She was sitting in her high-backed leather armchair, facing out of the window with Ettie on her lap, fiddling with her Dupont lighter, repeatedly flicking it open and closed, each ‘cling’ causing the dog to give a tiny twitch.

Nancy ground her teeth and stared through the net curtains with her small dark eyes at the quiet suburban street outside. A young couple walked past pushing a baby in a stroller. The sight of them brought back memories of her early days with Arthur when she’d been a young mother having just given birth to Adrian.

Time passed so quickly and before you knew it all that was left were the memories and the photos. The mantelpiece behind her was cluttered with a display of framed photographs, the most prominent of which was a large one of her and Arthur on their wedding day, the happiest day of her life. Others depicted her two sons at various stages of their lives, from childhood to manhood. And there were older pictures still, her mother and father back in the sixties, and her grandparents in the forties…

In the corner of the room was an old-style vinyl record player on a cherry-wood stand accompanied by her treasured collection of original Matt Monro records. She liked nothing more than to stick on ‘My Kind of Girl’, relax back in her leather armchair with a glass of Courvoisier and lose herself in the memories of her wedding night all those years ago. But not tonight.

As dusk set in outside, the room was starting to grow dim. The Royal Worcester figurines, frozen in their poses in the glass display cabinet, mutely observed their brooding mistress. A little drummer boy. A woman in a hooped dress holding a bouquet of flowers. A soldier carrying a musket over his shoulder.

Sitting there in the armchair, consumed by the thirst for revenge, Nancy savagely contemplated what she would do to Mister Snigiss once she caught up with him. His evasiveness infuriated her, only hardening her desire to track him down and get even with him.

Nobody got away with crossing Nancy Molloy. Nobody.

63

It was the first of March and a Friday morning and whilst most people in the city were going to their normal nine-to-five jobs and looking forward to the weekend, Bailey was sitting in the temporary HQ with Frank and Dale finalising plans for the bust. Mustafa hadn’t yet opened the kebab shop so for the time being she was spared the stink of reconstituted lamb wafting up from the floor below.

It had been three days since the bombshell meeting with Jennifer and Bailey had spent every waking minute since then trying to piece her inner life back together and make sense of it all.

For the meeting today with Frank and Dale, she’d been doing her best to try and put it out of her mind whilst she focused on this crucially sensitive stage of the operation. Now that it had entered the arrest phase all that remained was for the three of them to go over the final details again and again until they were confident that all possible scenarios and contingencies had been mapped out.