She felt nothing herself, but there was a crunch of cartilage, and the newcomer’s head, eyes rolling and blood oozing through the sweat-damp fabric covering the nostrils, slumped down onto Lorna’s chest, legs sagging. Lorna locked a tight-muscled arm around the exposed neck and throat, clamping it in a chokehold. All she had to do now was squeeze and keep on squeezing, perhaps throwing herself around a little bit, to affect a breakage of the spine.

The athlete was amazed by how lucidly she was contemplating this, considering that she’d almost never committed an act of wrongdoing before. Of course, having just needed to fight hard for her own life might have something to do with that.

The question was, could she carry it through?

The battle was over, and her opponent was at least semi-unconscious if not fully so. Was anything to be gained by killing? This lunatic would come around eventually, but would hardly be in a state to counterattack …

But while Lorna was dilly-dallying inside her own head about how best to resolve this, she hadn’t been paying attention to anything else, including the door, which had now opened quietly on those well-oiled hinges, admitting a second assailant. When she realised, she dropped the groaning figure to the floor and twirled around, but it was too late. Some kind of super-tensile, metallic cord had already been looped over her head, cinched closed at her neck and was now tightening across her throat.

Lorna gasped, squawked, gagged.

She tried to lurch away across the room, but was held fast from behind, and still the noose tightened, tightened, tightened. Frothing at the lips, she drove her elbows backward, but to no avail. This opponent was clearly better at violence than the first, holding Lorna at arm’s length. The athlete clawed at her neck, but the cord was now so tightly wound that it had buried itself in flesh and muscle. The pain and horror of this were so overwhelming that even the rupturing of Lorna’s eyeballs was as nothing. When she sank to her knees, she was stone blind, but that didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered any more, Lorna realised with sudden, chilling clarity.

It was over.

Chapter 13

Lucy arrived at Robber’s Row before seven o’clock on Monday morning, hoping to get ahead of herself before the day commenced. The CID office, or DO as it was colloquially called, was not empty. Night Crime were still at their desks, working bleary-eyed through the paperwork accrued during the previous shift, but, rather to Lucy’s surprise, Stan Beardmore was in too. She’d no sooner dumped her laptop on her desk than he stuck his head out of his office. ‘Lucy, can you step in here for a minute, please?’

Thinking that this felt vaguely ominous, as she rarely saw the DI before nine, she wandered in, only to find another person waiting for her too.