‘Just remember, Lucy,’ he said, ‘when you tell them all about us … quite a few things have happened in your investigations of late which, shall we say, don’t exactly figure in the Greater Manchester Police rulebook. And they’ll come up too. Inevitably they will. But hey … if you don’t mind that, if you’re quite happy that you can just bullshit all that controversy away, in a career that’s hardly been controversy-free as it is, then good on you. I was only thinking yesterday … you get more like me than your mum every time I meet you.’

She still didn’t look back. Just got into the Jimny and drove.

Good God. She thought she’d had him on a cliff edge.

Chapter 17

He wouldn’t admit it, but Nathan always felt challenged by men who’d done something with their lives. It was amazing the kinds of people who turned up at FitnessFanatix. Individuals who’d known serious self-discipline in their time, who’d done physically demanding jobs, or had regularly courted danger – ex-soldiers, ex-cops and the like – and yet for some reason had let it all slip away, their sculpted physiques now dwindled into unimpressive shadows of what they’d once been, their reactions turned sluggish, their outlook on life morose, tired.

Deep down, Nathan scorned such losers. But that wasn’t why he avoided working with these one-time alpha males. Mostly it was because, for all his contempt of them, he still felt challenged.

That Monday evening, like all evenings, he walked the gym floor on the balls of his feet, in his regulation red tracksuit trousers, white tennis shoes and slashed crimson vest, the one that hid nothing from the world of his muscular, sunbed-bronzed physique with its multiple menacing tattoos. The vest was non-regulation, of course; as one of the permanent staff here, Nathan was supposed to wear a non-threatening white T-shirt, but no one really cared. First of all, because he was a good personal training instructor; he didn’t just talk the talk, he walked it too (or swaggered it). But also because he looked the part. A tad brutish maybe, with his shaven head and his constant menacing frown – it was all nonsensically macho, but wasn’t that what this place was all about? Most of the blokes who came here did it because they yearned for big muscles and flat bellies, because they dreamed of being tough guys who would turn all the ladies’ heads when they lumbered past on the beach, or while walking their pet pit-bulls in the park. Whether that sort of thing really worked for the sophisticated twenty-first-century woman was a moot point, of course, but this was still the way most men thought. So, in that regard, Nathan was a great advert for the place.

Even if, deep down, he was increasingly frustrated that this was all he’d ever be.