They were brutally scarred, in many cases so bitten and ragged that the fur was entirely missing from their faces. Several had lost so much flesh from their jowls that their teeth were exposed. At least a couple were missing an eye, the empty sockets crudely sutured shut. Lucy saw ears hanging in ribbons, paws chewed into lame, leathery stumps. The reason for that was evident in their breeds, for these were mostly mongrels, but those that weren’t were recognisable as Labradors, spaniels and retrievers, suburban pets rather than fighting-dogs.

‘Bait,’ Lucy observed as she walked along the cages.

‘Looks like this is where all the abductees we’ve been hearing about have finished up,’ Payne said, following.

‘Maybe.’

‘No sign of the black van yet, though.’

‘We need to keep looking.’

To Lucy’s mind, the existence of ‘bait dogs’ was one of the most sickening aspects of the whole dog-fighting disgrace. That these trusting, innocent creatures could be thrown into the pit repeatedly as part of a callous training regime for the fighting-dogs, where they’d be attacked mercilessly, again and again, by savage beasts that wanted nothing more than to senselessly kill anything they were faced with, didn’t bear thinking about. But that such a thing could happen to one-time pets, allegedly stolen from loving homes by this mysterious black van that had been reported several times when an animal had vanished, was somehow even more horrible.

‘We need the vets again,’ Lucy said, to which the younger detective nodded and hurried away.

‘At least you’re not going to need them in here,’ a voice said.

She glanced around, and saw Malcolm Peabody leaning out through the entrance to an ugly breezeblock building with no glass in its windows and a sagging tarpaper roof. He’d removed his ballistics helmet and now carried it under one arm. His hair was damp and spiky, his freckled features greased with sweat. Normally an affable young bloke with a great enthusiasm for the job, his expression was grim and angry, his pallor waxen.

Deeply apprehensive, Lucy followed him inside.

Torchlight revealed that it was a basic shell of a room with bare walls and a rugged concrete floor. It was also stained with the blood of ages and strewn with dog carcasses. There were at least ten of them, all relatively recent; Lucy could tell that because flies buzzed everywhere, and a fetid odour thickened the air. She surveyed the heap of twisted forms with what a stranger might have called indifference, but in truth was cold professionalism. It wasn’t that it didn’t affect her, it was simply that, twelve years in, Lucy was a veteran of this kind of ghastliness, and she knew that to get emotional would only cloud her judgement.

Peabody, a relative newbie, was less in control.