Gold chains – Tranquil – shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘Blackbeard wants Forest left alone, so we leave Forest alone. Make sure you do too.’

So Chips really had defected to Blackbeard. That meant it was a dark day for Shacktown. Ahab expected to feel angry, betrayed, but all he felt was sad – sad for the town, but also for the young woman Chips had once been, lost to this new world.

But he wasn’t beaten. The town would put up a fight, one way or another.

First of all, he needed to see what they were burning – was it evidence that could be used against them? Was it correspondence from the drug suppliers? Was it Davey’s accounts?

The look of Tranquil and Vance gave him pause. They really were hard men; it’d be no good taking them on directly. What he needed was a distraction.

He crept back out of the white correa and around to the front of the house, to the Mercedes. It didn’t take him long – jiggling the handle and rocking the car back and forth – to get the alarm blaring.

The moment it went off, he ran back down the side of the house, his footsteps masked by the car alarm. He set off the sensor light and flinched as he was bathed in light, but Chips and the men had run through the inside of the house to get out the front – guilty people had a habit of chasing any alarm they hadn’t set off themselves.

He vaulted the bushes and moved into the yard, pawing through the paperwork in the box beside the fire pot, breathing in the smoke. They were just purchase orders and invoices for Dempsey Abalone, all signed by Davey. It wasn’t unusual to use fraudulent invoices as part of a money laundering scheme, but why would Chips be destroying them?

Then it came to him. With those invoices signed by Davey gone, Chips would have to sign them for the money to go through. She was effectively holding the crew to ransom – if she didn’t sign new invoices, they couldn’t wash their drug money, and no one would be getting paid.

She was making herself indispensable. And proving it to Blackbeard’s men while she was at it.

The car alarm was turned off, creating a ringing silence that left Ahab feeling dangerously exposed. He sprinted back into the correa bush, sprawling flat on the ground.

Chips and her new friends came back out into the yard.

Ahab noticed with alarm that Tranquil now had a sawn-off shotgun on his shoulder. He indicated the sensor light with a nod, raising a finger to his mouth, gesturing for Chips and Vance to help him search the yard.