Rank and sweet, like something good that had been left to rot.

The doors slammed shut.

My muscles flexed and trembled and now the pain began.

The transit van started to move.

And it was only then that I realised they had not come for Abu Din.

They had come for me.

25

I sat on the bench of the transit van as docile as a lamb being led to slaughter, my mind feeling that it was separated from the rest of the world by thick soundproofed glass. I stared at the black Nomex face masks of the two figures sitting opposite me and they stared back, and for a while all I could think about was the way my muscles twitched and shuddered with a will of their own.

Then I took a breath and tried to think, sucking up the pain and pushing it to one side, telling myself that it would keep on getting better, moment by moment, and telling myself that I could take it.

Think.

There was a smell I knew in the back of the van.

Something foul that had once been sweet.

Rotting fruit.

Dead flowers.

Sugar and human waste.

Think.

I took a breath and looked again at the two figures on the bench opposite me. The big one – the one who had filled my nerve endings with electricity, the one who had picked me up as if I weighed nothing – was sitting by my side. And there had to be one more man driving.

Four of them. The full team. None of them were talking. None of them displayed any telltale tattoos or jewellery.

They were good.

But they were not cops.

If they had been cops – and there had always been the unspoken suspicion that the Hanging Club just might be rogue cops – they wouldn’t simply have knocked the stuffing out of me with a cheap East European taser knock-off. A formal arrest will always be accompanied by physically taking control, was the first thing they taught you at Hendon. They hadn’t done it.

They had merely flattened me with their pound-store taser and chucked me in the back of their van. Any cop would have done more. But I was not cuffed. I was not unconscious. And I would get stronger with every passing minute that I could stay alive.

I looked at the masked faces, realising they had still not said one word.

‘So if you’re all here, then who was driving the white van?’ I asked.

‘Friends,’ murmured the large figure by my side.

‘Friends?’ I said. ‘I bet you’ve got lots of friends, right?’

A fist pounded furiously on the back of the cab. The driver was sending a clear message.

No talking!

I glimpsed eyes wild with rage behind another black Nomex and I felt the three figures in the back of the van shift uncomfortably. So was that the leader behind the wheel?