‘Beta blockers, eh?’ he said in a spiteful tone. ‘Do you suffer from anxiety?’

They all looked to her for an answer. She swallowed and tried to think how to explain the medication.

‘You look like you could do with a few right now,’ said Rick.

She forced a casual shrug. ‘You know how it gets when you’re juggling a lot of deals. It can sometimes get a bit stressful, keeping all those plates spinning.’

Rick nodded slowly as if he understood what she was talking about, although she got the impression he was the kind of person who kept a lid on that type of thing.

Stephen walked into the kitchen, tossed the beta blockers onto the kitchen top and began opening and closing the cupboards and generally poking around. Watching him as he opened the fridge and peered inside, Bailey was grateful she’d gone to the supermarket the previous day to fill it up; from that respect, at least, the place looked lived in. He closed the fridge, went over to the sink, squirted some anti-bacterial hand soap into one palm, turned on the kitchen tap and started to wash his hands.

‘Washing your hands again, Stephen?’ said Rick from the sofa. He turned to Bailey. ‘Poor Stephen here has a rather serious case of OCD. What that does mean though is that he possesses superb attention to detail, which in his line of work is an excellent trait to possess.’

Obsessive compulsive disorder. That explained the hand sanitiser she’d noticed him fiddling with at their initial meeting. She guessed he fitted into the germophobe category of OCD sufferer.

‘You’ve got low water pressure,’ said Stephen, fiddling with the taps, watching the small dribble of water come out.

‘I know,’ she replied.

‘You should get it looked at.’

‘I will.’

‘It’s probably because you’re so high up,’ commented Shane, who had now moved back to his position by the window. ‘Nice view though. Good fenestration. Know what that means?’

‘Generous windows.’

‘Very good,’ he said with a patronising smile. ‘But do you know what defenestration means?’

She could kind of guess. An unpleasant feeling came over her. ‘Why don’t you tell me?’

‘It means to throw someone out of a window.’ He laughed and shook his head. ‘Funny how they’ve got a special word for it.’

He yanked on the latch and pushed the window open as far as it would go. He leant out and looked down.

‘That’s quite a drop,’ he murmured.

Were they planning to throw her out of the window? It was ten floors down. No one could survive that kind of fall. She felt her palms beginning to sweat.

Leaving the window open, Shane pulled his head back in and wandered over to the entranceway, where he suddenly stopped and turned around, standing there solid and immobile with his arms crossed, cutting off her exit route from the flat.

Stephen strutted from the kitchen back into the living-room area, stopping right in front of her to glower up at her. He was at least five inches shorter than her.