She parked on a cul-de-sac just off St Clement’s Avenue, in front of a row of six terraced houses now boarded up and marked for demolition. Walking to the end of the short road, which no longer had a name of its own, she stopped and listened. Hearing nothing, she headed south along St Clement’s Avenue, following a rickety fence of corrugated metal. Some two hundred yards later, the fencing gave out, entire sections having fallen and been trampled. On the other side, two monoliths of rotted brick reared, vast and ghostly, into the night sky: Penrose Mill and its sister carbuncle, the old Griggs Warehouse. The ground in front of them was open and littered with every kind of refuse, and normally at night would be pockmarked by small fires burning with greasy reddish flames, the dark, tattered shapes of homeless folk clustered around them. Lucy especially expected this in the current warm, dry spell: the town’s forgotten people enjoying the balmy night rather than huddling beneath broken stoops or crammed into sewer pipes and burned-out cellars.

But at present there was no one. Not a soul in sight. Which was strange and not a little eerie. It was also inconvenient, as the only way to find the ex-nun would be by asking someone where she was.

Lucy walked forward warily. She’d consciously dressed down for this, putting on jeans, training shoes, an old hoodie and a denim jacket. This wasn’t simply so that she could blend in with the crowd, but to make it look as if she wouldn’t be worth robbing. There’d be many unfortunates here, men and women who through no fault of their own had fallen through the cracks of society, but there’d be addicts too, alcoholics and mentally unstable characters who could turn violent in an instant. That was also why she had an expandable Autolock baton in a special scabbard sewn inside her jacket, a small can of CS spray in one back pocket, and her handcuffs in the other.

At the moment, though, it looked as if she wouldn’t need any of them.

The place was deserted.