flowery language for as long as Lucy had known him; he even delivered it in a dramatic, Shakespearean tone, all traces of his local accent suppressed. It was something to do with his past, she understood, though she’d never questioned him on it. Police informers came in every shape and size; all that mattered was the reliability of their intel.

‘A true degenerate, eh?’ she said. ‘Go on. I’m all ears.’

‘The Creep. You know of this beast, I take it? He’s in the town now … as we speak.’

At first Lucy thought she’d misheard. ‘Sorry … what?’

He neither looked round nor raised his voice. The one thing Jerry McGlaglen defended more zealously that his air of faded flamboyance was his right to anonymity; when imparting information to his police handlers, he was never less than exceptionally wary. He would do nothing whatsoever to attract attention to himself from the ordinary public. To Lucy’s mind that somewhat contradicted his manner of dressing and speaking, but when she’d raised this with him once in the past, he’d replied that his attire served its purpose as a double bluff.

‘They look twice, that is undeniably true. But when all they see is a well-known eccentric, they rarely look again.’

‘The Creep?’ she said, puzzled. ‘You mean the lunatic who hangs around cashpoints in Birmingham late at night, robbing people at sword-point. You say he’s in town? You mean here … in Crowley?’

‘This is the story I’ve been told, my dear.’

‘Jerry … how is that possible?’

‘Why … I’d imagine he bought himself a ticket at New Street, climbed onto a train and headed north.’

‘Funny man. I’ll rephrase the question. Why is he here … I mean in the Northwest?’

‘How could I know? Perhaps he has relatives here. He was unlikely to linger in the Midlands after what happened during his last attack, don’t you think?’