As a rule, when you were facing big numbers, quite a few of them weren’t looking for legal entanglements and would scarper at the first opportunity. That was when they were most vulnerable; all you had to do was pick them off. Though, looking at these guys – and she turned the super-zoom dial on her scope – there might be as many fighters as runners. She saw shaved heads, scarred faces, scuzzy tattoos. For once she was glad the sixty officers from the TAU were parked in a layby in their troop-carriers a little way down Wellspring Lane.

She continued to observe the men as they greeted each other with high fives and bear-hugs, before swaggering over to Mahoney and thrusting at him the wads of banknotes that made up their admission fees.

Another cop came into the hide behind her. It was PC Malcolm Peabody, once Lucy’s probationer when she too had been in uniform. He was still only young, but a tall, rangy lad, with short red hair, a freckled face and jug-handle ears. Currently, he wore heavy-duty body-armour, plus a ballistics helmet with its visor raised and strap tight under his chin.

‘Sergeant Frobisher says everyone’s in position,’ he said quietly.

‘Everyone except you, Malcolm,’ Lucy replied, thinking that if it suddenly kicked off, she didn’t want handy lads like Peabody anywhere other than the front line. ‘There’s not enough space for all of us in here. Go back to your LUP and stay sharp.’

Peabody nodded and stooped back out through the low, narrow entrance.

None of them knew what the hide had originally been constructed for. It might indeed have been a wildlife observation point in the past. But it made a perfect OP for today: a flimsy, flat-roofed wooden hut, partly dug into the ground so it had an earthen floor, its exterior covered with vegetation, which, at the tail-end of summer, partly obscured the horizontal viewing port at the front – partly, but not completely.

Its interior was so restricted that it could only contain two with any comfort. But it gave an excellent view of the farm cottage, some fifty yards beyond the trees, and the open grassland to the east of it, where at this hour nothing stirred save a couple of tethered ponies munching the cud.

An increasingly excited canine yelping drew Lucy’s attention back to the cottage, where the rear doors to vehicles were now being opened and muzzled dogs brought out on chain leashes. Even through the zoom-lens of her scope, and with the whole of the farmyard area lit up, many of them were already so horribly scarred from battles past that their breeds were unidentifiable, but by their lean, squat, muscular frames she reckoned they’d be fighting species of old: pit bulls, Staffies and the like, an impression enhanced by the thick muzzles they wore, and their steel-studded leather harnesses.

Lucy shook her head.