‘I’m okay. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be back with Josie very soon. Why don’t you make her one of those egg salads for when we get back?’

‘I will. Are you sure you’re okay? I wish I was there.’

‘It has to be this way. I’ll have a cheeseburger.’

‘I know, I know it has to be this way. I’ll make us both a bacon and cheeseburger, and egg salad for Josie. Waiting on the table for you.’ He paused. ‘Try not to be scared. They have police scattered around, so nothing will happen to you.’

She said nothing. If this was some kind of trick to get at her, she didn’t care. It would mean Josie was gone. Next to that, her own plight meant nothing. But she nodded for the camera, for Nick, for all of them, to keep them calm.

‘Ten minutes,’ Bennet said. ‘You should go now and wait in the phone box, just to make sure nobody else can use it.’

She scanned her surroundings. Nobody seemed to be paying attention to the Corsa in a paint warehouse’s car park, but the Ogres would surely manage that without being spotted themselves.

Bennet said: ‘We can hear you once you leave the car, but you won’t hear us. We’ll see what’s ahead of you. If there’s a problem—’

‘There won’t be,’ she cut in.

She didn’t want to think that way. She picked up the shoebox of money and got out. She took a breath and started to walk across the car park, feeling the weight of eyes upon her. Ten, fifteen, twenty or so people on George Street, walking this way and that. Dozens more passing by on the main road into the town centre. Hundreds of cars zipping by on the dual carriageway. She was boxed in by myriad eyes, and any of them could belong to a man who might already have put her girl’s blood on his hands. Not knowing who was out there made her feel blind, so she ignored every piece of the whole world except the shoebox, which she carried in both hands like a tray bearing something fragile, and the phone box, which waited to pounce like a predator.

The tall security camera a hundred metres away seemed to stare right at her as she crossed George Street and approached the phone box. From this angle she could see the busy roundabout, and the train station, so close now, and the supermarket next door. Eight minutes until her world blossomed or wilted. Her legs barely carried her the final few feet to the phone box.