He took a final draw and flicked the cigarette into the wall-mounted bin.

Shit, Catherine thought. That was it. Gone.

They went back inside together, Dominic striding purposefully through the lobby as though trying to put distance between them. Catherine guessed she wasn’t even going to get a polite goodbye, but he suddenly stopped outside his court and glanced to the side, as though checking who might be nearby.

‘It’s very secret, very sensitive,’ he said. ‘I’d love to tell you, and I’d love to be prosecuting Frankie Callahan, but I can’t give you that name. What I can say is that it was not so much pressure as a plague.’

With that, he turned and strode briskly through the doors as though the court offered sanctuary in case she might pursue him.

Way above her pay grade right enough. Way above his too, which was presumably why he couldn’t – or rather wouldn’t – tell her.

Then she realised that he just had.

Not so much pressure as a plague.

Thank you, Dominic.

A plague of Locust.

Run to Ground

Since Ingrams had a pistol stashed in some hidey-hole under the Land Rover, it wasn’t a surprise that he had a well-stocked toolbox under one of the benches in the back. Having checked beneath the front of the vehicle and declared that the axle was intact, he produced a short-handled hacksaw and set about cutting away the thick lower trunks of the hedgerow, freeing the wheel arch.

Jasmine dabbed with a hanky at a small wound to the left side of her head. She had suffered several light scratches from the glass, little diagonals on her arms no worse than might be inflicted by a toddler’s nails, but the one to her scalp was deeper and stubbornly refusing to clot. She thought it must have been when she banged her head on the door frame, but she could feel a lump from that blow a couple of inches higher than the cut.

These minor injuries felt like merely an inconvenience, a mess to clear up that was barely related to the real damage she had suffered. The shimmering fragments of glass seemed disproportionately trivial by way of wreckage, too. It felt like a hole had been blown in the very fabric of the world as she understood it, and none of the existing evidence could truly testify to its enormity.

Everything should stop for now, she believed. There should be about two dozen police converging on this place, closing off the entire area while they commenced their investigations. She should be delivered into the safe hands of a massive machine, her role now reduced to that of witness while more capable and empowered agencies took responsibility for whatever had engulfed her.