Instinct told Wada there was safety in a group. And there was no better group to lose herself in than a Japanese one. She dashed across the road between the traffic and peered round the front of the coach. The tour organizer was conferring with the driver about the loading of the luggage. Wada sprang up the steps into the coach, smiled blithely at the nearest passenger, who smiled blithely back, and made for the first empty seat she could see.

The elderly woman she plonked herself breathlessly next to looked at her placidly and asked what had delayed her, for all the world as if she recognized her as a legitimate member of the party. Wada said something unconvincing about losing a button, but the woman seemed entirely taken in and embarked on a monologue about working as a seamstress in Osaka back in the mid-Showa era. Wada didn’t interrupt her and tried to give the impression of being utterly fascinated.

She heard the doors of the luggage hold clunk shut. A few minutes later, the tour organizer, a brisk young woman, came aboard, followed by the driver, who lumbered into his seat and started the engine.

‘Next stop Ely,’ the organizer announced through a microphone. ‘Very beautiful cathedral.’

And the coach pulled away.

TWENTY-FIVE

NICK CAME TO his senses slowly and was conscious for several minutes before he remembered being attacked. The puncture-wound on his neck was sore to the touch. As for the journey, all he could dimly recollect was being jolted around in the back of a van. He had no clear idea how he’d arrived where he now was.

Eventually, he realized he was lying on a mattress on a concrete floor next to a breeze block wall. He sat up woozily and looked around.

He was in a wire cage at one end of a windowless steel-roofed shed illuminated by fluorescent strip lights. There was a closed roller door at the other end. The door to the cage was padlocked shut. Beside the mattress stood a plastic bucket and, on a shelf above it, several litre bottles of water and a pack of loo rolls.

As he turned, he suddenly became aware that his cage was one of three stretching across the rear wall of the shed. And one of the others, separated from him by an empty cage, was occupied.

A woman of about forty, with short dark hair, dressed in black running kit, was lying on the mattress in her cage. Her eyes were closed and Nick wondered if she was unconscious. ‘Hello?’ he called.

She wasn’t unconscious. She raised her head and looked at him. ‘You’re back with us, then,’ she said in a light Australian accent.

‘Where am I?’

‘Can’t help you there.’ She rose to her feet and advanced to the side of her cage. ‘Did you run into some trouble with window-cleaners?’

‘Yes. Did they … bring me here?’