‘What do you think has happened to him?’ she asked.

Gillard shrugged. ‘That very much depends on the whim of the individuals who have him.’

‘They’re nae going to take him for a wee pint and steak and chips, that’s for certain,’ Rainy said.

It was 2:57 a.m. Gillard sat with DC Carl Hoskins in an unmarked car outside a block of tatty council flats in Farnborough. They weren’t alone. Squashed into a small unmarked van across the road were four uniformed officers in stab vests and baseball caps, with a door ram. The place they were keeping an eye on was on the third floor, number 302, a one-bedroomed apartment. Gillard looked again through binoculars. There was an apparently discarded settee and refrigerator on the balcony, and some flickering purple light from the curtained lounge. He had been hoping that the target would be asleep. The fact that a TV was on didn’t prove he was awake, but Gillard would have preferred he was in bed. The target was a violent man with a criminal record, who in the past had possessed an illegal firearm. Nigel Chivers, former bouncer, sometime construction worker, divorced father of two, aged thirty-seven. Gillard consulted the flat layout plan on his iPad. The external door went straight onto the lounge with no hallway. The chance of surprise was still good if they could get up there quietly.

In three minutes, a hundred miles north in Birmingham, West Mercia police were going to raid seven known addresses of AVENGE members. They were coordinated with Gillard’s raids, the one here and another being undertaken in Andover by Hampshire police for Chivers’ mate Terry Dalton. The whole operation had been very rapidly pulled together by DCS Nick D’Angelo. As the seconds ticked down, Gillard leaned out the window and exchanged a hand signal with the uniformed sergeant in the van. He got a nod in return. Back up in the flat, the TV was still on.

The last time he’d been involved in a raid, the uniforms had forgotten to bring a locksmith. The good news was that this time Gillard’s own reconnaissance had discovered that the block’s external lock was broken. The bad news was that the tiny lift was barely big enough for two people, or one if it was the twenty-five-stone PC Tony Tunnicliffe with the door ram. Gillard had given clear instructions that instead of a manic charge up six half-flights of concrete stairs, waking everybody with the sound of constabulary beetle crushers and heavy breathing, it was to be a slow and stealthy ascent. That gave them a much greater chance of catching Chivers unawares.