Glancing down, her heart sunk as she remembered why she was here. The floor all around her chair was covered in heavy-duty polythene plastic sheeting. There was only one reason for that to be there. It was to make sure that all her blood and guts didn’t make a permanent mess everywhere.

It struck home with a harsh force just how feral the underworld really was, and she knew that in her situation she could not expect any kind of mercy, not least because she was Old Bill.

The one small blessing was that she appeared to be alone in here, and there was currently no sign of the gang, which meant she had a small window of opportunity in which to try and do something. She wrenched at her bonds, but doing so only made them cut deeper into her wrists and ankles. Looking down, she saw that her legs had been secured to the chair with cable ties, and by the feel of it so had her hands, tied behind her.

She thought about screaming at the top of her voice, but then she recalled that the restaurant was quite remote and it was therefore unlikely that anyone would hear her. Better to conserve her energy in order to try and think of some way out of this.

Her mind frenetically churned through the options. Maybe if she knocked the chair over, she could somehow wriggle herself towards something to cut her bonds with. But the cable ties would be incredibly hard to cut, not helped by the fact that her hands were bound behind her back. No, that wouldn’t work. What about if—

The door to the room swung open. Her thoughts froze and she stiffened in the chair.

It was Dale.

He strode in with an arrogant swagger. Stopping at the edge of the plastic sheeting, he took a moment to absorb the tableau. A smile of overt gratification crossed his face.

From beneath her ruffled hair, she stared at him with a mixture of hatred, disbelief and revulsion.

‘Did you find your wallet?’ she growled.

‘Did you decide what you wanted to eat?’ he enquired. He then put on a fake miserable face. ‘Or have you lost your appetite?’

‘I knew something wasn’t quite right when I looked at the menu and saw that there weren’t any vegan options you could eat.’

Dale raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh really? I never even bothered to look at the menu. After all, it’s not as if I was planning on eating here.’

Viewing him with abhorrence, she now knew that she should have trusted her gut feeling from Hendon all that time ago. That taint of arrogance he’d possessed back then had never quite sat well with her, and she realised now that it had never really gone away. She should have smelt it. A signal of the rot within. But, like the best manipulators, he’d hidden it well.

‘You gave me up,’ she hissed. ‘Why?’

He sighed. ‘You know, I didn’t have to come in here. I could have just left. But I thought you at least deserved some kind of explanation before you die.’