‘I think Neil Wright may have a new name, but he is not a new person and we must never forget that. I think he’s dangerous, in some ways even more so now than he was when he was first imprisoned. Then, he was the perfect embodiment of the Bogeyman. He looked the part. Now, at first glance he looks like a sweet elderly grandfather. But he’s only sixty-three, and I think he’s quite fit and sexually predatory. The man is evil.’

The others looked at each other.

‘I don’t think we need to be quite so tabloid about it, Leticia,’ Jill said. ‘But your comments are noted.’

Just then Leticia’s phone trilled. A text.

‘Ah, it’s from Wright’s phone. Thank God!’ Her face lit up.

There was a warm smile from Jill. ‘Hopefully, we will all have been worried about nothing.’

But as Leticia clicked to the message screen, her jaw dropped open. ‘Oh my God!’

‘What is it?’ Allsop asked.

Leticia showed her the phone.

This is AVENGE. We have Rollason and the bastard is going to pay.

Chapter Twenty-two

Gillard was just tidying up the files when he got a call from DI Morgan. ‘This is the news you didn’t want to hear,’ he said.

‘Rollason has committed another crime already?’ the detective said, leaning across the desk for his notebook.

‘Er no, not quite that bad. We’ve had a message from AVENGE saying they’ve captured him.’

‘The vigilante group? More than half the population would regard that as very good news.’

Morgan cleared his throat. ‘Stop playing silly buggers, Craig, this is serious.’

‘All right Graham, but is it true do you think, just a few hours after his release?’

‘It was texted from his phone to his probation officer, so yes.’

‘Are you sure it’s not Rollason having a laugh? After all, it would be the perfect excuse for him to disappear from all the licence conditions, wouldn’t it?’

There was a pause, as if the Special Branch detective hadn’t considered that possibility. ‘Leticia, his probation officer, tried to ring him back but the phone was already switched off again. Can you trace it for us?’

‘I should be able to.’ Gillard started making notes and then said: ‘If this is a phone that he was given on release, I presume you would have put a tracker app on it to make it easy to follow.’

‘No. His licence conditions preclude any use of the Internet, and so we could only give him a dumb phone. We can only trace it the old way.’

‘Shame. That is going to cost us several hours. If AVENGE have even half a collective brain cell they will have sent the message from some obscure location and then chucked the phone away. Okay, leave it with me. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’