‘Thank you. We’ll meet you out the front . . .’

‘No,’ said Mims, sharply, turning to Georgie. ‘Not her. I don’t like her. Just me and you, lawyer-man.’

*

With great care, the owner replaced the blowtorch back in its box and picked up the iPhone from the nearby table. There were several pictures of Alexia’s mutilated face taken from different angles and the owner was pleased with the overall effect. There was something very abstract about the result. Perhaps one day they would recognise the beauty of what had been achieved and hang pictures of it in the Tate for the public to drool over.

The owner downloaded the pictures onto a MacBook and zipped up the best three in a separate folder before taking a plain, battered-looking Ford Mondeo to an internet cafe in Soho. There, the photographs were attached to an email and sent to their intended recipient along with a mobile phone number and nothing else.

The owner sat back, arms folded, and watched as the status bar above the email changed from SENDING to SENT.

The first conversation with Dominique Elias had been a disappointment in many respects. The owner had lost control and veered off script, angered by the old man’s arrogance, his blasphemous attempts at deception. But despite this lack of control, the owner had been fair. Elias had been warned. The consequences had been spelt out, but he had not listened.

He had not listened and that is why I had to act.

The owner looked around. The cafe was tatty, with Rastafarian artwork plastered on the walls and an array of shrunken heads hanging from the ceiling. They were plastic, of course, but still enough to draw the owner’s disgust. There was one other patron, a black man in his thirties captivated by his computer screen, sitting at the table opposite and a woman behind the counter paying little attention to anything other than her nails. There was a smell in the air that disagreed with the owner, who detested the cafe. It was nothing more than a sad microcosm of the lonely existence of man on a dying planet. Just one that was painted with orange and yellow walls. But it was one of the few internet cafes in London with no CCTV inside or out, so even if they managed to trace his messages back to the computer’s IP address, no one would connect the owner to the message. Or by the time they did, it would be too late. The owner was a specialist at merging into the crowd. The owner had always been part of life’s backdrop. Soon all that would be changed.

Somewhere, a phone was ringing. The owner looked down and saw the phone buzzing by the computer and eventually answered it.

‘Yes?’

No words were uttered at the other end of the line. There was just the sound of a man crippled with unimaginable pain.