The previous year, as part of the now legendary ‘Operation Clearway’, Lucy had gone undercover as a prostitute, walking the highways and byways on the outskirts of town. Though to a degree that had been worse than this – because, even though she’d been intelligence-gathering rather than presenting herself as a potential target, she’d been dressed in demeaning clothes and had been subject to the disdain of the general public, not to mention the potential violence of those nocturnal wanderers who existed only to hate and hurt – she’d mostly been in the company of other girls and had been able to spend the dark, wet nights in chatty conversation. Here, in the centre of Crowley, despite it being superficially less dangerous because she was now just an ordinary woman in jeans and an anorak – albeit wearing a concealed Kevlar stab-vest and carrying both a radio and a CS spray, with a support car never too far away – the main problem was that all-pervading boredom.

Lucy had been allocated four cashpoints in the obbo’s so-called ‘central zone’, which was mainly the district in closest proximity to Robber’s Row police station. They were all cashpoints that she herself had specified, each one located about a mile and a half away from the next. This worked well because it wouldn’t have done for them all to be close together. It was highly possible that the Creep, if he was here at all, would allow for the fact he was on foreign soil by scoping things out before launching an attack, and if he spotted the same lone female making constant rounds of the cashpoints, he’d soon get suspicious. As such, she’d commence her first walk at 10.30p.m., making a casual but lengthy circuit of the four cashpoints, starting at the RBS on Brunton Way, in the town centre, then moving on to the Co-op on Goodwood Drive, the NatWest outside the Lidl and finally the branch of Lloyds at Broadgate Green, drawing a minor amount of money from each one of them.

At the end of this, at around midnight – it was a timed circuit, and it was important that she kept to the schedule – she would wander idly into the car park at the rear of the Plough & Harrow, the only pub in Broadgate Green, where she’d get into the support car for some sandwiches and a flask of coffee.

At 12.30, the whole process would repeat itself, as it would at 2.30. They’d wrap things up with a debrief at the office at 4 a.m.