As they hurried through the alleyway, Priest examined the phone they had extracted from Simeon’s locker. It was a Nokia, but an older model – not even touch-screen. Priest held the POWER button and, after a few seconds, the low-res screen lit up and the Nokia logo briefly appeared. The battery was low and the phone was struggling to find a signal.

‘What do you think?’ asked Georgie.

They reached the end of the alleyway and Priest stopped as he waited for the phone to load whatever data was on it. He was surprised the phone didn’t have a lock on it, given what lengths Simeon had gone to in order to hide it. But then again perhaps that was the point and Georgie was right: Simeon wanted someone to find this phone.

‘I think we’re finally on to something,’ he replied.

‘Does it have internet access?’

‘It barely has a colour screen, but maybe.’

After what seemed like an age, the phone finally stopped whirring and Priest was able to navigate the menu. He clicked through to the text messages but it wasn’t easy to assimilate: the incoming messages were saved individually with a separate folder for outgoing, meaning he had to keep swapping between menu items to read the dialogue.

‘There are texts from someone in his contacts he calls “USER3412’’,’ Priest muttered.

‘What about?’

‘I don’t know, it’s difficult to follow. It’s also difficult to work out when the messages were sent. I can’t see how to look at the metadata, although I suppose there must be a way.’

They started to walk a little further up the road. There was a pub with outdoor seating and a group of old men brandishing pints of dark ale. It was hardly the weather for it but Priest supposed they had formed an immunity to the cold since the smoking ban.

Eventually, he managed to put together some of the messages in sequence.

‘Restoring balance,’ Priest said aloud. And what do the initials SNE, HNE and SNE stand for?