With Coley still reeling from the punch, Parker swept the contents of the workbench onto the floor. He would clean it up when the professor was secured. He lifted Coley with ease and threw him face down onto the surface. Parker looked around the room and saw a scarf on the hat stand. He pulled it off and passed it under the table, across the professor’s neck, keeping his head down. He tied the knot hard and tight. The professor groaned. Coley was not a particularly quick or mobile man. Parker pulled his own belt off and looped it around the professor’s ankles before securing it to one of the workbench legs.

‘She will look for you. It’s not too late,’ Coley rasped.

‘She, who? Lassiter? Don’t worry about her, she will be getting a visit from me, too.’

‘Not just Lassiter, there are others.’

‘Keep talking. What do you have to do with Exeter University? Why do you have so much correspondence with Lassiter?’

‘I used to work there. I moved to Bristol several years ago.’

Parker took the knife and cut a line through the central back seam of the fabric on Coley’s jacket, then he cut through the shirt with a swift movement, exposing the professor’s back. He could see the nodules of his spine poking through his almost translucent freckled and aged skin.

‘What are you doing?’

‘It’s going to get messy in here. Where do you want me to start? If I start at the lower section of your spine, then you will most likely be losing the use of your legs. There’s no guarantees I won’t nick your spinal cord though, in which case it’s curtains for you anyway. Or I could start on the fourth vertebra at the top, which controls your neck. Or how about six and seven? They control everything below the top of your ribcage. Death is one thing, but being a quadriplegic is something else entirely.’

‘You wouldn’t do that.’

‘With all due respect, you have no idea what I would or wouldn’t do and I can guarantee that I have done much worse than this. Now talk.’

‘What is it you want?’

‘I want to know what you had planned for my wife.’

‘I just follow the rules, I’m not the one you want to speak to.’

‘I’m not going to lie. This is going to hurt.’

Parker pushed the knife against the skin, increasing the pressure until it broke through and the smallest trickle of blood ebbed out. The knife could have been sharper, but that would make this easier on Coley and Parker didn’t want that. He inserted the blade a few millimetres into the flesh in the centre of Coley’s back and pulled the blade downwards towards his waistband; the skin split open as though someone had unzipped him. The blood started to pool and roll away from the cut. The spine was close to the surface and Parker could see the white sheen of the vertebrae. Coley started to sob and Parker waited for the begging to begin.