Because that was where they were holding his girl.

TARA

It was Big Dave who had driven me to the estate the day after my dad’s sixtieth birthday party.

‘Do you want me to come in with you?’ he said.

‘Wait for me,’ I said.

Less than one hour from our home in Camden Town there was an estate – four blocks of low-rise flats that had been scheduled for demolition almost from the moment they were built half a century ago, four blocks of miserable grey concrete facing a wasteland where someone had set an ancient computer on fire. In one corner of the wasteland, a gang of children on bikes watched me get out of Big Dave’s car. Under their hoodies, the colour of their skin was varied as an old Benetton billboard. They looked past me at Big Dave.

Big Dave was standing outside his car, exuding a quiet menace, and watching. He nodded at them, and there was respect and warning in the gesture, and the kids hiding their faces on their bicycles did not approach me. Nobody approached me.

Once you got into the flats, what you noticed was the wind and the music. There was no apparent reason for the wind, you could not work out where it was coming from, and yet it whistled down the concrete corridors, as if the estate had its own mad weather system. There was music that echoed from somewhere above me, always the same song, which was no song at all, more like the sound of a nail being pounded into something that had died a long time ago.

I found the flat number. Among all the boarded-up homes and drug start-ups and crack dens and tiny pensioners who had somehow missed the final evacuation to the suburbs, there was an actual number. I stopped in front of a door with a cage in front of it. I pounded on it until the music stopped inside and Mad Dave came to the door.

Mad Dave. Poor Mad Dave. He looked so ill it broke my heart. The drugs had taken everything from him apart from his old-world courtesy and his shy decency.

He invited me inside his home and made me a cup of tea, all apologies that it was only ‘normal’ tea, although I have never been an alternative tea girl in my life. Oh, Mad Dave! I never wanted their fair-trade herbal teas! They can keep their chamomile, Mad Dave. And God knows I never wanted to drag him into this. But, it has to be said, as he fussed with milk and sugar, Mad Dave looked like a suitable candidate. If you were going to pay someone £10,000 to kill someone, Mad Dave might be your first choice, or perhaps your last. Because he looked like a man with absolutely nothing to lose.

And Big Dave had confided that it would not be the first time that someone had asked Mad Dave the same favour that I was about to ask him. Big Dave did not go into details – the less known the better – but there had been a dealer around Chalk Farm who had been particularly violent to a young woman that Mad Dave was soft on. Apparently, it had not ended well for the dealer. So it salved my conscience now that I would not be asking Mad Dave to do something that he had never done before.