The ‘he’ in question was Lucy’s estranged father, who in so many ways signified a distant but dark past that still haunted and embarrassed her. Long before Lucy was born, Cora went through a wild child phase of her own, leaving her family home under such a cloud that she’d never speak to her parents again, and finally earning a living by performing nightly at a strip-club called SugaBabes on the other side of Manchester. She’d only been in her late teens at the time, and had been easily smitten by a handsome bouncer at the club, with whom she’d commenced a romantic relationship. However, when she unexpectedly fell pregnant with Lucy, she re-evaluated everything, and drew the conclusion that these underworld figures with whom she was increasingly involved could never be part of her daughter’s life. She thus packed the stripper job in, broke it off with her boyfriend, who was surprisingly amicable about it – most likely because he could (and did) take his pick of the rest of the girls there – and crossed the city to commence a new, more respectable life. In time, the ex-boyfriend, as he rose through the ranks of the mob, doing worse and worse things and yet reaping ever greater benefits, contacted Cora again, offering financial assistance in the raising of their daughter. But Cora, always an independent soul, continually resisted. In due course, she lost touch with him altogether … until last year, when unusual circumstances brought him back into both her and her daughter’s lives with shattering force.

It was a particularly horrific experience for Lucy, learning that her father was a villain. She’d grown up with the lie that her real dad had been a cheeky-chappie bus driver who’d abandoned them both because he couldn’t face the responsibility of parenthood. Of course, it didn’t make it any better that she was now a police officer; in fact, it made things a whole lot worse. If word of this revelation had got out, both father and daughter would find their respective careers imperilled. As such, they’d agreed to keep it quiet, and even now only a very tight circle of select acquaintances knew the truth.

Not that this prevented Lucy losing sleep from time to time.

Against her better judgement, she occasionally had to raise the subject with her mother. Even when, as now, it was patently obvious that Cora didn’t want to discuss it, Lucy just had to check that there had been no further contact from her long-absent father, aka ‘The Shakedown’, Frank McCracken.

Chapter 11

As always with decoy duty, the menacing prospect of suddenly encountering the offender you were trying to lure was juxtaposed against the many hours of tedium that in actual fact would fill your shift.