They stood watching the proceedings. Firemen wearing breathing apparatus and heavy protective suits gathered up their equipment and rolled up limp hoses, but it could be hours before the building was deemed structurally safe for police and a forensics team to go inside, and for a pathologist to examine the body.

Sasha’s car had been moved further along the street and she went over to look inside. There were scratches all over the paintwork and the leather seats were studded with glass; jagged shards were scattered in the footwell. Her beloved Spider was already on its last legs and this indignity was the last thing it needed.

‘Poor thing,’ Sasha muttered.

Sensing her upset, Ajay said, ‘We’ll get you home in a patrol car, and I’ll get someone to give your car a vacuum. You can pick up the old girl from the station in the morning. Go home, Sasha, and we’ll see you tomorrow.’

24

They drove along the coast in stony silence, Jez gunning the open-topped BMW along the winding lanes with Bethany beside him, her eyes hidden behind a big pair of white sunglasses. In the back, Abs watched the way her red hair spilled from the edges of her scarf and whipped about in the wind, trembling against the long slope of her neck. She didn’t turn around once, didn’t even attempt to communicate with him, and Abs wished he’d never come.

He tried not to bear a grudge against her for what she did – he supposed she believed she was acting in Jez’s best interests – but he couldn’t help but feel that she would have been totally unconcerned if he had been beaten up, or even killed, by Jenkins and his dodgy mates.

Abs could tell Jez was annoyed that Bethany had gone behind his back in order to protect him from Davey Jenkins, and he drove too fast. They zoomed around bends, the velocity making Abs brace against the back seat, and he heard Bethany tell Jez to slow down. ‘You’re going to get us killed.’

But after forty minutes or so, Jez took a sharp corner into a narrow lane hidden from the road by shrubs and bushes and flew up a twisting gravel drive towards Bethany’s parents’ country house.

The house loomed into view as Jez drove onto a circular drive full of cars. It was long and stately, with tall windows on either side of a big black door. Red and yellow roses crept up the brickwork. And the sprawling property was old, Victorian or Edwardian, every inch the home of a man who had earned millions from business. Trying to find the toilet here once, Abs learned that it was one of those buildings where you could easily get lost if you didn’t know your way around.