The van arrived at the gatehouse of the new jail, Steve passing across a clipboard holding a stack of documents, including the prison escort record and its matching risk assessment document, all neatly filled out. After being checked through by the gate officer, the barrier was lifted and the vehicle made its way into the courtyard. Other more detailed documents had been emailed to the prison governor, ahead of the arrival. Everything appeared to be as it should be. Bureaucracy doing its job.

Almost every word of it was fiction.

The prisoner they were escorting was sixty-three, not sixty-seven. He had served thirty years, not six. He had not killed his wife.

Neil Wright didn’t exist. It was a pseudonym.

The prisoner was Neville Rollason, a notorious child-murderer. He had at the Old Bailey in 1989 been given an indeterminate sentence for the killing of at least five boys between the ages of ten and seventeen over a period of four years. The judge had described him as: ‘Perhaps the most wicked, bestial and cold-hearted killer ever brought before me.’ The decades in various segregation wings across the British penal system had gradually changed his appearance. The grinning, muscular, tousle-haired goblin of thirty-three, a staple of the 1980s tabloid press, had gradually transmuted. He had aged. Wiry now and almost bald, he affected a stoop that added more years. Only the dark watchful eyes, now behind the red-framed spectacles, were the same.

Only one thing on the false documentation was correct. The release date of Tuesday 2 July 2019, when this criminal, known in his heyday as the Bogeyman, would be released back onto Britain’s streets. He’d had more than thirty years away from his passion, and after working hard to fool the shrinks and officials on the Parole Board, he was anxious to get started again. He’d already started compiling a mental list, the most recent addition to which was the name of the young officer escorting him. Aaron Jenkins of Crewe. He’d read it from the lanyard. But that was for pleasure. All in good time. There was more serious stuff to be planned. Like revenge against those who had tormented him. The friends and families of his victims. And, of course, the young fit policeman who had chased him down in the street in Croydon on that fateful day in 1988. Drawing the knife, and getting it knocked from his hand. Inside, he had replayed that moment in his head a million times. An exaggeration? Not much. There are 950 million seconds, give or take, in a thirty-year sentence. That’s a lot of time to plot revenge. To envisage all the details of what can be done to a bound and helpless victim. Blades, acid, drugs. Eyeballs, genitals, fingernails.

It helped to have a fake identity.