Cartilage cracked, and the girl squawked. But Alyssa dug a right hook into Lucy’s lower back, specifically her kidneys, knocking her physically sick. With legs like water, Lucy sagged forward, a karate chop clobbering the back of her neck. She was so stunned for the next few seconds that she hadn’t even realised she was being dragged forward again, this time on her knees. With a clang, they crashed into the metal door at the end, which swung open, revealing a small but empty brick room. Like everything else in this extensive cellar area, it had been whitewashed, but in the centre of the floor lay what looked like a circular metal lid with a dial-type handle in the middle of it.

A manhole? Even as her senses swam back, Lucy was nonplussed. They dropped her to the floor alongside it, where she lay still, feigning semi-consciousness.

Ivana, bleeding freely from the bridge of her nose, squatted and turned the handle left and right in a sequence she’d evidently memorised. She then tried to lift the thing, but this wasn’t easy; it was more like a circular slab of steel than a regular lid. Alyssa helped, all the time keeping the muzzle of her pistol jammed into Lucy’s neck. Together, they got it upright, a stale reek wafting free. Lucy glimpsed the hole underneath. At first, she was perplexed. It was about two feet across; perhaps half a foot down there was a polished crossbar of tubular steel, and below that a similar tubular bar, this second one descending into pitch darkness like a fireman’s pole. But only when Ivana put the cardboard cylinder down, letting it drop into the blackness, did Lucy realise what she was seeing.

This was it. The route.

Though how she was supposed to get down there with her hands cuffed behind her back, she didn’t know.

‘Just drop her,’ Ivana told her sister, wiping at her nose with her sleeve, smearing red all over her once pretty face. ‘So what if she breaks her fucking legs?’

Alyssa snickered, tucking the gun into the waistband of her shorts so that she could grab the hostage with both hands. Lucy knew that this was the sole opportunity she would get, and so, with the sort of Herculean effort only the truly desperate can muster, she swung her torso upward, slamming the flat of her left foot on the floor, and levering herself upright on one leg.

‘Fuck!’ Alyssa shouted, trying to grapple with her.

Lucy kneed her in the groin. It was a better tactic against male opponents, but it still had the desired effect, Alyssa doubling forward, gasping. Ivana, hunkered alongside the hole, tried to grab her legs, but Lucy kicked at her, knocking her sideways, and then turned and, still with hands cuffed, bolted out into the corridor.

She ran down it pell-mell.

Ivana shrieked incoherently, coming out behind her.