‘Sorry to interrupt. I’ll call you back later.’ Perry had spotted a black Range Rover entering the estate. He shut the laptop lid, tossed it onto the passenger seat and watched as the vehicle went past him. The driver was a bulky male wearing sunglasses. Once it had turned onto Southdown Way, Perry followed at a discreet distance. The target turned left into Ryeland Drive. His own home was on Romney Crook, the next turning on the right. He willed the vehicle to make the turning, but it did not. Instead it continued up the slight hill, and into Wensleydale Walk, parking outside number sixteen, in the same half on, half off the kerb fashion that Perry had witnessed outside his own home. This must be him. The man who makes my wife howl with pleasure.

Bastard.

Perry didn’t dare draw attention to himself by stopping, but drove past and into a cul-de-sac beyond. He turned the car around, stopped for a couple of minutes and then drove back at low speed. The driver was nowhere to be seen.

That was fine. Perry would come back later.

He drove home, and was relieved to see no sign of his wife’s Audi. Ideally, he wanted to get his hands on her phone and examine the call records to really work out what had been happening, but Mel was a very canny woman and the device was never out of her sight. In fact it was a toss-up whether Mel or Vanessa spent more time glued to their phones.

Once into his home office, he picked up the phone, intending to ring Rainy back. Then he stopped. There was something he wanted to do first. Something about the Wensleydale Walk address was familiar. He logged on to the local crime database and discovered that, yes, this was the house from which the Mitsubishi Warrior had been stolen a couple of weeks ago. He looked up the details of the couple from the electoral register. Kyle Halliday and Angela Wright. There were no previous entries for him.

Perry looked back through his emails, and found one that had been sent all around by DC Hoskins, headlined ‘The tale of the flying slipper’, attached to which was the video from Halliday’s CCTV. He had glimpsed it once at the office already, but now took a more detailed look. His adversary in love had certainly been courageous, rushing out to stop the thief. The comical partial disrobing, and the obviously painful fall, made Perry chuckle. Whichever German coined the word schadenfreude, delight in the misfortune of others, had clearly understood the innate cruelty of the human soul. The man was certainly muscular and well-developed. Trying to confront him physically, however tempting, might be stupid. There would be better ways.

After three viewings, Perry set aside project vengeance, and got on with the day job. But at last he had a smile on his face.

Twenty-four hours on from the start of Project Hawkeye, NCA resources had filled up the surveillance suite at Surrey Police headquarters. The mobile ANPR units were parked along key junctions on the patchwork of minor roads within the target area. They sent in a constant stream of data which was assessed in real-time by two specialist officers. So far, the Mitsubishi Warrior and Sam’s black Renault had eluded them. On the row behind, a supervisor and assistant were overseeing another five plainclothes officers in the field, visiting places within Surrey where ultra-low-temperature freezers were known to be installed. Next to them were two officers tasked with monitoring the various phones.