It took ten minutes to find the edge of the woods in the dark. It had stopped raining and the skies were clouded over, but the steady stream of aircraft heading west to Heathrow was more helpful than any compass and within twenty minutes he’d walked to the trees at the back of Pete’s garden.

With trembling hands, Fletcher reached up to grab the top of the fence and pulled himself with flailing legs up and over, into a heap on the flower beds and shrubs. His leg caught the fence panels as he fell, and the bang seemed to thunder through the gardens. Fletcher lay in a heap on the ground, not daring, not able to move. Was that fox shit on the lawn? Disgusting. He hated foxes. He’d shoot them all.

There were no lights on in the house. Panting and catching his breath, he moved to the French doors at the back of the house. Locked and double-glazed. The kitchen door was firmly secured too, but it had a cat flap. When Fletcher pushed his hand in, he couldn’t reach the lock. Maybe the kitchen window would be easier to force?

The padlock on Peter’s shed door came apart with just one blow of a brick that Fletcher found in the rockery. And inside the shed was a heavy screwdriver, strong enough to jemmy open the kitchen window. Inside the house, Fletcher pulled the curtains and lit the gas fire. Then he sat on the floor, holding his knees to his chin with his arms, and the screwdriver in his hands, as the warmth slowly soaked into his clothes and skin. And he sobbed in the darkness, not for his victims or their families, but for himself.

#

Newhaven Ferry Port, East Sussex

Vicki Braithwaite nudged the gears into first and eased the lorry forward. She had timed her arrival to ensure the dockside would be busy and she had been waiting in the lorry queue for forty minutes. ‘Travel when it’s busy,’ Dave had told her, ‘and it helps that you’re a girl and a white girl at that. They don’t stop girls as much.’ Braithwaite had no idea if that was true, but this was her seventh job for him, and she had yet to have a problem with customs.

The articulated lorry in front pulled away, and she found herself at the front of the queue. She pulled level with the window and leaned out, handing her passport and paperwork to a weary customs officer in a fluorescent tabard.

‘What’s in the back?’ the woman asked.

‘Chilled food,’ she answered, concentrating hard to look relaxed.

The customs officer looked through the paperwork and Braithwaite focused on breathing. She had done the same at Dieppe. ‘Go through Dieppe,’ Dave had said, ‘cos they’ve got no heartbeat monitors there. And they don’t look in the back of fridges if they’re sealed.’

‘Okay. Off you go.’ Braithwaite realised she had stopped breathing and slowly exhaled, wound up the window and slipped the lorry into first.