Sergeant Mullally took off his helmet and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘They’d realized that the place was empty, and that there was no party going on, and they were on their way out again when we came in and confronted them. These three ran in here, but we stopped them before they could get away upstairs. Not that it would have done them any good. We still would have caught them.’

Sergeant Mullally’s two fellow officers lifted up the whining gang member under his armpits and dragged him limp-legged out of the bar, his trainers scumbling on the floor.

‘We ordered them to put down their weapons, but they told us to eff off and a few other choice phrases. I’ve no doubt at all that they were high on something or other. Monkey dust is my guess. We ordered them again, but they still refused, and then one of them fired a shot at us, and even though he missed, and they were high, we had no option but to shoot to kill.’

Katie leaned over the bodies. ‘Patrick – let’s take a lamp at their faces.’

Detective O’Donovan pulled a pair of forensic gloves out of his raincoat pocket and snapped them on. Then he bent over the two dead men and rolled up their balaclavas.

Neither man could have been older than his mid-twenties. One had a wispy scobe moustache and a silver ring through his septum, while the other had snakes tattooed on his neck. The one with the moustache had a bullet hole right in the centre of his forehead, and the back of his balaclava was a bagful of soft bloody mush.

‘Barry’s not among them,’ said Katie. ‘It looks like the lord and master sent his minions out to do his dirty work for him while he stayed drinking at The Cotton Ball.’

She looked around the bar. There was a door at the back, which was slightly ajar, and she could see stairs, carpeted in worn-out green hessian. From the floor plans that she had downloaded, she knew those stairs led up to The Weavers’ back bedrooms, where any live-in staff presumably slept. She looked down at the bodies on the floor again, and then she said to Sergeant Mullally, ‘How many were there altogether?’

‘Three came out of the front car… three from the second… but only two came out of the third car.’

‘That makes eight. We’ve killed three of them and lifted four. That’s seven.’

She pointed towards the open door. ‘Number eight must have bolted upstairs. In which case, he must still be up there. There’s no access to the back.’