‘What do you want?’ Abs stammered in terror, but the man didn’t say a word, just stared. The guy beside him in the back casually reached into Abs’s pocket, took out his phone and chucked it out the window. Then he pulled a packet of cigarettes from his own pocket, lit one and turned away to look out at the streets speeding past, as if his job was done and he could now relax.

‘Where are we going?’ Abs asked the man in the front.

‘Shut up,’ the guy said with a sneer. They were going at such a speed that the man’s hair whipped in the breeze billowing through the open window.

‘What are you going to do with me?’ Abs had seen a movie where this happened, where a guy was kidnapped and taken to some godforsaken place in the middle of nowhere and killed. Then he thought of that poor girl, Rhiannon, and felt sick. ‘Tell me what this is about.’

‘You know what this is about,’ the man told him in a Welsh accent.

‘No, I don’t,’ Abs said. ‘Honest I don’t.’

‘You killed my niece,’ said the man. Abs tried to think of the name of the girl’s uncle. He remembered he was all over the papers back when it happened, calling for justice, making threats.

‘You’re…’ Abs clicked his fingers, trying desperately to remember his name. ‘Davey… Jenkins.’

The man growled. ‘I said shut up.’

Jenkins had boasted in the press that he had gangster connections and, oh God, he had threatened to get retribution one day for Rhiannon’s death. That was the word he used, retribution. Abs knew what that word meant, because he had made a point of looking it up. It meant vengeance. Revenge.

‘Mate.’ Abs held up his hands, ready to say anything to get these men to let him go, but Jenkins turned forward in his seat and Abs could only appeal to his back. ‘Davey, I can pay you money, I don’t have any on me right now, but I’ll make everything okay, because you’ve made a terrible mistake, yeah? We can sort this out, mate, it’s not too late.’

Davey Jenkins snarled over his shoulder, ‘Pipe down.’

And then they drove in silence, the faceless driver accelerating along the empty streets. Very soon they would leave town altogether, and then God knows where they would take him. To some abandoned factory where he would be tied to a chair and set alight, or to a reservoir where he’d be weighted down with rocks, or into the desert – wait, there wasn’t a desert in the UK, but somewhere like that. Somewhere his body would never be found. His mind was going crazy with all the violent possibilities. Abs knew he had to do something. He looked at the man beside him, who was gazing out the window and smoking, as if he were on a casual moonlight drive. The car screeched round corners, the interior filled with the roar of the engine and the blowing wind, and only slowed at junctions.