He walked increasingly briskly, his confidence growing. Glancing back, he could see the HGV, but still there was no movement there.

The entrance to the ginnel came up on the right. It was nothing more than a gap between overlarge buildings, an archetypical inner-city backstreet, unevenly paved and strewn with litter. He hurried down it anyway, mopping his brow with his sleeve, continually glancing backward. No figures intruded into the receding rectangle of streetlighting behind him.

‘This is good,’ he muttered, daring to hope that he’d slipped the net.

But then he reached a junction of passages. This was something he’d feared. He was pretty certain that he’d be able to work his way through to one of the main roads eventually, but where to go from here? The route on the right curved out of sight. There were no doors along it. The route on the left, however, was broader and ran straighter. Wheelie bins were ranged along it, which meant that it ran behind shops or industrial units. If he went that way, there’d likely be a cut-through to the main road.

He headed left, still walking quickly – but when he was forty yards along, a set of headlights sprang to life just ahead of him.

O’Grady skidded to a halt.

He couldn’t see what the vehicle was, but it was already advancing on him, its engine rumbling. For what seemed like several seconds, he was totally frozen, his back stiff, his feet leaden. It couldn’t possibly be them. They couldn’t have known that he’d try to escape this way. They couldn’t have covered this eventuality because they didn’t know this place.

But nor do you, Miles, that mocking internal voice now told him.

With a clank, the vehicle changed gear and accelerated. A bin hurtled sideways, its putrid contents exploding; sure proof that this wasn’t just some late worker heading home.

Instinctively rather than deliberately, he pulled the Taurus from his belt and opened fire – wildly, blindly. By luck, at least one of the slugs struck the nearside headlamp, putting it out.

That might have been a result, had O’Grady been able to follow through with further shots, but he’d first obtained the Taurus when he’d confiscated it during a raid several years ago. He’d never declared it, opting to keep it for himself, even though it had only contained four rounds. And now he’d fired them all.

But maybe he’d bought himself a little time.

He ran back along the alley.

With a clatter, the vehicle changed gear and accelerated again. He heard another thundering impact as a second bin was knocked out of its way. A small mercy, as the tone of the engine altered, the vehicle shifting down to avoid hitting too many more obstacles.