In purely practical terms, her mother’s phone-call had changed Lucy’s plans for the remainder of that night. She still needed to get back to the nick to book the forensic evidence in and request a fast-track analysis. But that was a mere matter of filling a form. However, it was no longer possible for her to sit down and interview her new star witness. That would take far too long, and so would need to be rearranged. She still had Sister Cassie with her, though – because now the woman was Lucy’s excuse for going to the hospital. On pulling up in the Robber’s Row personnel car park, she told the ex-nun to wait by the bike, entered the building through its personnel door and headed straight for the CID office. But her mind was still awhirl with this new development in their lives.

Frank McCracken didn’t mean anything to her.

She told herself this repeatedly.

He shared her blood, yes, but he was still an enemy of society. There was no denying that she’d seen things in him a person could like. He had a smoothness about him, and a charm, and, for some reason Lucy couldn’t pin down, she felt sure that his affection towards her mother was genuine. But at the same time he was violent, slept with whores and headed up a major department inside the Northwest’s pre-eminent crime syndicate.

And yet the news that he’d been shot had hit her like a punch.

The possibility that he was dying blew an icy breath down her neck. As she booked in the evidence, Lucy realised that she was desperate to know more about what had happened.

‘Bloody ridiculous,’ she muttered.

It was like he mattered to her, like he was a real relative.

I don’t feel anything for him. I hate him … or at least I hate everything he stands for.

But he was her father. The only one she’d ever known – albeit for a short amount of time.

How often, when she was little, when she’d believed her mum’s white lie that her dad was a happy-go-lucky bus driver who’d ditched them both at the first opportunity, had she yearned for more information about him. Anything would have done – a faded photograph, a letter he’d written. She still had an overpoweringly emotional memory of how, when she was about seven, she ran away from home and used her Christmas money to travel the bus routes of Greater Manchester for two whole days, looking for any driver whose facial features she might vaguely recognise. Her mum was beside herself with worry, and apparently fainted with relief when Lucy was found safe and well, fast asleep in a bus shelter in Rochdale on the other side of the city.