‘No, it’s just …’ Lucy shrugged. ‘You know.’

Cora eyed her suspiciously, sensing something untoward. It was always the same; Lucy had once successfully lied her way into the inner sanctum of the two most dangerous female gangsters in Manchester, but she could never fool her own mum.

‘You trying to bribe me?’ Cora wondered.

‘It’s not really a bribe.’

‘But there’s something you need to tell me and you want to sweeten the pill?’

‘Mum …’ Lucy tried her most plaintive voice. ‘I don’t live with you anymore, so you wouldn’t have known about this otherwise, but I don’t like hiding things from you.’

‘Hmm.’ Cora busied herself along the counter. ‘Let me guess … you’re off on another suicide mission.’

‘It’s not a suicide mission. It’s just undercover work.’

Cora pointedly said nothing. Neither of them needed reminding how badly Lucy had been injured and frightened the previous time she’d gone undercover.

‘But it’s going to be nothing like last time,’ Lucy added hastily. That was completely true, but she didn’t bother to explain that, whereas last time she’d been standing with those suspected of committing violent crime, this time it would be the other way around – she’d be out there with the prospective victims of it. ‘It’s with the Robbery Squad. Which means I’ll have big, hard blokes with me at all times. Plus, it’s here in Crowley … it’s only round the corner.’

Cora didn’t look mollified, but she didn’t raise any further objections.

It had never been the case that Lucy and her mother ‘didn’t get on’. Cora, a single parent living in Saltbridge, one of the older terraced districts in the town, which had suffered deprivation even into the twenty-first century, had raised her daughter alone, and with the odd exception of a few ‘wild child’ phases during Lucy’s youth, had turned her at length into a model citizen. However, Lucy’s joining law enforcement at the age of twenty had been a bone of contention between them, which had persisted for the last ten years. It was not that Cora disliked the police per se, but she considered that she’d seen some terrible things in her time – she knew ‘what went on’, as she was fond of saying. And every time her daughter climbed into her uniform, or now, as it was, plain clothes, she feared that something awful was going to happen. But, these days at least, these were concerns that Cora only paid lip service to, which Lucy took as a sign that she was at last getting used to the fact that her daughter was a copper for life.