Joker put his face up close so that she could smell his breath. ‘Listen you bitch. We’ve killed your friends and unless you talk to me you can join them.’

He nodded at Ginge and he dragged her by the hair over to where Fisher lay face down in a pool of his own blood. Ginge threw her on top of the body and rubbed her face in the blood. Joker walked over and kicked her in the back, over her kidney where he knew the pain would be excruciating.

‘Get her on her knees,’ Joker said, and Ginge hoisted her up by her hair. Joker stood in front of her and levelled the gun at her mouth.

She shook her head from side to side. ‘You’re too late,’ she whispered.

‘Stand to the side,’ Joker said to Ginge. ‘I’m going to blow her fucking head off.’ Ginge moved from behind her and Bunny and Jacko went to stand by the window.

‘There’s nobody who’ll know that you didn’t die when we stormed the flat,’ he told her menacingly. ‘There are no witnesses. This isn’t going to be another Gibraltar.’

‘You’re too late,’ she said. ‘It’s set to go off in less than five minutes. They won’t be able to land in time.’

‘A plane?’

‘No shit, Sherlock.’ She cleared her throat and spat down on the floor, not to insult him but because her mouth was filling up with blood and saliva.

‘Which plane?’

She was talking now, because she figured that whatever she told him it wouldn’t make a difference. She wanted him to know, and to know that there was nothing he could do to stop it. She told him it was a special flight to Rome, that a journalist called Ian Wood was carrying the bomb, and that everybody on board the flight was as good as dead. She began to laugh sourly until Joker hit her on the side of her head with his gun as Ginge began relaying the information to the Colonel.

Woody was on his fourth whisky when the ‘fasten seat-belt’ light went on and the front of the plane dipped down.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. There is some turbulence ahead and we are descending to avoid it. Please make sure your seat is upright and your seat-belt is fastened.’

Woody frowned. He’d flown often enough to know that the normal procedure was to fly over bad weather, not under it. He fastened his seat-belt and sipped his whisky. Better to drink it rather than to take the risk of spilling it, he decided.