Richard chuckled. It came from somewhere, the ridiculousness of the situation perhaps, all that had happened in the last few days and the hopelessness he now found himself in. ‘You underestimated my old mate. You might have had me worked out, a silly old man blinded by my own anger, but you didn’t reckon on Glenn. Always the soldier, that boy. He tagged you. A GPS Tracker on your car. Sent me an email with the details while you were still lying to me on that bench, when you were telling me that Glenn wouldn’t matter, that it would be the last time I saw you.’ Richard had regained enough strength to cough up what was lining his throat. He hacked it up and spat it onto the floor. His vision had returned enough that he could see his spit gleam in the weak light. Anything further away was still blurred at the edges. He could make out the shape of the man as he stopped pacing to stand over him. Richard raised himself off his painful ear to look up. The light now reflected off another surface close enough for him to see: the polished end of a shotgun barrel. He stared directly at it as he continued: ‘That’s how I found where your car was coming to and from. So I knocked on a few doors, yours eventually. But I wouldn’t have known you were hiding out in here had I not got to speak to your wife. Do you know what she said to me? She made me promise to shoot you dead. What sort of a wife would say that, Nicholas?’

‘You’re lying!’ The confidence seemed to slip for just a moment.

‘I think you know I’m not. She hates you, no way you don’t know it.’

‘We’ll see. You first, Richard, then we’ll see just how much she hates me. I’ll be sure to tell her you sent me.’ The voice was still controlled but there was a rage that was increasing with every word.

Richard rolled a little more onto his back, shifting to stare straight up and fix on the ceiling. The clamour in his chest had gone. All that was left was a calmness and suddenly he wasn’t staring at the ceiling, he was staring beyond it at a star-spotted sky, the way he’d done so many times in the last year when he had laid out, fixing on a distant light, convincing himself it was Angela smiling down. She would be smiling now, he was sure of that. Because he was coming to join her.

Joel grabbed the large padlock on the main doors of the Phoenix Railway Club but there was no give. DS Rose appeared from where she had run round the left side of the building.