John Perry raised his head, and looked behind him.

The sound of sirens, many of them, in the distance.

Three police squad cars and two vans screamed through the tunnel under the viaduct and up into the tarmacked apron. Uniformed officers piled out of their vehicles. The final van had a locksmith’s logo on the side.

DCS Raj Otara spotted Gillard and said: ‘Craig, you’re not supposed to be here.’

‘My wife is in there!’ Gillard retorted, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

‘And maybe my daughter too,’ Perry added.

Otara sighed. ‘All right, I’m not that cruel, just stay out of the way.’

The locksmith, a skinny guy in his sixties, came up to them. ‘With these locks, you’re talking a good ninety minutes to cut them. The easiest way in is actually to cut along the base of the shutter, that’ll have you inside in ten minutes.’

Otara sucked his teeth. ‘Okay, go for it.’

The locksmith pulled out the back of his van the biggest set of bolt croppers Gillard had ever seen. He took them and a big metal box of tools up to the left-hand edge of the roller door.

‘So what about the Range Rover you were tailing,’ Gillard asked Otara. ‘Wasn’t it heading in this direction?’

‘It was, but it’s been found ablaze in the village of Long Stainton. The fire service got on to it almost immediately, so let’s just hope there’s enough evidence left when CSI finally get to give it the once over.’

‘So Halliday has got himself yet another vehicle?’ Perry said.

‘Looks that way,’ Otara said.

The sound of drilling, and then grinding blotted out their words. The locksmith was gradually snipping his way across the shutter about two feet off the ground.

DC Carl Hoskins was helping PC Tony Tunnicliffe, one of the biggest cops in the county, to try to wrench out the bottom flap, but the locksmith told him to stop. ‘If you jam the mechanism, we won’t be able to wind it up, and then you’ll all have to go in and out the rabbit hole.’

‘It stinks of fish,’ Hoskins said.

Tunnicliffe had his hands resting against the metal of the door. ‘That must be why it’s so bloody cold,’ he said.

“‘Cold, with the fishes”, that’s part of the rhyme,’ Otara said, glancing at Gillard. The detective chief inspector was clenching and unclenching his fists, staring at the shutter as if he could laser his way in with his eyes.

The locksmith, sensing their impatience, cut two parallel snips in the roller door down to the ground, and kicked out a three-foot-by-two slot. Hoskins lay on his side to get an early view, and was met with a fog of freezing air that drifted out. He shone his torch through. It was clear the place had originally been a car repair joint: metal-lidded inspection pits, a broken hoist at the far end amid piles of tyres. Everyone outside heard his soft cursing at whatever it was he’d seen.