As she’d suspected, the door had been kicked from its hinges, which were nothing more now than stubs of corroded metal. The chain that had been fastened across it still hung at waist-height, a padlock, attached to two rusted ring-handles, suspended in the middle. The blackness beyond was so complete it was almost solid.

Lucy ducked under the chain, reaching to her back pocket for her phone. Its light might come in useful, but she didn’t activate it straight away, as it might alert him to her presence. The stink of the place embraced her as she stepped inside: dampness, decay, that indefinable but repulsive reek you always found in ruined buildings, like rotted vegetables, or faeces.

Her eyes gradually adjusted. A shaft of pale moonlight filtering through some partly obscured aperture high on the right revealed a footway of litter-strewn asphalt leading forward between two rows of plastic wheelie bins and dumpsters. Ancient black bin-liners, bulging with foul trash, had been loaded into them or jammed in between, turning it into a virtual valley of garbage. As more came into view, Lucy hesitated again. She recognised this as the entry point they’d taken during the raid nineteen months ago. Back then, they hadn’t met much opposition on ground-level, but it had been infested with rats – she could still hear faint scuttlings – so even the most degraded of the town’s dropouts hadn’t fancied sleeping down here. Of course, tonight’s opponent was of a different ilk. On top of that, Lucy was alone. Last time, they’d come here team-handed, and in a blaze of torchlight, clad with body armour and visored helmets, and carrying shields and expandable batons. By comparison, now, she felt naked.

She wondered if that scratching she could hear was really the sound of vermin, or the stealthy movement of someone hiding. As she scrutinised the mountains of rubbish on either side, her eyes fell on a fragment of metal, an old beer can lying trampled in the middle of the footway.

I heard something clatter in here, she reminded herself.

She saw the rest of the beer cans. They’d spilled from a torn bin-liner a couple of feet away. This bag also sat on the footway, having been dragged out of a gap between two skips on the left. Had this happened some time ago, perhaps during the drugs raid all those months back? Or more recently? The space between the two skips was probably still jammed with refuse, but not necessarily jammed solid. A space had been made in there, but space enough for a man to hide?

Everything else in the cave-like darkness melted to irrelevance, as Lucy gazed at the narrow slice of black. She didn’t notice that a large, hooded figure had slid out of concealment behind her. Had he not set his foot on a rat, which scampered off, squeaking, she’d never have noticed.