As Lucy walked along the dark hedge bordering the grounds of Crowley Grammar School, and pondered all this, it occurred to her that the Robbery Squad had actually invested a lot of faith in the tip-off she’d brought to them. Not that they would blame her particularly if nothing happened. So much policework relied on hunches and tips and ‘information received’. If this specific job failed to produce, and DI Blake had to account for her wastage of time and manpower, there’d be no hard feelings; it would be accepted as an occupational hazard. But then there was the Lee Gaskin factor.

Of all the detectives involved in the operation in Borsdane Wood five years ago, an occasion when Lucy had taken her eye off the ball for half a second and one DI Mandy Doyle nearly died as a result, Gaskin had taken it the worst.

That had been Lucy’s first CID assignment. She’d been in plain clothes a week when it occurred, and had been kicked back to Uniform straight afterwards, but it had been implied to her at the time that she was lucky she was still in a job. Most of those involved had been content with that punishment, apart from Doyle, who had never been happy from the outset with Lucy’s attachment to her otherwise all-male team, and Gaskin, who, for some reason best known to himself, had hung onto Doyle’s every word. Lucy hadn’t known either of them especially well back then, but in that one week she had seen enough to know that if Doyle had said to Gaskin, ‘Jump, you soppy little twat!’ he’d have replied, ‘Of course, ma’am … how high?’

Clearly, even five years later, this irrational devotion hadn’t diminished, and the bastard was now well-placed to do some dirt on her if he wanted to. Lucy had no doubt that Kathy Blake would already know about her past indiscretion, but if this op really went pear-shaped, and Gaskin made enough of a stink about Lucy and her intel not being all they’d hoped for, it wasn’t impossible that it would make a negative impression.

As Lucy pondered these thoughts, she cut across a now sleeping housing estate, walked down a passage between two clusters of maisonettes, and set off across Broadgate Green. This was a triangle of grass in what was an otherwise heavily built-up area of council housing. On the Green’s north side stood a row of six shops, in the very middle of which was the Lloyds branch. There was a raised terrace in front of the row, paved and fenced off from the road with a crash barrier, while to the west of it, Halpin Road, one of Crowley’s larger thoroughfares, though at this late hour it was quiet.