That was the point Danny had turned it off. Now the only sound in the cabin was the drone of the tyres as he sat at 60mph on the inside lane of a quiet A2. He had his instructions. His directions too. He shifted his gaze from his cold, white headlights to glance at his sat nav. He was seventeen minutes away.

He didn’t know Sittingbourne well. Football stadiums and pubs were generally how he negotiated towns, but Sittingbourne was not a place in which he had visited either recently. He was thankful for his sat nav. A postcode had been left for him by the suited man and it took him directly to the street. The instructions found with it told him this was just where he was to leave the car. It was residential, tightly packed and crammed with parked cars. Most of the houses had lit windows. It was gone 11 p.m. and the occupants would be settled for the night, most already in bed.

He found a space. He had needed to drift some way past the alleyway that the instructions told him to use. The appearance of interior lights when he silenced the car made him self-conscious and hasty. He caught his foot on the seatbelt and stumbled into the middle of the road.

‘Take it easy!’ he muttered to himself. He needed to slow down, to be more deliberate. He could feel his heart pulsing in his chest. His breathing was shallow and even that felt rushed. He opened the boot of his car. The bag under the bench had also contained a solid lump wrapped in towelling. The pistol. It had to be. He’d left it wrapped up and hid it under the floor with the space saver wheel. He hadn’t wanted it in the cabin with him.

He leaned in to unwrap it. The streetlighting leaked past him to catch on the matt black barrel. The handle was plastic. He wasn’t expecting that. He didn’t know what to expect. His idea of a pistol was largely based on cowboy movies.

It was lighter than he had expected too and ergonomically pleasing to the point of being comfortable in his grip: a well-designed murder weapon. Danny felt a shiver that wasn’t caused by the freezing mist that hung beneath the streetlights.

The alleyway held a thicker darkness and Danny was glad of it. His right hand trailed by his side with the pistol gripped tight. As much as he wanted to conceal it, the suppressor screwed to the end made it an awkward length and he didn’t trust it not to go off in his pocket or his waistband. He didn’t trust himself.