Though she’d passed various Squad members in the station corridors and the canteen, this was the first time she’d been up close to them, particularly to their mythical leader, whose desk she and Beardmore now stood in front of, though she also felt vaguely surprised. Lucy had half been expecting a policewoman with DI Blake’s reputation to be a real hard-bitten toughie. But in fact, she was attractive and looked rather refined. She was also surprisingly young. Lucy was thirty-one, but she doubted DI Blake was more than a year older than her, if that. In addition, she was short – perhaps no more than five-six, whereas Lucy was five-eight. She had long, honey-blonde hair, which she wore in a ponytail, and was ‘peaches and cream’ pretty, with a dusting of freckles and intense green eyes. In fact, DI Blake’s unblinking, laser-like gaze was something Lucy had heard about before; even the most rugged customers were said to have struggled to meet it during interrogation.

However, that intense gaze was now directed downward as she rifled through the heap of documentation that Stan Beardmore had brought up from CID.

Lucy glanced around the Robbery Squad office, while she waited. It was a big room, which had been put to lots of different uses in the past, but currently was cluttered with desks, tables, filing cabinets, VDUs and whiteboards covered in scribble, its walls adorned with paperwork and pictures. One thing she noticed in particular was an entire section of room that appeared to have been cordoned off with workbenches. Two detectives were currently in conflab there, discussing a series of blown-up CCTV screen-grabs pasted onto a Perspex screen and apparently depicting an armed robbery in progress: two figures in khaki fatigues and stocking masks were unloading money bags from a G4S security van on a shopping centre forecourt. The security staff lay face down, and were covered by two other masked figures, one wielding a pickaxe handle, the other a sawn-off shotgun.

DI Blake’s desk was at the opposite end of the room from this, set against the wall, to an extent lost among the desks belonging to the bulk of the lower ranks, and certainly no larger or grander. However, one thing that was different was the wall behind it, on which a series of large square photographs had been pasted in seven orderly rows. Each one depicted a face, the bulk of them ugly and brutish – clearly the headshots of known criminals, one or two of whom Lucy thought she recognised straight away – but approximately half of them defaced by a big red X, which had been drawn in vivid marker-pen, and with some vigour.