The impact smacked Jasmine’s head against the door frame, shaking loose glass fragments from her hair. There was blood smeared on her fingers. She was bleeding but she didn’t know from where, the adrenalin surge preventing her from feeling the pain quite yet. It was worth it, though: the Land Rover was facing back the way they had come.

She looked frantically into the rear-view mirror. About seventy or eighty metres along the road, the Audi had stopped and was starting to reverse towards them. That was when she became aware that despite the roaring of the engine, the Land Rover wasn’t moving forward.

‘Drive,’ she urged Ingrams, bouncing in her seat like an impatient toddler. ‘Go. Why won’t it move?’

‘If we’re unlucky, it’s because the front wheel arch is jammed in the hedge. And if we’re really unlucky, it’s because the axle’s broken. Either way we’re not going anywhere. Shit.’

With that, Ingrams undid his seat belt and opened the door. Jasmine gripped the handle on her side, but the door was wedged up hard against the hedgerow.

‘Don’t leave me,’ she pleaded, her desperation making her unashamed of her tearful supplication.

‘Keep your bloody head down,’ he retorted. His accent had changed. It didn’t sound put on any more. It did still suggest someone who had lived in a lot of different places, but more specifically a Scotsman who had lived in a lot of different places.

She sank down in the seat, then briefly reached back up to adjust the rear-view mirror so that she could see the road, her heart going like a double-kick drum. The Audi was closing in, the whine of its reverse gear getting louder as it approached. Fifty yards. Forty. She could see the driver and the passenger, both turned around to look through the rear windscreen. They were wearing latex masks, the driver’s still topped with the baseball cap he had been wearing to disguise his disguise. Presumably he had guessed that the sight of Richard Nixon’s face behind the wheel in Northumberland would have been more than enough to tip off somebody as paranoid as Ingrams.

She stuck her head up a little to look for him, expecting that he would be wrestling with the front wheel on her side of the vehicle. He was nowhere to be seen. Suddenly, though she wouldn’t have considered it possible, she felt worse, more afraid. Why had he left her? Where the hell was he?

Then she both heard and felt a metallic clunk from somewhere beneath her.

The Audi had stopped about twenty yards away. The passenger-side door swung slowly open and in the rear-view mirror she saw a figure, also in a Nixon mask, emerge slowly and deliberately, holding a pump-action shotgun.