Spotting the sign, he heads down the street, fiddling with the gold and diamond bracelet in his pocket. You couldn’t really call what he’s doing stealing. Doesn’t he pay the majority of his mother’s care home fees? Does he ever think of her as pilfering from him? No, of course not. Not stealing then, more like borrowing against his inheritance. Feeling buoyed now he stops before the golden balls and rings on the bell. A voice invites him in and he finds himself in a dingy, cream-coloured hallway at the end of which is a stand-alone signpost printed with the names of several businesses. An arrow points up a narrow staircase. Taking a deep breath, Cullen begins to climb the stairs. On the first-floor landing, above a sign printed with the name of the pawnbroker, a camera blinks. He presses the buzzer. A male voice says, ‘Come in!’ The door clicks open and there before Cullen stands a lean man in his fifties with a close-cropped, balding pate dressed in a suit that has seen better days. Behind the man and on two sides of the room are a series of vitrines displaying mostly gold jewellery. A locked gate bars the way to offices at the back.

‘Can I help you?’ the man says, smiling.

‘Yes,’ Cullen says, fumbling in his pocket and drawing out the bracelet. ‘My mother left me this. It’s diamond and twenty-four carat gold. It was originally her mother’s.’

‘I see.’ The man’s eyebrows rise and, if Cullen’s not very much mistaken, his eyes glaze over just a little. He’s heard all this before, he thinks, and wasn’t much interested then. ‘If you’d like to come over here and take a seat?’

A plastic chair of uncertain vintage sits on the side facing the wall, another on the far side of the vitrine. The man waits for Cullen to sit before going around the end of the vitrine and assuming a place of his own. On the countertop sit the tools of his trade; a weighing scale, a series of magnifiers and some other, less familiar paraphernalia.

‘Are you looking to borrow on it or to sell?’ the man says.

Cullen blinks. The idea that he might borrow using the bracelet as collateral and pick it up when he can pay back the money hasn’t occurred to him. If he did that, the Dalek might never know.

‘Give me a quote for both,’ he says.

The broker inspects the bracelet, then holding a magnifier in his eye socket, makes a closer examination. Finally he weighs it, then steepling his hands says, ‘This is a very good piece, but it’s old-fashioned and you should be aware that we price on the size of the diamonds and the weight of the gold.’

‘So if I sell it, someone will melt it down?’