‘Wild Bill was impressed no end by the gun thing,’ he said. ‘But what he really liked about me was how I excelled at violence. You may not believe that, because I’m not a big man. And back in Moston in the bad old days, when I was very young, that made me a target for every kind of bully. It began with my father, who hammered me regularly for the most minuscule things. But mainly it was this big kid in the neighbourhood – Arun Swaraj. He gave me a kicking every single day. Until my father saw it happen and refused to let me in the house afterwards. He put an empty milk bottle in my hand and said that I couldn’t come home until I’d smashed it over this guy’s head. I knew he meant it. So that was what I did. Arun went down like the pathetic sack of shit he was. But the really amazing thing was the way his wingmen ran away. My father taught me an important lesson that day, DC Clayburn. Violence works. Especially the nasty kind. The kind from which there is no coming back. That kind of violence doesn’t just earn you respect, it can actually earn you a living.’

Lucy was stunned, not just by how unconcernedly he was revealing his criminal past to her, but by how long he was taking to do it. It was a dead cert that they wouldn’t be telling her all this if they intended to let her live. But shouldn’t there be an air of urgency by now? She was a police officer who’d vanished from the grid. She’d be missed.

Unless that was the purpose of the delay.

Were they waiting to see what would happen?

They were clearly ready to run – the weighty travel-bag for example – but perhaps they weren’t sure whether that was a good option. Were there other cops out there, covertly watching them? Would they be followed if they ran? All of these had to be considerations. Or would it be safer to assume that any surveillance team should have reacted by now? Lucy was ‘local fuzz’ after all, not ‘Murder Squad’. So, might it indeed be the case that she wasn’t here as part of a larger operation? Might it be that the Torgaus didn’t need to flee at all?