‘I want you to know, if you use the cafe on Monday morning, I might be in there working undercover as a waitress. If I am there it’s important that you don’t do anything that might give away you know me.’

Rachel looked anxious and signed quickly.

‘She’s worried you told Nick about her.’

Jane shook her head. ‘Don’t be. He doesn’t know that you’ve spoken to me and, like I promised you, he never will.’

Rachel sighed with relief and signed, asking if Jane would like her to stop using the cafe for a bit.

‘It’s entirely up to you, Rachel, but I’d be grateful if you’d continue going in and lip-reading what the men talk about.’

She looked at Emma for advice.

‘I think you should if it will help their investigation, but like Jane said, it’s up to you.’

Rachel licked her lips as she thought about it, then agreed that she would go to the cafe on Monday morning.

*

As Jane and Teflon walked towards the stairwell to leave, Emma called out to them.

‘I wasn’t entirely truthful with you about why I needed to get away from the estate. We did suffer abuse from some local teenagers, and occasionally a few adults. We even had “weirdos” and “psycho twins” painted on our front door. I genuinely feared reporting it to the police would make matters worse, so we chose to ignore it and tried to avoid the people responsible when we were coming and going from the flat. Then one day everything suddenly changed. Someone had repainted our front door and the abuse stopped. If the kids saw us coming, they’d walk off or look the other way.’

‘Sounds like “someone” had a word in their ear and told them to stop. Do you know who it might have been?’ Jane asked.

‘At first, I didn’t, but after a few weeks I discovered it was Uncle Asil, our father’s brother.’

Jane looked perplexed. ‘The same man who abandoned you twenty-two years ago?’

Emma nodded. ‘He worked for my father and returned to Cyprus after his death. He came back to England a few years ago and found out where we lived. I wrote the letters to the council about a move to get away from him . . . Asil is a criminal, just like my father was.’

‘It sounds like you’ve spoken to him.’

‘He waited for me outside my work one day. I didn’t know who he was at first, but he called me Emira and I could see the resemblance to my father. I told him I wanted nothing to do with him and walked away, but he begged me to hear him out and said he only wanted to help me and Rachel. I said we were fine and didn’t need his help, but he followed me and said he was already helping us.’