‘Hop in,’ suggested the man helpfully. ‘We’ll give you a lift.’

Abs leaned into the window to get a better view of the men in the front but all he could see was the back of their heads. ‘Nah, I don’t want to bother you.’

‘It ain’t no bother.’ The guy grinned. ‘You’re a celebrity.’

‘No, it’s okay.’ The whole situation didn’t feel right to Abs. ‘I’ll give you an autograph and then I’ll get on my way.’

Abs reached for the pen and paper, but the man pulled them away and said nastily, ‘I’m going to have to insist.’

And in that instant, he grabbed Abs’s arms and pulled him through the window. Abs screamed in shock and tried to break free from his grasp, but he was grabbed from behind – he glimpsed the front doors were wide open, heard the ding ding ding of the seat-belt alert – and his head was forced down as he was bundled into the back seat.

‘Help,’ he screamed. ‘Help me!’

But the street was empty; there was nobody to hear him. He took a punch in the ribs from the man beside him, who raised his fist again.

‘Not the face!’

The two men climbed back in the front, the doors slammed and the car roared up the street. Then the guy in the front passenger seat turned to glare at him, and it was with a sickening realization that he recognized him as the man who had been watching outside the QuidStore yesterday.

‘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.