‘Sorry about the delay, Mr Mahoney,’ she said. ‘We’re almost finished here.’

‘Don’t know how lucky you are, love. If I was as bad at my job as you are at yours, I wouldn’t make a penny. But you get paid anyway, don’t you? There’s the public sector, eh?’

‘The situation’s simple,’ she said. ‘You’re shortly going to be charged with causing dogs to fight, receiving money for admission to these fights, publicising these fights, accepting bets on these fights, possessing materials in connection with these fights, allowing your premises to be used for these fights, possessing videos of other dog-fights, and, to top it all off, causing unnecessary suffering to protected animals.’

It was quite a laundry list of villainy, but Mahoney shrugged indifferently, as if this was only to be expected.

‘But I wouldn’t make any plans to go home just yet,’ she said.

A man sidled into the doorway alongside her, wearing a sweater and jeans. He was tall and lean, with a shock of black hair and rugged, lived-in looks. He fixed Mahoney with a hard but unreadable expression.

‘This is DCI Slater of the Drugs Squad,’ Lucy said. ‘Once we’ve charged you with those offences, he’ll be re-arresting you on suspicion of possessing controlled drugs with intent to supply.’

The colour drained from Mahoney’s brutish, bearded face. He leaped to his feet.

‘If I were you, I’d think about getting lawyered up after all,’ she added.

She closed the door with a clang, though the prisoner’s voice all but punched its way through the heavy steel.

‘You flatfoot bitch! You can’t do that!’

Lucy walked back down the corridor, Slater, an old colleague, ambling alongside her.

‘Got a lot of tired officers going off-duty now, sir,’ she said, ‘who’d thoroughly appreciate it if you nailed that bastard’s bollocks to the wall.’

‘No promises, Lucy,’ Slater replied. ‘But that tends to be what we do.’

Chapter 5

It was Cora Clayburn’s fifty-fifth birthday, in honour of which she was done up even more impressively than usual, and she was rarely ever seen out of the house minus lippy or eye-liner.