PRAISE FOR PAUL FINCH

‘Wonderfully dark and peppered with grim humour. Finch is a born storyteller and writes with the authentic voice of the ex-copper he is.’

PETER JAMES

‘Edge-of-the-seat reading … formidable – a British Alex Cross.’

SUN

‘An ingenious and original plot. Compulsive reading.’

RACHEL ABBOTT

‘As good as I expected from Paul Finch. Relentlessly action-packed, breathless in its finale, Paul expertly weaves a trail through the North’s dark underbelly.’

NEIL WHITE

‘A deliciously twisted and fiendish set of murders and a great pairing of detectives.’

STAV SHEREZ

‘Avon’s big star … part edge-of-the-seat, part hide-behind-the-sofa!’

THE BOOKSELLER

‘An explosive thriller that will leave you completely hooked.’

WE LOVE THIS BOOK

Copyright

Published by AVON

A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Paul Finch 2019

Cover design © Henry Steadman 2019

Cover photograph © Henry Steadman

Paul Finch asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008244019

Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008244026

Version: 2019-03-15

Dedication

For my wife, Catherine,

always my strong right arm.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Keep Reading …

Praise for Paul Finch

About the Author

By the same Author

About the Publisher

Prologue

The Hollinbrook estate, in Crowley, was as suburban as they came.

Not rich, but the gardens were neat, tidy, their lawns smoothly mown if not expansive. The cars on the drives were mainly family affairs, some a little beaten-up, all implying middle-income rather than wealth. But if it wasn’t hugely prosperous, at least the Hollinbrook had the air of safety. It might be part of Greater Manchester’s sprawling conurbation, but Hollinbrook was peaceful and quiet, a sedate backwater, where children could play unsupervised, and where pensioners like Harry Hopkins could take their dogs out for a late evening stroll in full confidence that nothing bad would happen to them.

Not that this would normally have been an issue for Harry. A former collier, he’d been a burly bloke in his youth, and though seventy-seven now, he still had a bluff, rugged aura. In his day, ‘graft’ had been a word that meant something: hot sweat, aching muscles, hands cut and callused, a body shrouded black with coal-dust. And none of it a source of complaint – because that was your job, your life, that was what you did to put food on the table.

A quarter of a century had passed since Hollinbrook Pit had closed, but Harry wasn’t the sole relic of those arduous days. He still lived at No. 8, Atkinson Row, the only line of dwellings that hadn’t been bulldozed in the late 1990s, when they’d finally started developing the vast brownfield site. This was partly because Atkinson Row had never looked out of place in the proposed new townscape. Its houses were more than serviceable, a terraced row of traditional two-up-two-downs, but with solid roofs, secure foundations and no hint of subsidence. These days they were downright attractive, their brickwork repointed and whitewashed, new pipes and gutters fitted, each with its own little garden at the back instead of a tiny yard and outdoor privy. They were still referred to locally as the ‘Pit Cottages’, even though Harry was the only ex-pitman living there. He had lived alone for the last nine years, since Ada had passed, but his property was the smartest of the lot, with a box of flowers under the front window, and his front door painted canary-yellow.

It was just after ten o’clock when Harry closed this handsome door behind him, the lock catching. Milly, his small Pekingese, waited patiently. She was thirteen now, tubby, grey at the jowls and bandy-legged. But she was an affectionate little soul who liked nothing better than an idle wander with her master. Harry buttoned up his overcoat, tugged his trilby down at the front and drew on his fingerless gloves. It was September, and the searing heat of August had noticeably diminished. Nights were cool, and there was an edge to the breeze.

They set off up the road together, Milly snuffling at the base of every streetlight, lapping at the occasional puddle left over from the afternoon rain, despite Harry’s gruff admonitions. They turned right at the top of the road, following their usual route.

Though it wasn’t terribly late, it was midweek, so each street they came to was bare of life: Candlemaker Avenue, Rotherwood Drive, Hornby Crescent, Billington Grove. They even sounded suburban, and they certainly looked the part: more of those manicured front gardens, rockeries, shrubbery. It was a far cry from the narrow terraced streets of Harry’s day. But in general, he had to concede that things tended to change for the better. It was too easy to get dewy-eyed about the past, especially if you hadn’t been part of it.

Most windows were now curtained, only soft lamplight filtering through, though now and then he passed an open bedroom window, and heard music playing or what sounded like a TV programme. That was something that had not changed for the better, in Harry’s opinion: kids having all that kit in their bedrooms when they should be out, running around. Not that he would really have expected that at this late hour, of course.

And not when there was that other thing supposedly keeping them indoors.

The black van.

By instinct, Harry tightened his grip on the lead, drawing Milly closer. The old girl wasn’t too worried. She didn’t exactly scurry these days.

The black van, though …

Harry didn’t know if it was one of these so-called urban legends. But if it was, he’d only heard about it recently. It had been down at the bookies a couple of weeks ago.

‘Whenever you’re walking your Milly, Harry … keep your eye out for this black transit van. It’s touring the neighbourhoods late at night. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be up to … but you can guarantee it’ll be no good.’

‘Well, if you don’t know what it’s up to, how do you know it’s no good?’ Harry had responded, puzzled.

A helpless shrug. ‘I dunno, pal. People are just saying it.’

‘Oh … must be true then.’

But now that he was out here on the road alone, and it was past ten o’clock, Harry didn’t feel quite so scathing. He was sure the black van thing was a myth. Good God, there were black vans all over. But though certain parts of Crowley, like this, had been prettified in recent years, he couldn’t deny that life wasn’t as tranquil overall as it once had seemed. Not even in the shopping district where you saw homeless folk everywhere. That was a sad story, but it was a nuisance too. Some of them had mental health problems, some of them were drug addicts, and nearly all of them were beggars. That had been almost unknown during his youth, even though everyone had been considerably poorer back then.

Equally unknown had been this new level of nasty criminality. Harry had always fancied himself a rough customer, but he wouldn’t go anywhere near the town centre pubs on a Friday or Saturday night, not these days. He much preferred The Horsehoe at the top end of the estate, even if it did have a reputation for being an old fellas’ pub. Harry didn’t mind. Anything was better than someone smashing a bottle over your head because you’d looked at them the wrong way, and then kicking your face as you lay on the floor. And it wasn’t just the town centre either. There were plenty of housing estates around Crowley that were just as bad; run-down neighbourhoods like Hatchwood Green for example. Nearly everyone in those miserable districts was unemployed, which didn’t help of course, though to Harry’s mind it didn’t excuse the wife-battering, the drunks sitting on doorsteps, the needles and condoms left in playground sandpits.

Harry knew all this went on because he knew men and women of his own age who were unfortunate enough to live in these areas, and they reported it every time he met them. But even the Hollinbrook wasn’t as safe as it might appear. Not these days. It had been idyllic once, but slowly and subtly things had been changing as the villains had started to notice it. There were burglaries here now and occasional vehicle thefts. Prowlers had been reported, even some pets had allegedly gone missing.

And then, as he pondered this, he heard the scuff of what sounded like boot leather.

He glanced up and caught someone stepping out of sight.

Just ahead of him, on the other side of the road.

Harry faltered in his stride.

He almost stopped – before pressing on, grumbling to himself.

Highly likely his imagination had been running wild thanks to those worrying reflections. But he was now approaching the crossroads between Billington Grove and Bucks Lane, and it really had looked as if someone had just scampered away around the left-hand corner.

Big deal, he told himself. Was it an offence to walk home?

But actually it hadn’t looked as if he’d just glimpsed someone walking home. It had looked as if they’d been standing watching him, and then had ducked away to avoid being seen. When he came level with Bucks Lane, he glanced left, not sure what he expected. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he saw nothing and no one – though that didn’t mean there was nobody there, as whoever it was could have gone to ground in any one of the front gardens.

‘Bloody hell, lad,’ he muttered. ‘You’re letting these daft stories get to you.’

He trudged on past the junction, and only after a hundred yards glanced back, to ensure that no one was behind him.

No one was. At least, no one who was close by. But was that dark, diminutive shape back at the crossroads a figure? Standing there motionless? Staring after him?

Harry squinted. Perhaps it was another dog-walker? That wouldn’t be unusual. Or some other innocent resident standing outside their house having a smoke? But if so, why did they seem so interested in him?

Unless they weren’t. Unless there was no one there at all.

Harry couldn’t be certain. Most likely, he was seeing things. Fading eyesight and substandard streetlighting were the probable explanation. But, determined to show that he wasn’t concerned either way, he ambled casually on, turning left down Tottington Road, Milly toddling at his side. Everything along here was as it should be: cars in driveways, front lawns scattered with children’s toys and occasional bits of garden furniture; typical end-of-summer scenery.

He looked back over his shoulder. The road was deserted.

Daft, he chided himself. If that had been some idiot waiting to jump him, he’d have done it back at the crossroads. Why would he be following?

Harry turned right onto Langtree Brow, and then right again into a ginnel. Here he halted, tall hedges on either side, as Milly squatted to do her business. After she was finished, he got a poop bag from his pocket, scooped it all up and tied the bag in a knot. More by instinct than design, he again glanced behind him. He was halfway along the ginnel, which ran for about seventy yards before crossing a narrow footbridge over the Manchester-to-Southport railway. The gap where it opened into Langtree Brow was empty, though why he’d thought it might not be eluded him.

He strode on, turning up his overcoat collar against the chill, depositing the poop bag in the next bin. Milly seemed happy, sniffing under the hedges, nothing troubling her.

They crossed the footbridge together, the railway cutting a strip of blackness beneath them. They were now at the furthest point from home, and Harry was ready to head back, his legs getting tired. Walking south along Rampton Road, he crossed the railway line again and then followed alongside it. The only sound was Milly’s gentle panting and the clicking of Harry’s leather soles on the damp pavement. Occasional gusts of wind whispered through the leafage in the gardens or moaned among the electric cables down in the cutting.

It was easy to feel alone at moments like this. And vulnerable.

He passed another couple of street-entrances on his right. The first led into Hopwood Lane, the second into Delamere Avenue. Again, no one was around, though, as it happened, halfway down Delamere a black van was parked up on the right.

Harry forced a chuckle, reminding himself that there was nothing unusual about that. He hadn’t seen the van before and he’d walked past here a dozen times this last month alone, but that meant nothing.

He turned left onto Rose Street, now well on his way home, though this was always the least comforting part of the journey, because though there were houses on the left, Hollister Park stood to the right. It was nothing really – a miniature green space provided by the estate’s original builders so the local kids would have somewhere to hang out. It had a playground, and lots of grass for football. Even so, it probably occupied no more than a handful of acres – though at this time of night it was an unlit void. There’d been some problems here during the summer, with teenagers gathering late on, drinking and shouting. But the police had been called, and that had been it.

Of course, that didn’t mean there wasn’t somebody there now, maybe just beyond the outer fringe of trees, keeping a silent, steady pace with Harry. Not that Harry knew what any would-be mugger would have to gain. It wasn’t like he carried money when he was walking the dog, or wore an expensive watch, or even had a mobile phone (despite his daughter Janet’s endless badgering that he acquire one). Again, he was vexed with himself for even thinking this way. This was his home neighbourhood, the place he’d lived all his life. He’d seen whole families come and go, he’d seen houses come and go, hell … he’d seen the pit come and go.

And he was frightened? Seriously?

Even so, he crossed to the other side of the road, so that the wet, leafy blackness of the park wasn’t directly at his shoulder. That wasn’t a sign that he was scared, he told himself; it was simple common sense. But he was still relieved to come to the end of the road and turn down Bradley Way. When a quick backward glance showed a clump of thickets on the edge of the park shuddering as though someone concealed among them was moving, Harry forced another chuckle.

‘Bloody breeze,’ he mumbled.

There was a breeze. He wasn’t making that up.

On Bradley Way, there was a minor incident when Harry glanced back and saw the headlights of a slow-moving vehicle only twenty yards to his rear.

He stumbled to a startled halt, at which point the vehicle, a large estate car, swung into the kerb to park. Harry continued to watch it even as he lurched on, until he blundered into a lamp-post. To the accompaniment of a faint, broken, rasping sound – what might have been muffled snickering laughter, though in truth was probably another breeze rattling the wet bushes – he hurried on, turning right into Malvern Avenue and then right again into Deerwood Close, where he stopped to get his breath and dab his forehead with a handkerchief.

It was okay, he told himself. He’d be home in a couple of minutes. He was almost there.

He glanced down at Milly, who’d craned her neck up to regard him curiously.

Even the bloody dog was wondering what was up with him.

Grim-faced, he crossed the road and turned onto Lodge Lane, and a few minutes later entered Atkinson Row at its bottom end. Harry could only feel relief as he wheezed his way along the pavement to his yellow front door. He inserted the key, looked to either side one last time – no one was anywhere in sight – and turned it. The door opened, and he stepped inside, Milly jumping over the step next to him. He wasn’t telling anyone down the bookies about this, that was for sure: how he’d become unaccountably afraid while walking the dog.

No … ‘afraid’ was the wrong word. He’d been nervous, that was all. A tad nervous. And why wouldn’t he be? Like it or not, he wasn’t a young bucko any more. And there were bad things going on. It might be a thought to take their evening stroll a little earlier from now on.

Harry closed the door, threw the bolt and applied the safety-chain. He unfastened the dog’s lead, and she trotted down the hall, turning into the living room, where the lights were still on and the television playing to itself.

Harry pulled his gloves off and took off his hat and coat, draping them over the newel post at the bottom of the banister. Milly meanwhile re-emerged from the living room and went through to the kitchen, which lay in darkness.

‘What’s up, lass … need a drink?’ Harry followed her in, switching the light on.

As always, the kitchen was impeccably clean, everything put away, the linoleum floor swept, the worktops sparkling. The mug Harry had left beside the kettle before he’d gone out still waited for him. It contained a teabag, one and a half spoonfuls of sugar and the spoon itself, and only required him to flip the kettle on, which he now did.

Then he noticed that Milly hadn’t touched her water-bowl. Instead, she stood with rigid spine, staring at the back door.

‘Something bothering you, lass?’ he asked.

He leaned over the sink and looked out through the kitchen window. He had a light in the back garden, but it was motion-sensitive, and at present was off. That was a positive thing, because it meant there was no one trespassing. But it also meant that he couldn’t see anything. Milly whimpered and pawed at the door.

‘Nothing out there, lass … what is it, a cat?’

It couldn’t have been that. If it had been, the light would have come on.

Harry leaned closer to the window, straining his eyes.

Gradually, the streetlighting seeping over the tops of the houses revealed the garden’s basic dimensions. It wasn’t large, about fifteen yards by ten, and mostly turfed, with the exception of a crazy-paved path running down the middle. To the right, where the coal-bunker had once stood, there was a brick-built dais – all Harry’s own work – with stone vases on top, containing plants. He could see that much. He could also see the potting shed standing to the left of his back gate, which, painted canary-yellow like the front door, was also clearly visible.

But now that he was looking hard, there was something else.

The top of a tall vehicle stood on the other side of his gate.

Harry felt a stab of confusion – that thing hadn’t been here when he’d left.

And then he got annoyed.

The Backs, as they called it, was a straight passage running along the rear of the terraced houses on Atkinson Row. It was little more than an access road; though narrow and unevenly cobbled, it was barely wide enough for vehicles, which meant that whoever had left this one here would be causing a massive obstruction – and right on the other side of the gate to No. 8. Harry wasn’t even sure if he’d be able to get out there. He had no clue who the vehicle might belong to, though he had a notion that the Rodwells, the young couple next door, were a bit rum. Okay, they weren’t lowlifes – they were teachers, apparently – but they’d had more than a few noisy barbecues in their garden during the summer months, which had gone on until late, and which they’d never offered apologies for. Even when they weren’t having barbecues, their friends tended to come and go loudly. A couple of times, he’d heard the Rodwells themselves squabbling through the dividing wall between his bedroom and theirs. So it wouldn’t be unlike them, or someone they knew, to have thoughtlessly left a vehicle in such an inconvenient place.

Grumpily, all previous concerns forgotten – because one thing you could never do was challenge Harry Hopkins in his own home – he unlocked the back door and stepped out. The garden light came on, and there was no mistake: a large, dark vehicle was parked just the other side of his back wall. He stumped along the path, Milly trotting inquisitively behind him, undid the bolts and yanked the gate open – to find a vehicle there so large that it literally filled the alley. Though its rear end was close to his gate, perhaps a yard to his left, there was minimal room to manoeuvre; less than a foot’s clearance separated its offside flank from his wall, which meant that he could only move along it if he slithered sideways.

But none of that mattered as much as the kind of vehicle it was.

A van.

A black transit van.

Fleeting pinpricks of sweat appeared on Harry’s brow; it was several seconds before he could even engage his voice.

‘Okay … okay,’ he grunted to himself.

This was a challenge, and no mistake – but there was no need to get jumpy. He’d already worked out what the problem was here: the Rodwells and their inconsiderate friends.

Thankfully, he hadn’t changed his shoes for slippers yet, so the fact there’d likely be lots of dirty puddles out there wasn’t a problem. He stepped from his gate and, as the rear of the van was nearest, edged in that direction first. For some reason, Milly hung back in the gateway. But Harry barely noticed, his temper continuing to fray as he thought more and more about the Rodwells and their loutish, snot-nosed pals. He noticed that the van wasn’t parked across their gate. When he reached the back of it, its rear doors were both closed, doubtless locked.

Moving to the vehicle’s nearside and finding that the passage on that side was wider by several inches, he sidled along it more quickly, though his feet sloshed through inches of mucky water. When he got to the front, there was nobody inside the cab. Both the front doors were also probably locked, but when Harry put his hand down to the radiator grille, warmth exuded from it. As he’d suspected, the damn thing had only recently arrived.

The more he looked at it now, the more he thought it was dark-blue rather than black, which was a relief in a silly kind of way. But that didn’t stop it being any less of a nuisance.

He was now well positioned to view the rear of the Rodwells’ house. There were no lights on at the back, but there could be at the front. Harry would need to go back through his house to check.

His slid along the vehicle’s nearside, circling its rear end towards his own gate – and there stopped in surprise. The left of the van’s two rear doors now stood open.

Harry was stumped.

Could it have been the wind? No, that was preposterous. There was the odd gust tonight, but nothing like sufficient to open a vehicle door, even if that door had been left ajar, which he was damn sure this one hadn’t.

So – had someone inside this van just climbed out?

He glanced over his shoulder, but the alley dwindled away in a straight line until it joined with the next street. There was no one there.

‘What the bloody hell?’ he muttered.

He leaned forward, poking his nose into the van’s interior. It was too dark to see anything, but now he wondered if that was a faint rustle of cloth he was hearing.

‘Is someone … someone in here …?’

Two hands in black leather gloves shot out of the darkness, gripping him by the cardigan collar.

He was yanked forward with tremendous force, smashing both kneecaps against the van’s rear bumper. The material of his trouser legs hooked on jagged metal, briefly anchoring him in place, allowing him to splay his arms out and grab at the door-frame on one side and the closed door on the other, wedging himself. As his shock ebbed, he began resisting, pushing backward, but those gloved hands were strong, and they dragged at him all the harder. Harry travelled forward again, feet leaving the ground, the material of his trousers ripping, along with the flesh underneath.

As he shouted in pain, one of the hands released his collar and slapped palm-first across his mouth. Then there was a thundering impact on the back of Harry’s head.

His world spun as his hands slipped loose and he slumped forward. Somewhere, there was a frantic yipping – was it Milly?

Whoever had hit Harry from behind now wrapped both arms around Harry’s thighs, and lifted him bodily, feeding him forward into the van’s interior. The person already in there continued to lug him.

The next thing Harry knew, though he was too groggy to make sense of it, he was lying in oily darkness, face-down on corrugated metal. As if that wasn’t enough, someone knelt on the middle of his back, pinning him with their full weight. And still that yipping went on, though it turned into a squeal of fright as a bundle of fur and paws was flung in alongside him. With an echoing CLANG!, the door slammed shut, and blackness descended.

The back of Harry’s head throbbed appallingly; hot fluid leaked through his thinning hair. Milly grizzled and snarled alongside him. When he attempted to speak – absurdly, it was to try and calm the dog – it came out a spittle-clotted burble. His captor responded by shifting one of his knife-like knees from the middle of Harry’s spine to the back of his head, pressing it down sideways, which intensified the raw, stinging pain. The old man yelped aloud, but it was lost as the vehicle rumbled to life and, with a shudder-inducing growl, accelerated away along the Backs.

Chapter 1

The men began arriving shortly after ten o’clock that night. At least, Lucy assumed they would all be men. The intelligence suggested that, and while she wasn’t so naïve as to believe that casual cruelty was solely a male preserve, this particular business, as well as being totally disgusting, just seemed so childishly laddish that she couldn’t picture any of the female offenders she’d arrested over the years participating willingly.

‘All units, we’re on,’ she said into her radio. ‘But sit tight … wait for the order.’

From where she was concealed in the woodland hide, just beyond the cover of the trees, Lucy had a clear view of the rutted track leading to the farm cottage. Over at the point where it joined Wellspring Lane, the gateman was busy admitting a succession of vans and cars, which now passed within seventy yards of her position, travelling slowly in cavalcade. Already she could hear the yipping and yelping of the dogs caged in their boots.

Geraldson, the RSPCA inspector, dabbed with a handkerchief at the sweat glinting on his brow. He was young and nervous.

‘Is there a black van out there?’ His voice was querulous.

‘Even if there is, it won’t necessarily be the one that’s been abducting pets,’ Lucy replied. ‘These are all paying participants. They’ll have their own animals.’

‘So … when do we move?’

‘Not until it gets going.’ Lucy – Detective Constable Lucy Clayburn – continued to watch through her night-vision scope but reached out a hand and squeezed his shoulder with a firm, hopefully reassuring grip. ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got this.’

‘There’ll be some rough customers.’

‘That’s why we’ve got the Tactical Aid Unit with us. They’re mostly ex-military. They like nothing better than a ruckus.’

Geraldson nodded and smiled, eyes gleaming wetly as more headlights rolled across the hide, shining fleetingly on his face.

By Lucy’s estimation, about fourteen vehicles had now arrived at the cottage. Each one would likely be carrying more than one dog. So that would be twenty-eight animals at least, not counting any that were already being kept on site. The RSPCA were anticipating thirty-two in total, which would provide a straightforward knock-out contest. The members of this ring were clearly anticipating a long night.

As the vehicles pulled up haphazardly in the farmyard, a bulb sprang to life outside the ramshackle building to which it was attached, and a man slouched out. He was heavy-set and bearded, in a ragged green sweater and khaki pants. One by one, the parked vehicles opened, and men disgorged from them: generally at least two, sometimes as many as five. Like the guy from the cottage – whom Lucy had already identified as Les Mahoney – they mostly wore outdoor-type clothing: khaki, camouflage fatigues and such, though there were a few leather jackets among them, and a bit of oily denim.

‘Christ,’ Geraldson breathed. ‘There’s more than I expected.’

‘We’ll be fine,’ Lucy replied.

As a rule, when you were facing big numbers, quite a few of them weren’t looking for legal entanglements and would scarper at the first opportunity. That was when they were most vulnerable; all you had to do was pick them off. Though, looking at these guys – and she turned the super-zoom dial on her scope – there might be as many fighters as runners. She saw shaved heads, scarred faces, scuzzy tattoos. For once she was glad the sixty officers from the TAU were parked in a layby in their troop-carriers a little way down Wellspring Lane.

She continued to observe the men as they greeted each other with high fives and bear-hugs, before swaggering over to Mahoney and thrusting at him the wads of banknotes that made up their admission fees.

Another cop came into the hide behind her. It was PC Malcolm Peabody, once Lucy’s probationer when she too had been in uniform. He was still only young, but a tall, rangy lad, with short red hair, a freckled face and jug-handle ears. Currently, he wore heavy-duty body-armour, plus a ballistics helmet with its visor raised and strap tight under his chin.

‘Sergeant Frobisher says everyone’s in position,’ he said quietly.

‘Everyone except you, Malcolm,’ Lucy replied, thinking that if it suddenly kicked off, she didn’t want handy lads like Peabody anywhere other than the front line. ‘There’s not enough space for all of us in here. Go back to your LUP and stay sharp.’

Peabody nodded and stooped back out through the low, narrow entrance.

None of them knew what the hide had originally been constructed for. It might indeed have been a wildlife observation point in the past. But it made a perfect OP for today: a flimsy, flat-roofed wooden hut, partly dug into the ground so it had an earthen floor, its exterior covered with vegetation, which, at the tail-end of summer, partly obscured the horizontal viewing port at the front – partly, but not completely.

Its interior was so restricted that it could only contain two with any comfort. But it gave an excellent view of the farm cottage, some fifty yards beyond the trees, and the open grassland to the east of it, where at this hour nothing stirred save a couple of tethered ponies munching the cud.

An increasingly excited canine yelping drew Lucy’s attention back to the cottage, where the rear doors to vehicles were now being opened and muzzled dogs brought out on chain leashes. Even through the zoom-lens of her scope, and with the whole of the farmyard area lit up, many of them were already so horribly scarred from battles past that their breeds were unidentifiable, but by their lean, squat, muscular frames she reckoned they’d be fighting species of old: pit bulls, Staffies and the like, an impression enhanced by the thick muzzles they wore, and their steel-studded leather harnesses.

Lucy shook her head.

Mahoney now walked across the farmyard, his guests following, though they kept their four-footed charges well apart from each other. As most of these animals, if not all, had been trained through years of brutal abuse to despise other dogs on sight, they were already snarling and rearing, having to be forcibly restrained.

Geraldson watched through a pair of binoculars.

‘Savages,’ he whispered.

‘Yeah, well, don’t worry,’ Lucy replied. ‘Tonight, they’re going to learn what it means to be chained and caged.’

At the other side of the farmyard, perhaps fifty yards from the cottage, there was another clutch of outbuildings, all in a similarly dilapidated condition to the main house. The largest had clearly once been a barn of some sort; it was an ugly brick and concrete structure, but its roof had evidently caved in some time ago, because while the rest of it was rotted and flimsy, that was relatively new, made from sturdy sheets of corrugated steel.

Mustn’t have the guests getting wet if it rains, Lucy thought.

Mahoney went into the barn first, through a side-door. Lights came on within, and then he re-emerged on the east-facing side, pushing open a large pair of timber doors, through which the men and dogs now trooped. It was difficult to be sure what went on after that, because once the majority were in there, all Lucy could see through the open doors was a chaos of bodies milling about, the dogs still grizzling and snarling at each other.

She lifted the radio mic to her lips but refrained from issuing an order, relying on her ears to tell her what was going on. When the snarling and grizzling gave way to full-on barking, that would mean that muzzles had been removed, and when the men also began shouting, the first bout would be in progress.

A person Lucy hadn’t seen before entered the farmyard, almost certainly Mahoney’s wife, Mandy. She was a slatternly, overweight woman wearing sandals, jeans that were too tight for her, and a baggy, semi-transparent cheesecloth shirt that barely concealed her naked, pendulous breasts. Ratty grey hair hung past her shoulders, and she had a pudgy, porcine face, tinging red as she made cumbersome trips back and forth from the cottage to the barn, hefting crates of beer.

‘Shouldn’t we go now?’ Geraldson asked quietly.

‘No,’ Lucy said firmly. ‘Just wait.’

She leaned forward, almost pushing her head through the greenery curtaining the aperture. But it was pointless. She couldn’t see the woods stretching away to the right of the hide and fringing the open pasture. She’d simply have to trust that Sergeant Frobisher, who was on secondment from Area, would have everyone adequately concealed but also primed for action, so they could jump up and move in the instant she gave the word. There were other lying-up points around the one-time farm: behind the stone walls bordering the eastern end of the pony paddock, sixty yards further away than Lucy’s own position; and in the trees on the west side of the farm buildings, though the lads over there had needed to dig in further back because it was open woodland and there was a risk of their being seen. So Frobisher’s team would be the first into action, and they’d need to make a very rapid approach.

An explosion of barking suddenly sounded from inside the barn. Geraldson gazed at Lucy, white-faced, a globule of fresh sweat trickling down his nose. She raised a hand for calm but leaned closer to her mic. ‘Clayburn to TAU, over?’

Static crackled, before Inspector Rick Crawley, heading up the TAU, responded. ‘Go ahead.’

‘Tine to move, sir. Can you block the gate on Wellspring Lane, over?’

‘Roger, received.’

Lucy glanced at Geraldson, who nodded wordlessly, his mouth clamped shut. And then, inside the old barn, men began shouting, bellowing encouragement, but laughing too, with an angry, raucous delight. The barking took on a new, savage, monstrous overtone.

‘All units,’ Lucy said into the mic. ‘Hit ’em!’

Sergeant Frobisher and Malcolm Peabody’s eight-strong snatch squad broke cover and scampered across the grass, dark and stealthy in the night, the only sound a clack of visors being snapped down and a repeating metallic click as Autolock batons were flicked open.

She turned and stooped out through the small rear entrance of the hide onto the access lane behind. Here, screened by late-summer undergrowth, several RSPCA vans were parked, their personnel standing around in taut silence. Lucy signalled to them and walked around to the front, pushing through the foliage and onto open ground. She wasn’t fully armoured like the snatch squads, but she wore a stab-vest and basic Kevlar padding over her scruffs.

The RSPCA officers followed her out, wearing thick handling gloves, carrying deterrent sprays and poles with slip-leads attached. Well-equipped as they were, they kept a safe distance behind.

From this angle, the pony paddock lay in front of them. More police officers were scurrying across it from its eastern perimeter wall. As Lucy veered towards the farm, Mandy Mahoney had waddled back into view, heaving another crate of beer, apparently unperturbed by the terrible sounds emanating from the barn and seemingly oblivious to the advancing forces. Several pairs of moving headlights also caught Lucy’s attention. Along Wellspring Lane, on the far side of the paddock, three large vehicles – the TAU troop-carriers – were slowing to a halt in front of the farm gate. The gateman was slow to respond, probably because he was stumped by the sight of them. However, half a second later, he was haring back down the farm track, shouting hoarsely and incoherently.

Lucy switched on her loudhailer and raised it to her lips.

‘Leslie Mahoney!’ she called, her voice projected across the darkened meadow. ‘This is Detective Constable Lucy Clayburn of Crowley CID. You and your friends are all being arrested under Section 8 of the Animal Welfare Act. The entire plot is surrounded, Mahoney … so I want you all to come out of that barn right now. Bring your dogs with you and keep them in check. Make sure they’re muzzled and leashed. Anyone resisting will also be arrested for assaulting police officers and assault with intent to resist arrest. Anyone using a dog to resist will be arrested for attempting to cause grievous bodily harm.’

Forty yards ahead, Mandy stood frozen in place as she listened to this message from the darkness. But only when Frobisher’s snatch squad burst into the light, having advanced across the paddock in complete invisibility, did she respond, dropping the crate of beer and running comically towards the barn. Some of the men inside, presumably those closest to the main doors, had also heard. Heads were fleetingly stuck out, and then disappeared again. The wild shouting inside took on notes of panic and then hysteria. Several seconds later, a confused knot of bodies emerged, both human and canine, the animals leaping and whining in confusion, the men hauling on their chains. Those unencumbered by dogs ran every which way, but already there was no escape. The snatch squad from the woods on the west side of the farm surged into view from between the decayed buildings, shouting orders and warnings. Other uniformed cops emerged from around the back of the barn.

The men and dogs scrambled for their cars, and there were gut-thumping collisions as the officers piled into them. Despite this, several vehicles started up, but as they all sought to rev away up the track at the same time, they slid into each other, clunking and shunting, grinding to a chaotic halt. The couple that managed to get ahead of this tangle only made it a few dozen yards, before the sight of a police troop-carrier blocking the gate and a whole phalanx of TAU men, as well armed and armoured as the divisional lads and yet somehow looking more menacing, more military as they advanced down the dirt track, brought them to a halt. The next thing, doors were being yanked open and burly policemen dragging out the drivers and their passengers.

Lucy lowered her loudhailer as she entered the farmyard.

Arrests were being made on all sides. There was no serious violence, but there were struggles as brutish, swearing men were wrestled to the floor and clapped into cuffs. One was struck across the back of the knee with a baton to help him comply. The dogs would have been a problem, especially as several had got loose and were darting back and forth, but they were all still muzzled, and now, at Lucy’s direction, the RSPCA handlers came forward to take charge of them.

‘Prisoner transports move in,’ Lucy told her radio. ‘We’ve got a large number detained.’

One suspect, a younger guy with longish, fair hair, wearing what looked like a wolf-fur doublet, made a semi-successful break for it, shaking off a lone PC and racing onto the open ground of the pony paddock, veering towards Wellspring Lane – only to stop at the sight of several more police vans pulling up behind the troop-carriers. He didn’t know they were divisional vans coming to take prisoners, and, thinking they were yet more police reinforcements, slowed to a trudging halt before dropping to his knees and raising his hands, allowing the pursuing officers to take him into custody.

Lucy was still in the thick of the action, though it was mostly over. On all sides, cautions were being issued, and the responses, mainly f-words and other more imaginative profanities, being recorded on dictaphone as the jostling, cuffed men were frogmarched to the farm cottage wall and held there, each by his individual arresting officer, while others commenced searching them. One resisted more than the rest, kicking out and spitting, and was given a backhander across the mouth for his trouble. Lucy wasn’t worried. When the evidence was finally presented, she doubted there was a magistrate in the land who’d be swayed by farcical complaints about police brutality.

Quite a bit of that evidence was on display inside the barn itself, when she went in there. The centrepiece was a purpose-built pit, squarish in shape, about ten yards by ten, dug to a depth of five feet and lined with brick, with a steel ladder fixed in one corner and a camera mounted on a tripod overlooking it, alongside an upright chalkboard scribbled with betting information.

Two dogs still occupied the pit. One, an American pit bull, charged crazily back and forth, jumping up to snap and snarl at the officers, despite the excessive blood dabbling its jaws and jowls. The other one, whose breed was uncertain, lay in a quivering, panting heap, gashed and torn and spattered with gore.

‘We need one of the vets in here,’ Lucy said to a PC at her shoulder. ‘And a handler … to control the other one, yeah?’

The PC moved away, just as acting DC Tessa Payne, a young black officer, formerly in uniform but currently on secondment to Crowley CID as a trainee, leaned in through a doorway connecting to another outbuilding. Like Lucy, she only wore light body-armour over her jumper and jeans and was in the process of pulling off her protective gloves and replacing them with latex.

‘Lucy …’ she said. ‘You might want to look in here.’

‘This going to make me throw up?’ Lucy said.

‘More likely make you dance a jig.’

Lucy went through into what was a basically a lean-to shed lit by a single electric bulb, its damp walls lined with shelves groaning beneath the grisly accoutrements of dog-fighting. She saw piles of spare muzzles and harnesses, stacks of grubby second-hand magazines with grotesque images on their covers, homemade DVDs, DIY veterinary kits, including staple-guns and tubes of superglue, and a number of ‘breaking sticks’, thick wooden bars impressed with toothmarks, which would normally be used to pry open a victorious animal’s jaws when it had them locked into its latest victim.

‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘Bloody perfect. All this needs bagging and tagging, Tessa.’

Payne nodded, at which point they were distracted by the sound of more canine whining. The outhouse had its own outer door – again just a frame with no actual door in it. On the other side they found an enclosed yard containing a set of weighing scales, a treadmill and a large glass tank, very grimy and filled to the brim with water so filthy and green that it was almost opaque. There was also a row of grillwork cages with crudely built kennels attached. Each was occupied by a dog, but these were animals of a different ilk to those they’d seen so far. They were highly subdued, lying still with ears flat, each one watching the humans beyond their cages with fearful intensity.

And it was clear why.

They were brutally scarred, in many cases so bitten and ragged that the fur was entirely missing from their faces. Several had lost so much flesh from their jowls that their teeth were exposed. At least a couple were missing an eye, the empty sockets crudely sutured shut. Lucy saw ears hanging in ribbons, paws chewed into lame, leathery stumps. The reason for that was evident in their breeds, for these were mostly mongrels, but those that weren’t were recognisable as Labradors, spaniels and retrievers, suburban pets rather than fighting-dogs.

‘Bait,’ Lucy observed as she walked along the cages.

‘Looks like this is where all the abductees we’ve been hearing about have finished up,’ Payne said, following.

‘Maybe.’

‘No sign of the black van yet, though.’

‘We need to keep looking.’

To Lucy’s mind, the existence of ‘bait dogs’ was one of the most sickening aspects of the whole dog-fighting disgrace. That these trusting, innocent creatures could be thrown into the pit repeatedly as part of a callous training regime for the fighting-dogs, where they’d be attacked mercilessly, again and again, by savage beasts that wanted nothing more than to senselessly kill anything they were faced with, didn’t bear thinking about. But that such a thing could happen to one-time pets, allegedly stolen from loving homes by this mysterious black van that had been reported several times when an animal had vanished, was somehow even more horrible.

‘We need the vets again,’ Lucy said, to which the younger detective nodded and hurried away.

‘At least you’re not going to need them in here,’ a voice said.

She glanced around, and saw Malcolm Peabody leaning out through the entrance to an ugly breezeblock building with no glass in its windows and a sagging tarpaper roof. He’d removed his ballistics helmet and now carried it under one arm. His hair was damp and spiky, his freckled features greased with sweat. Normally an affable young bloke with a great enthusiasm for the job, his expression was grim and angry, his pallor waxen.

Deeply apprehensive, Lucy followed him inside.

Torchlight revealed that it was a basic shell of a room with bare walls and a rugged concrete floor. It was also stained with the blood of ages and strewn with dog carcasses. There were at least ten of them, all relatively recent; Lucy could tell that because flies buzzed everywhere, and a fetid odour thickened the air. She surveyed the heap of twisted forms with what a stranger might have called indifference, but in truth was cold professionalism. It wasn’t that it didn’t affect her, it was simply that, twelve years in, Lucy was a veteran of this kind of ghastliness, and she knew that to get emotional would only cloud her judgement.

Peabody, a relative newbie, was less in control.

‘These are obviously the ones they couldn’t use any more,’ he said, looking nauseous as he indicated a heavy mallet hanging from a nail by a leather strap. ‘And this is how they put them out of their misery.’

‘Don’t touch it,’ Lucy replied. ‘Don’t touch anything. Not till we’ve had Photographic in here.’

They stepped back outside into the fresher air, and Lucy indicated to one of the other uniforms to come and stand by the door. Walking back through the barn, they came to the farmyard where the prisoners were lined up, their details and the details of the officers who’d detained them being tabulated by Sergeant Frobisher to ensure there’d be no confusion back at Custody. One by one, the prisoner transports were reversing into place, their back doors swinging along with the cage doors inside.

‘Your cards are fucking marked!’ the hefty figure of Mandy Mahoney squawked as two armoured policewomen frogmarched her to a waiting police car. As the only female detainee, she would travel separately from the others. ‘All you pigs … you’re all fucking marked!’

Not far behind her, the even more ponderous and dishevelled shape of Les Mahoney was also manhandled forward. He stank of sweat, and when he grinned at Lucy, showed a full set of rotten teeth.

‘Sorry to disrupt your evening’s entertainment, Mr Mahoney,’ she said.

His grin never faltered. ‘Fuck you, you slip of a tart.’ Hawking a green one, he spat it on the floor at her feet. ‘And tell your fucking clodhopping arse-bandit mates not to make too much of a mess, or I’ll sue the fucking lot of you.’

‘Some chance,’ Peabody retorted. ‘You’re going to jail, pal.’

‘Yeah?’ Mahoney guffawed. ‘Good. I could use a five-month holiday … you spotty-faced lump of dogshit.’

Peabody lurched forward, but Lucy physically restrained him.

‘Get him out of my sight,’ she said.

Mahoney laughed loudly and brashly as he was led away.

Lucy shook her head. ‘Last of the old-school charmers, eh?’

Peabody scowled. ‘It’s right what he said though. We’ll be lucky if he gets any more than a slapped wrist for this. We should drive the bastard around a corner somewhere and smack the living crap out of him … just in case he gets a free ride later.’

Lucy watched as they assisted the cuffed Mahoney into one of the vans. ‘What’ve I told you about getting too involved, Malcolm? You won’t go the distance if you let this job screw with your head. Those things back there … they’re just animals.’ She patted his cheek before walking away. ‘Wait till you see it done to humans.’

Chapter 2

Though she’d worn a uniform for the first decade of her career, Lucy Clayburn had now been a detective constable for two years, but in all that time she had only ever worked her home patch of Crowley, Greater Manchester Police’s legendary November Division.

The one-time industrial town – though these days it was more a post-industrial wasteland – had an infamous reputation for villainy, though it probably wasn’t any more deserved than those bad reps attached to other northern English cities where full employment was a thing of the past and drugs and alcohol had flowed in to fill the gap.

The problem with being a police officer – anywhere really, not just in a place like Crowley – was that you knew what went on behind the sometimes paper-thin façade of the local community. So she wasn’t entirely surprised that night of Wednesday, September 12, to look down the list of prisoners waiting in the traps at Robber’s Row police station, November Division’s HQ, and see that they included professional men with sedate family backgrounds: a senior civil servant, a local journalist, an estate agent, even a bank manager. There were louts and scallies among them too, all the usual suspects; but respectability was a keyword where several were concerned, or superficial respectability at least. Maybe, to an extent, she should have anticipated this, because dog-fighting wouldn’t have existed at all, even as an illegal sport, without the hefty cashflow it generated. It was only ever about gambling, and if you didn’t have the readies for that, you couldn’t participate.

‘Worrying, isn’t it?’ Lucy said, scrolling down the file on the screen belonging to Sergeant Joe Cullen, the Robber’s Row custody officer. ‘Lots of these guys come over as perfect citizens … so able to create the impression they’re normal that they can function easily in everyday society. They do jobs efficiently and make them pay. They impress socially. They have friends, families. But deep down, they’re so disturbed that they derive pleasure from watching innocent animals rip each other apart. Either that, or they’re so indifferent to it that they don’t care so long as they make a few quid.’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the thin end of the wedge, to be honest,’ Cullen replied. He was a foursquare old-schooler, with a weathered hangdog face and a brush of thick grey bristles on his head. ‘If they’re prepared to do this, what else are they up to? Like you say … they’re not normal.’

‘Mahoney’s solicitor here yet?’ Lucy asked.

‘Doesn’t want one,’ Cullen replied.

She arched an eyebrow.

Cullen shrugged. ‘Asked him twice, but he insists he’ll be fine. Confident little toe-rag, I’ll say that for him.’

‘So, Mr Mahoney,’ Lucy said, ‘you understand that you remain under caution?’

Mahoney nodded. Still in the scruffy, rancid clothes they’d arrested him in, still smelling of sweat and cigarettes, he slouched on the other side of the interview room table, grinning.

Lucy rolled back the sleeves of her sweater and got the ball rolling. ‘For the benefit of the tape, we’re in Interview Room 3, Robber’s Row police station. I’m DC Lucy Clayburn, in company with acting DC Tessa Payne. This is the interview of Leslie Mahoney. Interview commencing –’ she glanced at the clock on the wall ‘– 11.15pm.’ She watched him carefully. ‘So, Mr Mahoney … how was your day?’

Mahoney guffawed with laughter. ‘That’s a funny one, I must admit.’

‘No more effing and blinding?’

He shrugged. ‘Just caught me at a bad moment, that’s all.’

‘The moment you’re referring to, of course, was the moment when you were arrested outside your home tonight, at 39, Wellspring Lane. Isn’t that correct?’

‘Yeah … that’s correct.’

‘I’m guessing you’re also aware why you’ve been—?’

‘Let’s not fuck about, love. You’ve got me for running professional dog-fights.’

Lucy remained cool. ‘You don’t seem too concerned.’

‘It’s a bang-up job, isn’t it? You caught us at it red-handed, so yes … before we have to go through all that boring question-and-answer shit, I was causing the dogs to fight, I was receiving admission fees from the attendees, I was accepting bets on the outcome, I did possess premises and equipment adapted for use in dog-fighting, I was in possession of videos … and so on and so on.’

He grinned again, showing brown, scummy teeth, his ragged beard dotted with saliva.

‘Where’d you get the dogs from?’ Lucy asked.

‘Don’t own any dogs,’ Mahoney said. ‘I just organise the fights.’

‘I’m not talking about the thirty-plus fighting-dogs we recovered from your property,’ Lucy said. ‘We’ve yet to establish exactly who their owners are. I’m more interested in the seventeen dogs we found in kennels at the back of your barn. And in the thirteen dead dogs we found in what looked like an improvised mortuary.’

‘You’re talking about the bait dogs.’ Mahoney caught Payne’s mingled look of contempt and bewilderment. He chuckled at her. ‘Surprised, darling? I bet most of the poor sods you lock up are rarely this forthcoming, eh?’

‘So where did you get them?’ Lucy asked again.

‘I bought them. Or got them from rescue centres.’

‘So, they are yours?’ Payne said. ‘Even though you just said you don’t own any dogs.’

Mahoney looked amused again. ‘Fuck off, kid … they’re not real dogs, are they? Strays, mutts. God knows what kind of parentage most of them had. Every one a fucking mess.’

‘They were certainly a mess when you’d finished with them,’ she retorted.

Lucy glanced sidelong at her. Tessa Payne was a recent recruit to Robber’s Row CID, having done her initial uniform work out of Cotehill Crescent. She was sporty and fit – apparently a top athlete – but was also a college graduate, possessing the sort of sensitivity you rarely found in the police at one time. At present, she seemed calm, but Lucy could tell that she had no love for Les Mahoney.

‘If you’re talking about the dead ones, I was doing them a favour,’ Mahoney said. ‘You think ordinary vets don’t do the same thing … put some creature that’s beyond repair out of its misery?’

‘Ordinary vets normally do it in a clinical environment,’ Payne said. ‘In a humane way.’

Mahoney looked puzzled. ‘What could be more humane than a quick smack on the noggin?’

‘So you’re admitting killing the thirteen dogs in the shed,’ Lucy said.

‘Yeah, sure.’

‘With this?’ She placed the mallet on the table between them. It was now enclosed in a sealed plastic evidence bag.

‘Yep.’ Mahoney didn’t even bother checking it. ‘That’s it.’

‘So, as well as the gym – we saw your swim-tank and your training treadmill – you also provide a bait dog service? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Correct.’

‘Fighting-dog owners come and visit you, and presumably for more cash, you’ll put one of your bait dogs in the pit … so the fighting-dog can get a lot of practice in?’

‘That’s about the gist of it, yeah.’

‘The other dog doesn’t stand a chance, does it?’ Payne said. ‘Don’t bother answering that, by the way … we’ve seen the outcome for ourselves.’

‘Look … why are you pretending you care?’ Again, the prisoner looked amused. ‘You’re a fucking rozzer. Kicking the shit out of people is part of your job description. And that’s people … not dumb fucking animals, brainless mongrels that no one fucking wants.’

‘So, you took possession of them,’ Lucy said, remaining focused. ‘By buying them, or … excuse me if I smirk, rescuing them.’

‘Correct.’

‘All done officially?’ Payne asked.

‘Absolutely. Paperwork straight and everything.’

‘There were certainly some dogs in your kennels that didn’t look as if they’d ever seen the inside of a rescue centre,’ Lucy said.

Mahoney tried to think. ‘Suppose there were one or two pedigrees. Yeah.’

‘Where’d you get those from?’ she asked.

‘Those were the ones I bought. Owners couldn’t look after them any more, or they were moving away, or a family was splitting up or something. Sad, eh? Like it’s not bad enough, the kids seeing their mum and dad separating, and then they get their pets taken off them too. But who cares, really? I mean, come on … pets. Soppy, poofy things. Fucking toys pretending to be dogs.’

‘You bought them?’ Lucy said, seeking confirmation.

‘Again, I’ve got all the documents.’

Which they would no doubt soon find, Lucy reminded herself. In addition to the dog-fighting offences, she’d also arrested Mahoney on suspicion of theft – i.e. having stolen the missing dogs – which had empowered them to perform a thorough search of his premises. Right now, as Lucy and Mahoney spoke, Malcolm Peabody and one or two other uniforms were still down at Wellspring Lane, going through the property inch by inch.

‘Do you want to know what’s really funny, though?’ Mahoney said.

‘Funny?’ Lucy replied.

He leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘You’ve come in here thinking: “Gonna teach this bugger a lesson. He’ll try and wriggle out of it, but we’ve got him. Gonna fucking wallop him.” And yet … I’ve not tried to wriggle out, have I? I’ve coughed to it. Because you and me both know the worst I’m going to get for this is six months.’ He grinned again, mouth filled with brown, shovel-like teeth. ‘Like I said, I could use the holiday.’

He sat back again, his grin broadening.

‘Done you like a pair of brain-dead kippers, haven’t I?’ he said. ‘Because you now reckon you’re going to lay a few theft charges on me. You’re thinking, “The only chance we’ve got of sticking this bastard somewhere the sun doesn’t shine is to prove that he’s pinched some of these dogs, especially these pedigrees because they’re worth a bob or two.” I bet you’ve got a list in your back pocket of a load of missing dogs, haven’t you? I’ve heard the stories too. House pets getting lifted all over Crowley by this evil black van.’

He gave Lucy a long appraising stare.

‘I wonder, DC Clayburn, if you’ve actually verified yet whether any of those missing pooches marry up with any of those in my kennels … or are you just guessing that’s the case? Because if it’s the latter, bad luck.’ He laughed again. ‘And to pre-empt your next dumbfuck question … no, I don’t own a black transit van. I’ve got three vehicles, and I’ve got documents for all of them. But don’t bother looking around my place for this mythical black van, because you’ll just make bigger arses of yourselves than you already have.’

DI Stan Beardmore, Lucy’s divisional supervisor, was an easy-going guy in his mid-fifties, short and squat, with a head of neat, snow-white hair, and a habit of wearing shabby tweed jackets over his smart shirts and ties. At present he looked nonplussed.

‘I don’t understand the problem,’ he said. ‘The bastard’s coughed to everything.’

‘Trouble is, he’s right, isn’t he?’ Lucy replied from the other side of the connecting office between Custody and the front desk. She whipped a folded print-out from the back pocket of her jeans. ‘I’ve got a whole raft of animals here that aren’t accounted for.’

‘Lucy, they’re just dogs. We’ve got a longer list of missing people who we haven’t even got time to look for.’

‘That’s not the point.’ She shook her head. ‘We’ve got enough to charge him with the dog-fighting stuff. But unless we can hit him with a decent theft charge too, he’ll get a tap on the wrist and then go home laughing.’

‘He had one or two pedigrees in his collection, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, but I’ve already checked and none of those marry up with anything registered as missing.’ She spread her paperwork on the desk and indicated a section that she’d previously drawn a square around in biro. It contained printed details, and a poor-quality black-and-white photo of a fluffball dog. ‘I was hoping to find this one, at least. Petra. A dyed-pink Toy Poodle, she disappeared two months ago from a back garden in Cotely Barn. Her owner reported a mysterious black van in the vicinity that evening.’

Beardmore rolled his eyes.

‘The point is that Petra originally cost her owner £650 when first purchased,’ Lucy said.

‘She definitely wasn’t in Mahoney’s kennels?’ Beardmore asked.

‘I think we’d know if we’d found a dyed-pink poodle.’

‘What about that shed where the dead ones were?’

Lucy shook her head, grim-faced. ‘She wasn’t there either. There’s another thing though. When Petra went missing, she was wearing a pink leather collar with diamond studs in it … that alone was worth two thousand quid. Ridiculous expenditure on a dog, I know. But if we could do Mahoney for that, he’d get a few extra months, if nothing else.’

‘And would it be worth it? For a few extra months?’

Lucy shook her head. ‘Stan … if you’d been there. If you’d seen what we saw …’

‘Okay, I know, I know.’ He looked frustrated. ‘I agree it’s a bag of shit … a bastard like Mahoney deserves the book throwing at him. He’d go down for five years if it was up to me. But we don’t make the law, Lucy. We just enforce it.’

‘I need something else. That jewelled collar at least—’

‘Excuse me, DC Clayburn,’ a voice interrupted. ‘There’s someone to see you out front.’

It was Daisy Dobson, one of the civilian employees who worked the station’s front desk. She was a tall, statuesque girl, with a mess of blonde hair and a permanently sour countenance. She might still have made a good impression in her smart shell-blue uniform, but she was also in the habit of chewing gum noisily. She stood impatiently awaiting a response.

‘Is it important, Daisy?’ Lucy asked. ‘Only … I’ve got a whole raft of prisoners.’

Daisy chomped on but didn’t move away. ‘I don’t know whether it’s important or not.’

‘In that case get rid of them,’ Beardmore replied. ‘We’re busy.’

‘It’s a nun,’ Daisy said.

‘A nun …?’ Fleetingly, Beardmore was lost for words.

‘That’s right, sir,’ Daisy replied. ‘A proper one. With all the gear on.’

Beardmore recovered himself. ‘Get rid of her politely then. We’re still busy.’

‘It’s all right,’ Lucy said, knowing who this caller would be. She folded her paperwork and slid it back into her pocket. ‘I’ll go through. She’s not a real nun. I mean, she was a real nun once. Well, a sister rather than a nun. Anyway, she’s neither now, because … well, it’s a long story.’

Beardmore was blank-faced. ‘Are we talking some kind of crackpot?’

‘That’s the problem.’ Lucy headed to the door. ‘With Sister Cassiopeia, you’re never quite sure.’

Chapter 3

Sister Cassiopeia, or Sister Cassie as she was better known, was seated on one of the benches in the waiting room. Given the lateness of the hour, she was there alone, but she’d have stood out even in a riotous crowd.

She wasn’t particularly tall, perhaps five-foot-seven, and never wore makeup, but she possessed a natural elfin beauty, a shadow of which remained even now, in her forties and after much hardship. She was thin, these days, rather than slim, but who wouldn’t be after living on the streets for a time, and yet her distinctive female shape remained visible, in fact was almost accentuated by her monastic clothing: the long black habit and brown scapular, the white wimple, black cloak and black veil. It was only when you were close to her, and the odour of her rank, unwashed clothes reached you, or when you noticed the patches, and the ragged hems of her skirts, and the mud spattered up them, that you realised there was a problem here. By then it probably wouldn’t surprise you to learn that if her arms were ever exposed, you’d see patterns of needle tracks.

‘Lucy, my child,’ she said in her soft Irish accent. She got up and crossed the room, her ever-present satchel swinging by its shoulder strap. As usual, she seemed remarkably energised for such a scarecrow of a person. ‘My, my … you’ve all been very naughty, this time, haven’t you?’

‘Oh … have we?’ Lucy replied.

Sister Cassie eyed Daisy Dobson with undisguised irritation. The big blonde girl, still noisily chewing, stood behind the desk openly and unashamedly eavesdropping. ‘May we speak somewhere a little more private, child?’

Lucy nodded. ‘I think we’d better.’

She led the ex-nun to a side-door, tapped in the combination and diverted her towards one of the station’s non-custodial interview rooms. ‘I have to tell you, though,’ she said over her shoulder, ‘I haven’t got a lot of time.’

‘Well, that’s always the problem,’ Sister Cassie replied, following her in, unhooking her cloak and seating herself rather primly in an armchair. ‘We’re all rushed off our feet these days.’ Then she became stern. ‘But I do think these disappearances are getting a little out of hand.’

Lucy sat in the facing chair, which thankfully was several feet away. Sister Cassie attended to her own hygiene as much as any homeless drug-addict could be expected to, regularly using the showers available in the shelters, but she also insisted on wearing this ancient religious garb of hers, which, by the look and stink of it, probably hadn’t been laundered in two decades or more.

Lucy shrugged. ‘Sister … we’re looking into these pet abductions as part of a larger operation …’

‘Pet abductions?’ Sister Cassie seemed baffled. ‘My child, if only it were pets I was talking about.’

Lucy could only shrug again, bemused. ‘Okay, so … what disappearances?’

‘My dear child … three of my regulars have recently dropped out of sight.’

‘Dropped out of sight?’

‘I believe that’s the vernacular. They’ve vanished. They’re no longer here.’

‘Sister, I’m afraid I’m still not sure what you mean …’

‘Oh, child.’ A look of patient frustration briefly etched the ex-nun’s face, a hint maybe of the teacher she’d once reputedly been. ‘This is not difficult. You know Edna Davis, I take it?’

Lucy couldn’t help thinking about the custody clock ticking next door. ‘I’m afraid I don’t.’

‘They used to call her the Cat Lady.’

Lucy paused. This name rang a bell.

‘Always sits at the junction between Stoker’s Street and Kiln Lane,’ Sister Cassie explained. ‘Or she used to. I don’t know where she is now.’

Lucy recollected the homeless woman in question. She was a lot older and in a far more decrepit state than Sister Cassie and was instantly recognisable for her beige mac and overlarge trainers, and for the crumpled, flower-covered hat she wore, but, most noticeably of all, for the three or four cats she always had with her.

‘Stoker’s Street and Kiln Lane?’ she sought to confirm.

Sister Cassie nodded.

‘And she’s disappeared, you say?’

‘One day, I was making my usual evening rounds – and she was no longer there. And she hasn’t been there since. No one I know has seen her.’

‘When was this?’

‘I would say … five days ago.’

Lucy pondered. Five days wasn’t that long, and some homeless people were transient and prone to wandering.

‘But I’m afraid that isn’t the worst of it,’ the ex-nun added. ‘Ronald Burke … you know him?’

Lucy regarded her quizzically. ‘No, but he’s also homeless, I’m guessing?’

‘You, most likely, will have met him when he’s been causing trouble in public houses.’ The ex-nun sighed at such regrettable behaviour. ‘He used to wear a brown overcoat and a grey balaclava. Whatever the weather.’

‘Yes, now you mention it … I remember.’

‘Well … he hasn’t been seen for two or three weeks.’

‘Sister … couldn’t these people have simply moved on? They’ve no work to keep them here, no fixed abode.’

‘Oh, my child …’ Sister Cassie gave a sad smile. ‘Let’s not find reasons not to investigate, mmm? You are a police detective, after all.’

Ever the school-ma’am, Lucy thought. ‘You said that three of your regulars have gone missing?’

Sister Cassie was thoughtful. ‘The last one is a little more troubling. For a brief time, I was unsure whether to include him on the list, because he can really be rather naughty. Frederick Holborn … you know him?’

Lucy shook her head.

‘Ah. Probably a good thing. No doubt he would attempt to impugn your honour.’ The ex-nun arched a disapproving eyebrow. ‘As he regularly does mine.’

‘I’m sorry …’ Lucy was puzzled. ‘You’re saying he’s assaulted you?’

‘Perhaps “assault” is too strong a word. Let’s just say that he has several times sought sexual favours from me. I think he regards my religious calling as a challenge to be overcome.’

From what Lucy knew, it wouldn’t have been much of a challenge. Sister Cassie might don the trappings of a nun and adopt the role of carer with her fellow vagrants, but she had a heroin habit all of her own, and she needed to earn the money for it.

‘I almost stopped including him in my nightly rounds,’ the ex-nun added, ‘but though drink and other poisons have ravaged many of these poor creatures to a point where they are closer, frankly, to God than they are to men, they still have needs and desires. I don’t mind admitting, there’ve been times when I’ve almost complied—’

‘Sister, please. If you’re not actually making a complaint against Fred Holborn, can we get to the point?’

‘Well, he’s vanished too, child. Completely … as if he was never put on this Earth.’

The door opened, and Tessa Payne stuck her head in. ‘Sorry, Lucy, but Sergeant Cullen’s wondering what the delay is.’

Lucy signalled that she’d be out shortly.

‘You’re a very kind person, Sister,’ Lucy said. ‘And I know you genuinely care for those in want. The fact you make these nightly rounds at all is … well, it’s going to win you a lot of brownie points with the Lord, even if it doesn’t get you anything down here.’

The ‘nightly rounds’ she referred to were a real thing. Sister Cassie spent the best part of each day scavenging what scant supplies she could – food, drink, cigarettes, money – and despite holding some back in order to feed her own habit, was often able to make a nightly circuit of the doorways, sewers and underpasses where so many of Crowley’s homeless bedded down, doling out whatever she could to the most needy, or sometimes simply offering company and comfort.

‘But the first point I made still stands,’ Lucy said. ‘Edna Davis, Ronald Burke and Fred Holborn … they might just have wandered off.’

Sister Cassie shook her head.

‘Look,’ Lucy said, ‘they may have been fixtures in Crowley for years, but there’s nothing to keep them here.’

‘I know these people well, child. None of them have anywhere else to go.’

‘What do the others think?’ Lucy asked. ‘I mean, the rest of your community.’

‘They’re as worried and bemused as I am.’

‘So why haven’t they come forward? You say Ronald Burke vanished two or three weeks ago.’

‘My child … they will not come into a police station.’

‘Why not?’

‘They don’t trust you. And why should they? One young lady I see on my regular rounds … she was raped by a gang of men some nine months ago. Not just raped, sodomised too. It was a terrible attack and I know, because I’m the one who cared for her afterwards and persuaded her to go to the police station.’

‘I don’t remember this,’ Lucy said.

‘It wasn’t here at Robber’s Row, it was at Cotehill Crescent.’

‘Okay, and …?’

‘Well …’ Sister Cassie sighed again. ‘It’s a sad tale already, but it gets sadder still. While the police ladies were helping her undress for examination by the nurse, they found certain substances. As such, this young lady herself was questioned. It made her feel very uncomfortable … as if she wasn’t already uncomfortable enough.’

‘I do remember that one, actually,’ Lucy said. ‘That young lady had quite a bit of heroin on her, and several uncapped needles, all of which she failed to mention. As a result, one of the policewomen assisting got her finger pricked and had to go through all kinds of health checks afterwards. Are you surprised they got cross with her?’

‘It doesn’t matter. They were searching for evidence that might have incriminated the young lady’s attacker, and they ended up making a fuss about evidence which might well have incriminated the young lady herself … and for something completely unconnected with the original complaint. So, you see, child, my community, as you call it, is not very keen on your community.’

Unconnected with the original complaint …

Lucy thought about that, wondering why it seemed meaningful.

And then the penny dropped.

‘Is everything all right?’ Sister Cassie said, noting Lucy’s gradual change of expression.

Lucy stood up stiffly. ‘Sister … I have some rather pressing business, I’m afraid.’

The ex-nun nodded sagely, and she too made to stand. ‘Of course.’

She smiled as she pulled on her cloak and picked up her satchel. She wasn’t being sarcastic. This was one of the disarming things about her: despite everything, she still radiated charm and civility. Even with the occasional admonitions, her attitude throughout the short interview had mainly been one of gratitude that a police officer had found time for her.

Lucy showed her out into the front waiting room. ‘I’ll come and find you,’ she said. ‘It won’t be tomorrow – I’ve got too much on, and I’ve got Friday off. Over the weekend, maybe?’

‘Of course.’

‘Where will you be? St Clement’s Avenue, is it?’

‘That’s my usual haunt, child.’ The ex-nun opened the front doors to leave.

‘I’m serious, Sister,’ Lucy said. ‘I’ll come down there and look you up.’

But the ex-nun was already walking away along Tarwood Lane, her robes flapping behind her. She waved one-handed, without looking back.

Briefly, Lucy was discomforted by the thought of the woman travelling all the way back to St Clement’s Avenue alone and on foot. Even if she got there safely, St Clement’s was one of the most dangerous neighbourhoods in the borough. But that was Sister Cassie’s life all over: the streets, the darkness, the isolation – she was no stranger to any of it. Besides, Lucy had more important things to do at present than offer rides to hobos.

Such as once and for all squashing a very nasty, very self-confident little bug.

Chapter 4

Lucy drove back to Wellspring Lane at speed. All the way, three sentences replayed themselves over and over through her head.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the thin end of the wedge.

If they’re prepared to do this, what else are they up to?

Those first two, courtesy of the laconic Joe Cullen.

Completely unconnected with the original complaint …

That latter the homespun street-wisdom of Sister Cassiopeia.

It was now very late, past midnight, so though Wellspring Lane was at the extreme southern end of the borough, away from most residential districts and edging onto the famous Chat Moss, there was almost no other traffic on the road. Lucy got her foot down nevertheless, concerned that the search of Mahoney’s premises might be approaching its end.

She was only just in time, bouncing her Suzuki Jimny down the rutted track to the farm cottage, swerving at speed around the abandoned vehicles there, and seeing Malcolm Peabody and three other constables outside the building, next to what looked as if it was the last divisional van on site. They were still in protective clothing, but even as Lucy arrived, gloves were coming off and the press-studs down the fronts of overalls being plucked open.

Peabody advanced, grinning, as she screeched to a halt in the farmyard.

‘We’ve bagged and boxed everything,’ he said. He tapped the side of the van. ‘We’ve got enough here to do such a number on this Mahoney wanker that he’ll never forget it.’

‘Did you find the jewelled collar?’ she asked, jumping out.

‘Erm, no.’ Peabody pondered. ‘But he’s banged to rights. Photographic have only just gone, and they’ve got loads of stuff too.’

‘Any other animals?’

‘Only the ones we found before.’

‘What about the black van?’

He shook his head, frowning as he sensed her displeasure. ‘No sign of any van on these premises. We’ve been through all the outbuildings. But Luce, we’ve got him – we caught him at it.’

‘We’ve got him for dog-fighting, Malcolm – not something that’s going to see him do serious time.’ She entered the cottage via its still open door. ‘Everyone, come in here, please.’

The other officers trooped inside, joining her in a small, cluttered kitchen.

All kinds of revolting mess filled its central table and surrounding worktops. The dull lighting and low, beamed ceiling only added to the gloom and the cramped atmosphere. The door had been open for hours now, but there was still a staleness in the air, a vague odour of spoiled food.

‘How thoroughly have you searched this house?’ she asked, her gaze roving from one blank, tired face to the next.

‘We’ve had a look around,’ Peabody answered, ‘but we gathered so much evidence from the barn and the outbuildings—’

‘So you’re saying you’ve not searched it at all?’ she interrupted, visibly vexed.

‘We’ve had a look around.’

‘What does that mean, Malcom? A cursory look? You’ve checked in a few drawers?’

No one spoke, but several shamefaced glances were exchanged.

‘Come on, Lucy,’ Peabody protested. ‘We’re looking for evidence of organised dog-fighting. And we’ve found it outside. Stacks of it. What exactly could he keep in here?’

‘I found some paperwork,’ a young policewoman called Laurie Darlington chipped in. ‘It was in a cupboard in the dining room. So I put it in the van.’

‘Show me,’ Lucy said.

They went back outside and opened the van. PC Darlington rummaged among the boxes and various plastic bags before lifting a clear plastic envelope tagged LD1, containing a bundle of dirty documents stapled together. Lucy didn’t unseal the paperwork but examined what she could of it through the plastic. Though the top sheet had been scribbled on almost unintelligibly, close analysis suggested that it was a customer log, detailing names and the services provided, plus payments and the like.

‘This is good,’ Lucy said. ‘In fact, this is excellent. But just at present it’s not what we’re looking for. Inside again, everyone, please.’

Lucy held the same rank as the search officers, but they deferred to her naturally, not just because of her length of service, twelve years, but because she’d been point-man on this operation from the start, and because, even though a lowly divisional detective, she already had a rep for breaking tough cases.

‘Here’s the deal,’ she said, when they were back in the kitchen. ‘We’re fully authorised to search this pad, so I want every inch of it going over, yeah? If necessary, it needs physically ripping apart.’

There were thinly veiled groans. Most of these officers, including Peabody, had been on duty for several hours after their normal shifts had supposedly finished. They were being paid for it, but inevitably fatigue was setting in.

‘Seriously, Lucy?’ Peabody groaned. ‘All this for a dog-collar?’

‘Anything we can hit this bastard with, we have to do it,’ she said.

‘Won’t he have sold it on by now?’ another copper asked. ‘I mean, if it’s worth that much … why would he hang onto it?’

‘We’re not walking away from here without having a good look around,’ she said simply. ‘That dog-collar’s too valuable.’

More irritated expressions; more shuffling feet.

‘At least,’ she said, ‘that’s going to be the official line.’

Immediately, their expressions changed. Feet stopped shuffling.

‘Pricks like this guy Mahoney always have their fingers in more than one illegal pie,’ Lucy said. ‘So that’s what we’re really looking for. Anything else we might be able to use, but it’s got to be good.’

‘Aren’t we only supposed to be looking for stuff relevant to the case?’ someone queried.

‘Section 19, PACE,’ Lucy said. ‘A constable engaged in a lawful search of a premises may seize anything if he or she has reasonable grounds for believing that it is evidence in relation to an offence he or she is investigating … or any other offence.’

They pondered this.

‘Why do you think he’s coughed to the dog-fighting so readily?’ she asked them.

‘’Cause he’s no choice,’ Peabody said.

‘Maybe, but maybe also because he wants us out of here quickly … before we find something else.’

With a greater degree of enthusiasm than previously, and now under Lucy’s direction, the team went at it again, this time more robustly. First, they did the bedrooms, which were odious pits of filth and slovenliness, moving bookcases so they could look behind them, yanking out the contents of wardrobes and doors, checking under beds, lifting rugs and carpets, even dislodging loose floorboards and peering underneath. Downstairs, they investigated the under-stair closet, which was filled with what appeared to be rubbish, though there was a double-barrelled shotgun there. Knowing Mahoney, it was almost certainly unlicensed, but it was unloaded, and a vigorous search of the under-stair crawlspace provided no cartridges either, while the weapon itself looked so ancient that it might even be classifiable as an antique, which would exempt it.

In the cottage’s living room, they lifted more carpets, checked under more sideboards, dug behind and underneath the upholstery on the couch, probing through welters of crumbs and tattered newspaper. They prodded thick tufts of fluff gathered behind radiators, and pried loose skirting boards away, only for mice and cockroaches to scamper free. Some shelves next to the television were stacked with unmarked DVDs. They played a few of these and found they were nothing more than pirate copies of recent movies. Peabody suggested that this was another charge they could add, but Lucy called it ‘Mickey Mouse stuff’.

She was getting tired herself now, and deeply frustrated. The clock was ticking on her prisoners, and she couldn’t keep these officers on duty for ever. When she glanced at her watch and saw that it was nearly three in the morning, she was ready to call it off. She was standing at the top of the cottage stairs contemplating this, when a voice came up to her from below. She went back down and found PC Darlington in the doorway to the ground-floor privy.

‘Could this be what we’re looking for?’ Darlington wondered.

Curious, Lucy stuck her head into the cubicle, where another PC, a tall lad, had stood on the toilet lid to check inside the cistern, which was high on the wall, and in so doing had accidentally hit the ceiling with the top of his head, dislodging a concealed but loose panel, from behind which a bulky plastic sack had tumbled. He’d already opened the sack and discovered maybe a hundred sachets of white powder, which he offered to Lucy in two gloved hands.

For the first time in two or three hours, she smiled.

Forty minutes later, Lucy was back in the Custody Suite at Robber’s Row police station. A few of the lesser miscreants, those who didn’t own dogs themselves, were already lined at the counter, being charged with attending a dog-fight and making bets.

DI Beardmore, who ought to have gone home hours ago, stood to one side, arms folded, looking sallow-cheeked. He’d even removed his jacket and tie and unbuttoned his collar, which was not his normal form. When he saw Lucy, he frowned all the more.

‘Can we get this show on the road, please?’ he said grumpily. ‘We’re running out of space in here, Lucy. The night shift have started nicking real criminals and we’ve nowhere to put them.’

‘Sir … Mahoney’s a real criminal.’ And she told him what they’d found at the cottage, and the phone-calls she’d made afterwards as she’d headed back here from Wellspring Lane.

A short time later, she walked down the cell corridor, produced a bunch of keys and unlocked one of the doors. Inside, Mahoney was lying on the narrow mattress, arms folded behind his head. He sat up and yawned. ‘About fucking time.’

‘Sorry about the delay, Mr Mahoney,’ she said. ‘We’re almost finished here.’

‘Don’t know how lucky you are, love. If I was as bad at my job as you are at yours, I wouldn’t make a penny. But you get paid anyway, don’t you? There’s the public sector, eh?’

‘The situation’s simple,’ she said. ‘You’re shortly going to be charged with causing dogs to fight, receiving money for admission to these fights, publicising these fights, accepting bets on these fights, possessing materials in connection with these fights, allowing your premises to be used for these fights, possessing videos of other dog-fights, and, to top it all off, causing unnecessary suffering to protected animals.’

It was quite a laundry list of villainy, but Mahoney shrugged indifferently, as if this was only to be expected.

‘But I wouldn’t make any plans to go home just yet,’ she said.

A man sidled into the doorway alongside her, wearing a sweater and jeans. He was tall and lean, with a shock of black hair and rugged, lived-in looks. He fixed Mahoney with a hard but unreadable expression.

‘This is DCI Slater of the Drugs Squad,’ Lucy said. ‘Once we’ve charged you with those offences, he’ll be re-arresting you on suspicion of possessing controlled drugs with intent to supply.’

The colour drained from Mahoney’s brutish, bearded face. He leaped to his feet.

‘If I were you, I’d think about getting lawyered up after all,’ she added.

She closed the door with a clang, though the prisoner’s voice all but punched its way through the heavy steel.

‘You flatfoot bitch! You can’t do that!’

Lucy walked back down the corridor, Slater, an old colleague, ambling alongside her.

‘Got a lot of tired officers going off-duty now, sir,’ she said, ‘who’d thoroughly appreciate it if you nailed that bastard’s bollocks to the wall.’

‘No promises, Lucy,’ Slater replied. ‘But that tends to be what we do.’

Chapter 5

It was Cora Clayburn’s fifty-fifth birthday, in honour of which she was done up even more impressively than usual, and she was rarely ever seen out of the house minus lippy or eye-liner.

In appearance alone, Lucy was very different to her mother, five-foot-eight tall and, thanks to years of sporting activity, possessed of a trim, athletic build. She was naturally tanned and had glossy, crow-black hair, which these days, as a plain-clothes officer, she wore well past her shoulders. Her green eyes and sharp features had a feline aspect, which men seemed to find both attractive and intimidating. In contrast, Cora was more of an English rose: she only stood five-foot-six, was more buxom than her daughter, and had silver/blonde hair currently styled in a short bob, blue eyes, pink lips and a soft, pale complexion. Age had caught up with her a little. She was ‘no longer wrinkle-free’, as she would frustratedly say while standing in front of the bathroom mirror, but, thanks to her exercise regime, plus the fact that she ate like a bird, she was still in terrific shape.

She also knew how to dress.

When they met at The Brasserie that evening, while Lucy was in kitten heels and jeans, with a stonewashed denim jacket over her black sleeveless vest, her mother wore stiletto heels and a flowery, figure-hugging dress which instantly took ten years off her. The Brasserie was a small place just off the town centre. It had once been a stable block or saddlery, and it attempted even now to retain that aura, with intricately paved floors, period timber beams, and walls adorned with framed, sepia-toned photographs depicting the Bridgewater Canal during the horse-drawn era. But it provided good service and very good food, and was perfect for a quiet midweek celebration. Lucy and Cora were allocated a table alongside the huge stone fireplace, but it was a mild September so far, and though the hearth was stacked with logs and kindling, no flames had been lit.

‘Late night?’ Cora asked, after they’d ordered a couple of drinks.

Lucy flipped through the menu, only vaguely aware that she’d just stifled a yawn.

‘Sort of.’ In fact, she’d only hit the sack after ten that morning, and even then had only managed to grab a couple of hours in an armchair in the rec room at Robber’s Row, as she’d needed to get back on duty in order to bottom the paperwork.

‘You couldn’t take today off?’

‘Would’ve been nice, but no. Finishing off a big job.’

‘Well … you still found time to send me a very thoughtful present. Thank you very much.’

‘It was only a voucher,’ Lucy said.

‘A voucher is good. No point taking a wild guess, is there? And no point giving me money, either. Where’s that going to go, if not on bills?’

Lucy picked up her glass of prosecco. ‘Happy fifty-fifth.’

They clinked glasses, even if Cora pulled a face. ‘Don’t say that, please …’

‘Hey, I’m no spring chicken,’ Lucy replied.

‘You’re thirty-two. I wish I was.’

‘Well … theoretically, I’ve got my best days ahead of me.’

‘Not theoretically. You have, trust me. Just don’t waste them.’ Cora leaned forward, staring at her daughter meaningfully. ‘Promise me that … you won’t waste them.’

In reality this meant: Please get yourself a fella. So Lucy opted to change the subject. ‘How’s the shoulder?’

‘Stiff, but I’ll live.’

The previous year, Cora had accidentally become embroiled in one of Lucy’s more extreme cases and had suffered a pistol shot to the left shoulder. The wound was relatively clean, the bullet passing through, and quick emergency surgery had prevented any life-changing damage, but it had still seen her spend several weeks in hospital, and even now she was on a course of recuperative physiotherapy. It was typical of Cora’s courageous self-confidence, though, that despite the very obvious scar, she was still happy to wear a strappy summer dress, and to look good in it.

‘Get anything nice?’ Lucy asked. ‘Apart from my voucher?’

‘Well … I’ve been meaning to tell you this.’ Suddenly, Cora looked cagey. ‘On the basis that you were bound to find out anyway, you having such a nose for trouble …’

‘Okay … go on.’

Cora sighed. ‘Yesterday morning, a florist’s van turned up at the house. And delivered … well, I don’t know for sure … maybe a couple of thousand pounds’ worth of summer blooms. Living room’s currently like a greenhouse at Kew Gardens.’

‘Two grand’s worth of flowers?’ Lucy said, astonished.

‘At least.’

‘So … what is it, a secret admirer?’

Cora took a sip of prosecco. ‘Hardy secret, Lucy.’

‘Ohhh, you’re not telling me …?’

Their eyes met, and Lucy shook her head with angry bewilderment.

To say that her father, Frank McCracken, was estranged from her would have been the euphemism of all time; in truth, the mere mention of his name put Lucy on edge as almost nothing else could.

He was a gangster. It was that simple. But not just an ordinary gangster; he held high rank in the Crew, the most influential crime syndicate in the whole of Northwest England. It hadn’t always been that way, of course. Thirty-two years ago, he’d been a small-time enforcer, one of whose duties was to mind the girls and watch the punters in a mob-owned strip-joint in central Manchester. It was there that he’d met a young Cora Clayburn, who, in a completely different life to the one she led now, had been one of the stars of the show. She’d taken to McCracken quickly; he was handsome, tough, intelligent, and he had the gift of the gab – his role at the club had been more ‘cooler’ than ‘bouncer’. They’d embarked on a relationship, but when Cora fell pregnant, she’d quickly reappraised her life. First of all, she’d decided that she wanted to keep the baby. Secondly, it was obvious that a rowdy strip-club was a completely inappropriate environment in which to raise a child. Thirdly, urbane though Frank McCracken could be, he was a criminal – and a violent one – and so were all his friends, so it didn’t take long for Cora to decide that she didn’t want him in her youngster’s life.

It still wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision to leave. Cora was open and honest with McCracken, and he accepted it, partly because he wasn’t ready for fatherhood but also because he could take his pick of the other strippers and was still at an age when playing the field was viewed as a male birthright. He’d offered Cora money to assist her, but she’d even turned that down, insisting that she wanted to make a complete break, advising her former beau that he would likely never see or even hear from her again.

And that was how it had remained. The child, a girl called Lucy, was born in Crowley, where Cora made her new life. She grew up never knowing who her father was but, ironically, joined the Greater Manchester Police. It was only two years ago, in the very dramatic circumstances of Operation Clearway, an undercover mission she and numerous other policewomen had undertaken in order to catch a killer called Jill the Ripper, that Lucy had finally come into contact with McCracken – now a major player, of course.

When they became aware of each other, there was immediate distrust on both parts, though the man had been more intrigued than the girl, almost feeling proud that his daughter had overcome the difficulties of having a lone parent in a rough part of the city. Lucy, in contrast, was overtly hostile to him, but, by necessity, a truce had eventually been reached, both parties understanding that if word ever got out that they were related to each other, their careers would both be damaged, if not ruined. Even now, only four people knew about it, as far as Lucy was aware: she and her mother, and McCracken and his second-in-command, a psychotic bruiser called Mick Shallicker.

The truce had held, even though they’d had dealings with each other several times since then, but increasingly, Lucy felt, her father was becoming lax in his efforts to keep things secret.

‘There was even a signed card with it,’ Cora added, interrupting her thoughts. ‘Just so there couldn’t be any mistake. The card was so big, it wouldn’t have gone through the letterbox.’ Her voice was almost wistful. ‘He not only signed it, he put fifty-five kisses on it.’ She glanced up, her expression suddenly hard. ‘So, go on … if you’re going to start shouting and bawling, let’s do it now and get it over with.’

‘What’s the point shouting?’ Lucy asked. ‘You didn’t give him any encouragement … I’m assuming?’

‘Of course I didn’t.’ Cora whipped her napkin off the table, a bit too aggressively, and arranged it on her lap. ‘But I’ve not needed to. It’s not like he’s come back into our lives through ordinary circumstances, is it?’

‘Well … not exactly ordinary.’

‘But through no fault of ours.’

Lucy shrugged. ‘And what are you trying to tell me … he likes what he sees?’

‘Why shouldn’t he?’

‘For Christ’s sake, Mum!’ Lucy leaned forward, lowering her voice. ‘You’re in fab shape for your age, but he’s walking around with Supertramp on his arm. Or he was.’

Carlotta ‘Charlie’ Powell was Frank McCracken’s current squeeze, a Pamela Anderson lookalike, who had once been the most expensive hooker in Manchester.

‘I can’t explain his motivation,’ Cora said. ‘All I’m telling you is what’s happened.’

‘I take it you haven’t done anything daft in response … like sent him a thank-you note or something?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Not yet?’

‘Lucy … will you stop behaving as if you’re the mother and I’m the child?’ Cora said heatedly. ‘Or as if you have a monopoly on common sense?’

Lucy sat back again, feeling admonished.

‘For all the reasons that you constantly warn me against him, I dumped that man thirty years ago. And in the process I condemned myself to a lifetime of anonymous single-motherhood. All this happened before you were even wearing nappies. Now, some might argue, given the pillar of righteousness you’ve become, that my sacrifice was worth it … and that maybe I’m finally entitled to a little me time.’

‘Mum … you’re not actually thinking of getting back with him?’

‘Lucy … just because you don’t want a man in your life, that doesn’t mean I don’t.’

‘But he’s already with someone.’

Cora shrugged. ‘You think that’ll bother your father?’

‘What?’ Lucy was aghast. ‘You’d be happy to be the other woman?’

‘I …’ Fleetingly, Cora struggled with this dollop of common sense. ‘Of course not. It’s just that I …’ Again, she had trouble articulating. ‘I really liked Frank. Back then, I mean.’

‘You left him easily enough.’

‘The decision was far from easy, trust me.’

‘You’ve had loads of chances to get to know other guys. I know you’ve been asked out at least three—’

‘None of them measure up, Lucy. That’s the trouble.’ Briefly, Cora was wistful again, lost in a dreamy past. Only to snap out of it suddenly. ‘Anyway, it’s easy for you to talk. You’re young, you’ve got your looks, your health …’

‘So have you.’

‘But you’ve still got years ahead of you. The pages on my calendar are turning fast.’

Lucy didn’t know what to say. The idea of her mother taking up with a notorious gangster was intolerable, of course, the antithesis of everything she stood for. But ultimately this was her mother’s business, not hers. Did she really have a right to intervene?

‘If you want the truth,’ Cora said, ‘I think Frank’s feeling the years too. He might have that ex-porno queen, or whatever she is, in his bed, but she’s not like a real wife, is she? She won’t keep him a tidy home, she hasn’t raised his children.’

‘So now you’re saying Frank McCracken’s missing his family?’ Lucy scoffed. ‘A family he hadn’t even met until a couple of years ago?’

‘God, you can be harsh when you want to.’

‘I’m stating a fact. And I don’t want you to get hurt.’

‘You’ve a funny way of showing it.’ Cora threw down her napkin and stood up, much to the surprise of the waitress, who had just arrived with their first courses.

‘Mum … please!’ Lucy tapped the tablecloth placatingly. ‘Come on … don’t be silly.’

Cora sat down again but looked grumpy. Rather nervously, the waitress served their dishes. The twosome ate in sulky silence.

‘Obviously this means more to you than I thought,’ Lucy said when she’d finished her starter. She dabbed at her mouth. ‘But you know the situation with him and me. As soon as word gets out, we’re both finished in our respective careers.’

‘And do you really believe that, Lucy?’ Cora scrutinised her in a firm, motherly way, as though trying to wheedle the truth out of a deceitful child. ‘Do you? Honestly?’

Again, Lucy considered this. Coming clean to her bosses about who her father was would be a huge risk. How would they ever be able to take her seriously as a police officer again?

‘Just say, for the sake of argument,’ Cora ventured, ‘that I did start seeing him –’ Lucy suppressed a shudder ‘– do any of your lot even know I’m your mother? I can count on one hand all the times during your career when other police officers have been to my house.’

‘It’s not just that,’ Lucy replied. ‘Look – Frank McCracken’s a hardened criminal. Oh, I get it, don’t worry. That refined aura, that rough-diamond charm. He could win anyone over. But he’s a murderer. He’s surrounded by murderers. I can’t stress that enough. The man he works for is one of the most feared gangsters in Britain. He’s literally a homicidal maniac.’

Cora looked unimpressed.

‘But you know all this already, don’t you?’ Lucy said, deflated.

‘I’m not saying I’m about to tie the knot with him. I just don’t think we can keep pretending that he isn’t part of our lives. And quite clearly, neither does he.’

Again, Lucy didn’t know how to respond. All this had come completely out of left field.

‘If you insist on it, I won’t thank him for the flowers,’ Cora said. ‘But this won’t be the last time I hear from him. I can feel it in my bones.’

I’d love to know why, Lucy suddenly wondered. What is he up to?

Was it conceivable – was it even faintly possible – that Cora was right, and that McCracken was hankering after a proper family? If so, he surely couldn’t imagine that she and her mother would provide that?

‘How’s work anyway?’ Cora asked, trying to change the subject. ‘Sounds like you had a busy day yesterday.’

‘Yeah …’ Lucy frowned as the waitress removed their plates. ‘I had a bit of a score, but it was none of it very edifying. Think of the quietest, leafiest neighbourhood you can, and there’ll be monsters there. Hiding behind the privets and the chintz curtains.’

‘And yet some of the lowliest people in society are exactly the opposite.’

Lucy shrugged. ‘Good and evil don’t make class distinctions.’

Briefly, Cora stared at nothing. ‘And no one looks out for them.’

‘Well … we try to.’

‘You think so? What happened to that bloke Walter Brown?’

‘Walter who?’

Cora relapsed into thought. ‘I didn’t know him very well. Gardener … but he had a drink problem. Lost his job, lost his flat. For a time, he was selling the Big Issue at the top of Langley Street. Then he went missing.’

‘I’m sorry, what?’

‘Used to see him every Wednesday lunchtime, when I went shopping,’ Cora said. ‘He was a nice man, when he was sober.’

‘What do you mean, “He went missing”?’

‘One week he just wasn’t there. A week later, there was a young girl selling it. I asked her what had happened to Walter. She said she didn’t know. They thought he’d just moved on. But he wouldn’t have moved on, I’ll tell you. He was a Crowley man. Been here all his life.’

‘And did no one report this disappearance?’ Lucy asked.

‘Like who? He didn’t have a family, didn’t have any friends.’

‘So, there’s no actual evidence that anything bad happened to him?’

‘No, but let’s be fair, Lucy … if I was to tell you this about a neighbour, someone who actually lived in a house and paid their taxes, I reckon the next thing you’d do as a police officer would be to knock on their door, to see what was what.’

Lucy mulled this over and was sad to admit that it was probably true.

Homelessness was a major story in Britain today, and rightly so given that it was a national disgrace. At one time, you’d only see those poor wretches in the forgotten backstreets of big cities, but now they were everywhere, right under society’s nose. And yet so few people even noticed them.

‘I’m sorry, love …’ Cora reached out and patted her daughter’s hand. ‘You’re a good police officer. It’s not your fault.’

Lucy didn’t reply. For a moment, all she could think about was Stan Beardmore’s comment the previous day: They’re just dogs … we’ve got a longer list of missing people who we haven’t got time to look for.

That ‘list’ comprised dozens of missing persons posters, each one depicting a grainy photograph of some poor individual – and there were all ages there, all races, all classes – who had dropped out of sight, never to be seen again. In many cases, it was so long ago that their posters had yellowed and curled. And it was the same story in police station foyers all over the UK.

And now they had more people vanishing from Lucy’s own streets, and yet it had taken a homeless heroin addict dressed as a nun, and an off-handed comment from her mother, to draw her attention to them.

‘No, it’s not our fault,’ Lucy agreed. ‘But maybe we can do a better job than we are doing.’

Chapter 6

Mick Shallicker lounged in the penthouse suite of the Astarte Hotel in central Manchester.

The Astarte was a bland structure, looking like a typical midweek stopover for travelling businessmen, which was exactly the impression that its owners, Ent-Tech Ltd, aka the Crew, liked to give. The top floor, which was nominally the penthouse suite, comprised bedrooms, an office, a boardroom and a lounge bar, none of it accessible by public stairway or lift, only by a private express elevator, which ascended straight to it from a subterranean car park to which normal customers were also denied entry.

In fact, the Astarte was the hub of Crew operations, though few people who passed it would have the first clue that this presentable but on the whole innocuous building housed a crime syndicate whose baleful influence was so far-reaching that even the police had to tread warily around them.

Mick Shallicker was as much a part of this as the immense granite building blocks from which the Astarte was constructed. His prime role was as personal minder and chief enforcer to Frank McCracken, the Crew underboss in charge of shaking down all those non-affiliated criminal groups in the Northwest who didn’t voluntarily pay ‘tax’. By its nature, this department had constantly to be ready to threaten or employ violence to get its way, and Mick Shallicker was right at the heart of that. It helped that he was six-foot-nine, with a build to match. He was broad and strong as an ox, an all-round giant whose rugged, brutal face bespoke no mercy for those falling into his grasp.

At present, he was in the lounge bar, next door to the boardroom, sipping a cold beer and snacking on an excellent buffet. Others like him, at least in terms of rank, were dotted around the spacious, comfortable room, some on couches, some in armchairs, some, like Shallicker, standing at the bar. There was some chit-chat, but nothing especially warm or friendly, though there was no tension in the air. None of these men trusted each other, though they didn’t dislike each other, and even if there was some animosity, theirs wasn’t a paygrade that permitted outward displays of it. Watched closely by several dark-suited members of Benny B’s security team, who had already disarmed everyone on arrival, they spoke civilly to each other if it was necessary to speak – there were even a few quips, a few chuckles – but for the most part they simply nodded, smiled their enigmatic half-smiles and kept quiet.

All, though, were listening – mainly for any sign of increased volume from the boardroom next door. At present, it seemed calm, though this was a special meeting that had been called at short notice by Crew Chairman ‘Wild Bill’ Pentecost, and that didn’t always bode well. In fact, Mick Shallicker was so intent on listening – he knew there’d been a certain amount of strain in recent times between Pentecost and Frank McCracken in particular – that he half-jumped when his mobile suddenly buzzed in his jacket. Fishing it out, he saw to his surprise that he’d received a text from Lucy Clayburn.

Need to speak to him. ASAP.

He put the phone away and continued to wait and listen.

In the boardroom, Bill Pentecost was holding court from his usual place, standing at the head of the long teak table. At sixty-one, he was a tall, lean, permanently besuited man, and yet his appearance was never less than curious and unsettling. He had frizzy grey hair, a thin pale face and narrow blue eyes, which he levelled like a pair of laser beams through the square-lensed, steel-rimmed spectacles he always wore.

‘These are difficult times, gentlemen,’ he said in that slow, emotionless monotone that friends and foes alike found so difficult to read, and therefore so unnerving. ‘New challenges, it seems, are presenting themselves every day.’

The meeting had commenced at nine that evening, and only now, after ten, having dispensed with some routine matters, did Frank McCracken suspect the Chairman was at last getting down to his main business. By the concerted attention on everyone else’s faces, the rest of the Crew’s directorship felt the same. For his own part, McCracken was resolved to look calm and relaxed. Like all birds of prey, Wild Bill could sense fair game before it had even broken cover. Not that McCracken considered himself in those terms. Things were strange at present – there was something in the air he didn’t like – but generally he was at home in this dangerous company. Though in his mid-fifties, he’d kept well. He was tanned and fit, with a silver-grey crewcut, dark eyes and lean, predatory features that did little to conceal the hawkish personality underneath. As the Crew’s shakedown captain, his line wasn’t always as profitable as some of the others, but he was a regular and reliable contributor to company funds and he’d been close to Pentecost since their earliest days.

He wasn’t what you’d call Pentecost’s right-hand man. That honour was bestowed on Lennie Trueman, the Crew’s official deputy chief, and a guy who could turn half the criminal population of Northwest England against them at the drop of a hat. But because of their history together, Frank McCracken was one of Pentecost’s inner cadre of specially trusted henchmen, though in the last couple of years there’d been a slight fraying of the relationship, McCracken concerned that the Chairman was becoming too suspicious, too paranoid, Pentecost reacting to McCracken’s blunt viewpoints with undisguised hostility.

‘Only last week in Stockport,’ the Chairman said, ‘the Manchester Robbery Squad arrested two characters called Vladimir Boyarksi and Oleg Mikhalkov for a security vault robbery in Wilmslow, which had netted them around £900,000 in cash and jewellery. These two clowns were captured after beating their inside man, a cokehead idiot who was so stoned on the lunchtime in question that he wasn’t able to assist them in opening all the strongboxes they’d targeted. Afterwards, fearing further retribution, he went to the nearest cop shop, and ratted them out. They and the hoard of cash and jewels they stole are now in government hands. The latter is a particular loss, I fear –’ he threw a glance at McCracken ‘– because it means that our resident taxman will not be able to get his hands on our share.’

‘That’s the status at present,’ McCracken spoke up. ‘But there are ways and means.’

Pentecost made no reply to that, not especially appeased.

‘These fools will get big stretches,’ he said. ‘But despite this they remain unknown to the British police. They’re refusing to talk, of course, or even behave as if they understand English. They have no criminal records in the UK, or anywhere else according to Interpol. But, dim as our pals in the Manchester fuzz are, I doubt it will be long before they finally put names to faces and deduce that this terrible twosome is in fact Yuri Lyadova and Dimitri Guseva, two mid-ranking soldiers from the Tatarstan Brigade, who operate out of St Petersburg.’

He paused for effect. Everyone remained rapt.

‘You may argue,’ Pentecost said, ‘that anyone who’d put his trust in some brainless junkie fuck is scarcely worthy of the designation “soldier”. And I’d be inclined to agree, except that what these Russkie knuckle-draggers usually lack in brain-power, they make up for in numbers and loyalty.’

The boardroom hung on his every word. He surveyed them one by one.

‘I’m not saying we’re facing a Russian invasion here. At least, not an imminent one. But these two were most likely skirmishers sent ahead to check out the lie of the land. No doubt there’ll be others.’

‘A Tatarstan lieutenant was killed in a shootout with National Crime Group officers in Bradburn up in Lancashire last year,’ ventured Adam Gilcrist. As the Crew’s chief importer and seller of illegal firearms, he always had an interest in illicit gun-play. ‘The coppers think he was acting alone, but this new intel suggests different.’

‘The Russians have a permanent presence in Liverpool,’ Lennie Trueman said in his deceptively gentle West Indian accent. ‘And it’s not just them. We’ve got Mexicans interfering with some of our supply-lines.’

‘Ah yes, the cartels,’ Pentecost said thoughtfully. ‘It was only a matter of time before those gentlemen found the whole of Mesoamerica too small for their liking.’

‘They’ll struggle to make an impact here,’ Benny Bartholomew chirped up.

Benny B, the Crew’s Head of Security, was a beefy character, with slab-like arms and shoulders and an equally massive neck, but much of it was running to flab these days; his face was podgy, his curly hair receding, and, as he viewed the world by squinting at it through a small pair of circular lenses, the effect was often more comical than menacing.

‘You think so, do you?’ Pentecost said, intrigued to hear more.

Benny B leaned forward, his chair squeaking. ‘There’re no deserts here for them to dig pits in, which they can stuff full of headless corpses, are there?’

‘I hate to rain on your parade, Mr B,’ Toni Zambala interrupted.

Formerly a pirate and smuggler in the pay of the Mungiki crime syndicate in Kenya, Zambala, despite a machine-gun-toting youth in which he’d violently rejected all things western, had effortlessly adapted to the capitalist lifestyle of the UK. He was now in charge of narcotics, importation and distribution, and his annual contribution to company funds was greater by far than everyone else’s, so, though still an underboss, when he spoke, people listened.

‘Not three weeks ago, one of my sellers was fished out of a Fallowfield sewer.’ He took a sip of mineral water. ‘He hadn’t had his head cut off, I’ll grant you, but that was only because the guys responsible had wanted to put him down the sewer while he was still alive … minus his hands and feet, I should add. The cops reckon the chopping tool was a machete.’ He turned his gaze on Benny B. ‘Kind of a Mex thing, wouldn’t you say?’

Pentecost pursed his thin grey lips. ‘Not an ideal situation. When our own people are getting their hands and feet chopped off.’

Frank McCracken was the only one who didn’t mutter his discontent. He was too busy wondering where all this was leading. He too had heard rumours that foreign powers were slowly muscling in on their action. Not so much his, maybe. He dealt mainly with those established British gangs who even after all these years still failed to recognise the Crew’s authority. But it was plain there was a foreign presence on the streets.

‘You’re very quiet, Frank,’ Pentecost suddenly said.

McCracken shrugged. ‘We might have to make deals, Bill.’

‘Surrender?’ Benny B said, sounding shocked.

‘Not that exactly,’ McCracken replied. ‘Just talk to them, so we can buy them off for a while … give ourselves more time to plan.’

‘Bollocks!’ Nick Merryweather blurted. ‘We’re not losing so much ground that we’re being forced into that, surely?’

Merryweather was the Crew’s whoremaster-in-chief, and a depraved, violent pimp. But for all that he was good at brutality, he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box.

‘Even if we were confronting them,’ McCracken replied, ‘which we’re not because we never know where they are, all we’d really be doing is fighting fires. Like you say, Bill, they’re scouting rather than invading.’

A silence followed, as the rest of them ingested this.

‘Well, Frank,’ Pentecost finally said, ‘the latest batch of accounts appear to support your POV inasmuch as we certainly need to rebuild our powerbase.’ He wafted a fistful of print-outs before slamming them down on the table. Even those seated farthest away could recognise the columns of financial data.

‘And as you gentlemen no doubt can tell from my demeanour,’ Pentecost said, ‘they don’t make for happy reading.’ He snatched a sheet up and turned to Jon Killarny, the Irishman who ran their counterfeiting scams. ‘August this year – down three per cent on July. July down two per cent on June. June down one per cent on May.’

‘Now, Bill … I …’ Killarny, a one-time IRA sergeant-at-arms, struggled to explain himself, only for Pentecost to switch his attention to Al Reed, whose role was the ‘protection’ of pubs, bars and nightclubs.

‘August this year …’ The Chairman shook his head. ‘Down six per cent on July. Six per cent, gentlemen. July down three per cent on June … and then this, June down eight per cent – yes, I kid you not – on May. None of you need to look smug, by the way.’ There was now a snap in his voice, his frosty eyes roving the room. ‘It’s the same across the board. When we reach November, we’ll have a better picture of our earnings for this last financial year, but even the boldest estimate puts them down an average four per cent on last year, which was four per cent down on the year before …’

And so it went, the Chairman listing and describing each and every one of their underperformances. In the end, only Frank McCracken’s department’s monthly returns were more or less in alignment, August showing a reduction on the previous month of less than half a per cent, though even that, to Bill Pentecost, was less than tolerable.

‘Of course,’ he said, resuming a calmer tone, ‘these are our net earnings, are they not? They’re not gross.’

There were visible stirrings of discomfort. Suddenly, they all knew what he was driving at, and it was exactly what Frank McCracken had feared.

The Crew was born of bloodshed. Back in those distant days of the twentieth century, numerous criminal firms had dotted the post-industrial wilderness that was Northwest England, each with its own territory, each with its own speciality, though they’d shared many overlapping interests, which for decades meant they’d existed in a state of semi-permanent warfare, ensuring that no one was earning to their full potential. The Crew had been the remedy, Wild Bill Pentecost, whose stronghold at the time was in East and South Manchester, and whose field was loan-sharking and general racketeering, eventually luring the bosses of his rival firms into a new kind of unity which promised peace and prosperity for all. Many of those original men still sat in the room, equal partners in the overarching enterprise that was the Crew, deferring only to their acknowledged Chairman, their various departments still reflecting the particular expertise they’d each brought to the table.

But all along Pentecost had known that he couldn’t expect this rapacious band to work solely for him, each week feeding the entirety of their ill-gotten gains into central funds via an elaborate money-laundering operation, from which they would all be paid an equal monthly share. That would have been totally unacceptable because it would have been unfair. Toni Zambala, for example, outsold all the others, while at the other end of the scale Benny B added nothing to company cashflow, a discrepancy exacerbated by the fact that his role as Head of Security was largely nominal these days, most of the underbosses preferring to resolve security issues themselves. McCracken alone had at least as many bent coppers, solicitors, local government officials and journalists on his payroll as Benny did, while Lennie and Toni held both the region’s major cities in thrall to their innumerable dealers, street gangs and general-purpose thugs. Benny B couldn’t be underestimated, of course. Having spent much of his time recruiting mercenaries and other ex-military personnel, he could put a considerable force of well-trained killers into the field – but still, he didn’t produce anything. Appreciating the dangers of this imbalance, Pentecost had authorised at an early stage what he called ‘the skim’, which allowed each underboss to keep 25 per cent of each week’s earnings. It remained dirty, of course, and it didn’t always amount to a massive sum, but it allowed his individual captains to pay additional staff, soldiers, runners, lookouts and the like, and to lavish a little extra wealth on themselves from time to time. It kept them happy, and encouraged them to work their people ever harder, because the larger each department’s official income, the larger its skim.

Little wonder it was now regarded as a sacrosanct perk.

But of course, what a man could make, he could also unmake.

‘Alas, we may have to pick up some of this slack ourselves,’ Pentecost said, walking around the room with that slow, heavy tread of his. ‘So … as a temporary measure, I propose that we cut the skim from twenty-five per cent to fifteen.’

There were audible murmurs of discontent. Chair legs scraped, narrowed eyes exchanged surly glances.

‘It’s a proposal at present,’ Pentecost added, no tension in his voice. ‘But I want you to consider it very seriously, gentlemen. These are difficult times, as we’ve already discussed. Even now, it may not seem necessary that we prepare a war-chest, but wars often happen when you’re least expecting them.’

‘Yo, Bill,’ Merryweather protested, ‘if you’re talking about cancelling the skim …’

‘I’m not talking about cancelling it, I’m talking about trimming it.’

‘A ten per cent cut is some trim,’ Toni Zambala pointed out.

‘Slashing it then. Never fear, there’ll be something left.’

More mutters of irritation.

‘Gentlemen, you surprise me.’ Pentecost strolled back to his own end of the table. ‘Are we not the ruling elite? Do you seriously expect the burden of these losses to fall elsewhere when we ourselves –’ he tossed the paperwork down the table ‘– are directly responsible for them?’

‘If there are losses across the board, Bill,’ Al Reed ventured, ‘couldn’t it just be the effect of austerity?’

‘Austerity is something that impacts on the ordinary,’ Pentecost replied. ‘On those who lack the means and the will to resist it. We are immune to austerity, because we are the extraordinary.’

‘Don’t we get to vote on this?’ Trueman wondered.

Pentecost met him eye-to-eye. This was the potential crisis point. Trueman’s body-language suggested they had not okayed this beforehand. That would be typical Wild Bill these days. Increasingly, he reacted to developments in kneejerk fashion. Previously, he would never have made a potentially controversial move without discussing it with his number two first. It would have been difficult for any of them to tackle Wild Bill on his own, but to tackle him and Lennie Trueman together would be suicide.

Billy Boy is riding his luck, McCracken thought.

But perhaps, on further consideration, Trueman, a cooler head who saw the bigger picture quickly, had decided that the very least they could do in these trying circumstances was put business before pleasure. So, though he remained taut, he awaited his Chairman’s response politely.

‘Of course,’ Pentecost said, walking again. ‘We’re all equals in here.’ He paused at the other end of the table. ‘Any objectors raise their right hands.’

He swept them with his gaze as they each struggled with the matter.

One by one, with many a truculent stare directed downward, they folded their hands on the table in front of them, until it was unanimous.

‘I think the motion is carried,’ Pentecost said. ‘Which concludes our business for today.’

The meeting didn’t break up as amicably as usual.

The Chairman saw them out in his usual fashion, accompanying them into the penthouse lobby, where Benny B and his men restored their guns to them.

Pentecost spoke fake fond words as they departed. But when he went back into the boardroom, he found that they hadn’t all left. Frank McCracken stood by the main window, taking in its panoramic view of the city.

‘Still here, Frank?’ Pentecost approached. ‘I thought after that pep talk, we’d all consider we had rather a lot of business to attend to.’

‘Just wondering if I could have a little private chat?’ McCracken replied. ‘For old times’ sake, if nothing else.’

Pentecost mulled it over. ‘Suppose I can spare a minute for one of my oldest muckers.’

‘If a minute’s all I’ve got, I’ll get straight to it,’ McCracken said. ‘I wonder if you’d consider reversing that decision about slashing the skim?’

Pentecost looked sad. ‘How disappointingly predictable of you.’

‘Bill, come on …’ McCracken allowed a conspiratorial note to creep into his voice. ‘Look, these guys are on your side. Since you put the Crew together, they’ve never made as much dosh. Okay, they have to pay three quarters of it into central funds, but they’re well rewarded for that, plus they recognise it’s working. That’s why they’re happy to go along with it.’

‘Go along with it, Frank? You make it sound like they have a choice.’

‘Bill, you put this outfit together on the understanding everyone would have a certain degree of autonomy. We all sit at the same boardroom table, we all have the same ambition, but it’s always been the case that each one of these guys is a gaffer in his own right, too.’

Pentecost affected a puzzled expression. ‘Are you lecturing me about something I invented?’

‘What I’m trying to say is they’re loyal. But that we can’t take that loyalty for granted.’

Pentecost headed for the door in the frosted glass wall partitioning the boardroom from his own office. He went through, leaving the door open for McCracken to follow.

The Chairman’s office, or the Head Office as it was usually referred to, wasn’t used a great deal, hence it existed in a permanent near-pristine state, its blocks of shelving lined with books, mostly legal and business tomes (which, from time to time, Pentecost actually read), but everything else hinting more at luxury: it had a plush carpet, expensive artwork on its wood-panelled walls, a seventy-inch hi-def television, a row of carved Italian chairs and, in the very centre, dominating everything, a huge, leather-topped desk with a neat stack of phoney paperwork at one end and a desktop computer at the other.

Pentecost strode to the drinks cabinet in the corner, where he filled two large tumblers with ice cubes and poured malt whisky from a crystal decanter.

‘You know what I’m talking about, Bill,’ McCracken said from the doorway. ‘Lennie could close the entire Port of Liverpool to us. So how would Terry Underwood bring in his knock-off Italian dresses and shoes? You think the Camorra would be happy to put business on hold for as long as it takes us to buy another port? What about the Triads when it comes to knock-off tech from China? Aside from that, we get a cut of everything that comes through the docks. The merchants are happy to pay, the shipping lines are happy to pay – anything for a smooth operation. And when we don’t get it, we steal it. What happens if all that dries up? And how would it impact on the narcotraffic? Toni would need to find a completely new way to import his product. Most likely, he’d go off and do his own thing. That’d be half our most lucrative operations down the toilet at the same time. Plus, if Lennie and Toni walk, it’ll cost us the streets … we’ll lose our eyes, our ears, our noses. Meanwhile, Nicky and his vice girls are worth ten million to us each year alone. What if that cashflow dries up too?’

‘And when will all this happen, do you think?’ The Chairman offered McCracken his drink.

‘I’m not saying it will.’ McCracken took the glass. ‘I’ve not heard a sniff of rebel talk. But it could happen. That’s just common sense, isn’t it? And look, Bill … I wouldn’t be saying all this if me and you didn’t go right back. You’ve got my firm promise, my solemn guarantee that whatever happens, I’ll stand with you. You know you can always rely on me. But if it was two of us against the rest …’

Pentecost regarded him coolly. ‘You seriously think I haven’t considered this possibility, Frank? You think I haven’t got contingency plans?’

On reflection, McCracken didn’t think that for one minute, and had a fairly good idea what any such plans would entail. Bill Pentecost was nothing if not a forward thinker, especially where supporters whose loyalty might be suspect were concerned. For all the Crew’s underbosses knew, any one of them could be sleeping in a house that might, at the touch of a match, become an escape-proof crematorium, or driving cars that could blow themselves to smithereens at the flick of a switch.

‘We just don’t want a civil war,’ McCracken said, trying to sound as reasonable as possible. ‘Not with everything else that’s happening. Let the lads keep the skim. It helps them to pay their soldiers and runners in cash. And it gives them a bit extra to play with.’

‘I think that’s the real issue, don’t you, Frank?’ The Chairman sipped his malt. ‘A bit of personal belt-tightening never goes down well.’

‘Why should they do that? They’ve earned these extras.’

‘They’ll be earning nothing if these foreign nuisances continue to encroach on our territory.’

‘I’m not pretending that isn’t an issue, Bill. But why take it out on the lads?’

‘Because the lads, as you call them, are not pulling their weight.’

McCracken pointed at the window. ‘The enemy’s out there, not in here.’

‘The enemy won’t meet us in open battle. Instead, he strikes us here, there, everywhere … whenever we aren’t looking. But we need to be looking, Frank. That’s my point. We need to be. All of us. If my own captains can’t do that, the men who take a fortune out of this company every year for their own private pleasures, what fucking use are they?’

‘Bill, come on … you know as well as I do that this is no straightforward war. Like you say, it’s slow encroachment … and it’s happening everywhere. It’s the way things are, it’s a new age of crime …’

‘And we don’t have a role any more. Is that what you’re saying?’

McCracken placed his whisky on the desk; he hadn’t touched a drop so far.

‘We need to negotiate,’ he said. ‘It won’t be difficult. Look … the Russians, the Mexicans, whoever it happens to be, they don’t want a major scrap any more than we do.’

‘So we should accept slavery?’

‘No … but how about an equal partnership? Look, Frank … this is happening the world over. Yeah, there are occasional flare-ups, but most firms are finding out that if they’re prepared to sit down at the table and talk with these guys, deals can be done.’

‘There’s a problem, though, Frank.’ Pentecost seated himself behind his desk. ‘You see, the Crew only exists as an entity if we’re considered to be rule-makers, not rule-takers. And to be honest, I’m surprised I have to remind you of this.’

‘How can we maintain that if we fall out among ourselves?’

‘We won’t be falling out among ourselves.’

‘Maybe not.’

‘Definitely not.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘Because we took a vote on it.’

‘That vote was coerced.’

Pentecost’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Really?’

‘Okay, maybe not coerced. But the lads are all going home now, where they’ll sit and have a good think about it … and in a short while they’ll be steaming.’

Pentecost pondered this.

‘Come on, Bill,’ McCracken coaxed him. ‘You know this. You don’t need me to say it.’

‘If that’s the case, the only conclusion can be that even more stick is required.’

‘Bill … are you not listening to me?’

‘Frank … I think it’s you who’s not really listening to me. The way I see things, the lads have already had plenty carrot. A bit of stick too, I’ll admit. But evidently not nearly enough.’

McCracken couldn’t say anything else, and he didn’t really need to. His disbelieving expression said it all.

‘Your concern is noted.’ The Chairman sat back in his swivel-chair, fingers steepled. ‘And I’ve absolutely no doubt that should any of our … lads come to you with any kind of complaint, much less a scheme of any sort, you’ll report it to me forthwith.’

‘Yeah.’ McCracken gave a small shrug. ‘Sure.’

‘I’m so glad.’ Pentecost smiled, and because it was something he did rarely and was so unpractised at, it looked more than a little deranged. ‘Your loyalty to the company is most welcome … even if it’s only to be expected.’

Chapter 7

Raimunda was the ultimate platinum blonde.

Her glorious mane hung to the small of her back, her 38-24-38 figure accentuated by her body-hugging, electro-pink minidress, while her matching pink six-inch platform-heel sandals, which elevated her five-foot-ten inches to an intimidating six-foot-two, added what seemed like miles of luscious, shapely leg. As always, her sultry looks were daubed in makeup: blusher on the cheeks, thick kohl rimming her sapphire eyes, cherry gloss on the lips.

Clarissa had something even more exotic about her.

Her locks were shiny and tar-black. She was olive-skinned, her enchanting golden eyes almond-shaped, her cheekbones delicate, her mouth small but sensual, though ripened tonight with purple lip-glow. She was a similar shape to Raimunda: tall, almost unfeasibly so for a woman, but equally curvaceous. An archetypal Amazon warrior, her outfit comprised a green zip-sided miniskirt, a green camisole top and strappy shoes with six-inch clear heels.

The pair of them walked with an elegant sway even as they tiptoed through the grotty yard at the back of the terraced inner-Manchester residence. They kept it sexy – that was their stock-in-trade – but it was dark, so they also had to be wary of tripping over stacks of bricks, or sacks crammed with broken masonry.

‘I’ll see you next Monday,’ Dean Chesham said from the open back door behind them. He was a muscular young black guy, film-star handsome, clad only in a pair of red silk undershorts. Despite the evening chill, his strong, stocky physique was slick with sweat.

They replied with lazy waves as they vanished through the back gate. Grinning to himself, Dean went back into the house.

The air indoors was cooling fast, because there was no central heating installed yet. He’d only recently had the electrics turned back on, because the darker nights were drawing in. For the most part, the house was a shell, its interior stripped to the bare bricks and boards. Only the back bedroom had any semblance of habitability. Dean padded back upstairs and walked down the landing towards it, towelling off with a stained and scruffy T-shirt. In normal circumstances, he’d have preferred a shower, but there were two good reasons why that wasn’t in tonight’s programme. Firstly, it would suit him to look sweaty when he finally got home; secondly, there was no running water.

The back bedroom was still bereft of wallpaper, plus it wasn’t very large. Dean had just about managed to get a three-quarter-size double bed into it, and this was currently a mess, its mattress askew, its sheets tangled, clothes draped all over it. He pulled on a T-shirt and climbed into a pair of torn jeans with dried paint on them. Equally paint-stained was the dusty old sweat-top he put on over his T-shirt. He sat on the bed to knot the laces on his workboots, then he hit the light switch and headed along the landing, grabbing his L-Quad leather jacket from the newel post at the top of the stairs. Before going outside, he made sure to pull his hood up. Though cooler now that it was autumn, it wasn’t cold. But he still had to get to the car without being recognised.

Exiting by the back door, he made his careful way across the cluttered yard. Out in the alley, a beaten-up Honda Civic waited for him. It had been around the mileage clock at least twice, but Dean didn’t mind being seen in such a heap. It wouldn’t stand out, and still had sufficient life left under its bonnet to get him quietly and unobtrusively back to the lock-up garage he rented in Styal, where he’d swap it for his black-and-red Range Rover Evoque.

Seventy-five big ones, that beauty had cost him. Even if he hadn’t thought it would attract undue attention, he couldn’t have risked bringing it to this neighbourhood. And perhaps it was ironic he was thinking this, because he now turned left through the gate into the alley, and the first thing he saw was a man loitering in the narrow space between the wall and the Honda’s front nearside door.

Dean halted, but more through puzzlement than fear.

Lights shone from the windows of some of the surrounding houses with just enough strength to show that, whoever this guy was, he didn’t look threatening. He was about average height, average build, with neatly combed silver hair over a thin, pinched face, and a trim silver-grey moustache. He wore a buttoned-up Burberry trenchcoat, and underneath that a shirt and tie. Dean glanced down, spying well-pressed trousers with proper creases in them, and leather shoes.

He ventured forward, fishing the car keys from his jacket pocket, but then he spied a second man standing behind the first. This second guy was about the same height as the other, but twice the width. He too wore a jacket and tie, but it bulged around a massive body, while his collar hung open on a neck the girth of a tree-trunk. He had cauliflower ears, a dented nose and small eyes beneath heavy bone brows. He was younger than the first guy, probably somewhere in his mid-forties, with a dense, matted beard and moustache.

‘If it isn’t Black Lightning,’ the guy in the trenchcoat said. By his accent, he was a Manchester man, but it was modified, refined.

‘Do I know you?’ Dean replied.

Trenchcoat looked worried. ‘Sorry, that isn’t racist, is it – Black Lightning? Isn’t that what they call you on the Stretford End?’

‘That’s what they call me, yeah.’

‘Good. Thought so.’

‘If you don’t mind …’ Dean pointed his key at the Honda, but Trenchcoat stayed where he was.

‘Your footwork’s seriously amazing,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen you dance through defences like … well, like no one did since the days of Georgie Best.’

Dean glanced again at the Neanderthal visage of the bearded guy behind him. Then he became aware that a third character had circled into view around the other side of the car. This one too was in his forties; he also wore a suit and tie, but was rangy of frame, with a hatchet nose and a messy thatch of dirty blond hair. He now stood directly behind the footballer, blocking any possible retreat.

‘Okay, listen …’ Dean backed into the brick wall. ‘You fellas surely realise I don’t carry money round with me? I mean, I’ve got a few quid.’ He dug into his jeans pocket. ‘You can take that.’

‘I’m surprised you’ve got any left after tonight,’ Trenchcoat said.

Dean offered him a tightly wound roll of twenties. ‘Just take it, yeah?’

‘Relax, Lightning. We’re not here to rob you.’

‘Yeah?’ Dean’s nervous gaze flicked back and forth between them. ‘Well, I’m sure this isn’t a welcome-to-the-neighbourhood party.’

‘More like welcome-to-the-jungle round here,’ the bearded one said. He was Mancunian too, though much more obviously. ‘Ideal for the kinds of tricks you get up to, eh?’

‘Look,’ Dean said. ‘I don’t know what you fellas think you know.’ He thumbed at the house on the other side of the wall. ‘I’m just doing this place up.’

‘Yeah, we’ve heard,’ Trenchcoat said. ‘Your little retirement plan, isn’t it? You’ve been buying run-down houses all over the Northwest, doing them up till they’re spanking new and selling them on at considerable profit.’

‘Nothing illegal about that,’ Dean ventured.

‘Course not,’ Trenchcoat agreed. ‘But I’d like to bet that none of the houses you’ve officially bought so far are quite as run-down as this one, eh?’

‘I’ve officially bought this one.’

Trenchcoat half-smiled. ‘When I say “officially” … I mean, as in your lovely wife, Lydia, knowing about it. Oh, I’m sure she’s well aware and totally approves of this safety net you’re putting together for when your playing days are over. But the problem is, Lightning … she thinks it means houses round Knutsford, Didsbury and Altrincham, doesn’t she? I bet she’d be stunned to know you’ve got a new pad in the backstreets of Withington.’

‘Okay, it’s a shed.’ Dean shrugged. ‘But we’ll still make money when we’ve done it up.’

‘You’re a great footballer, Dean,’ the blond guy said, speaking for the first time; his accent was more Cheshire than Manchester. ‘But you’re not too smart if you seriously think we don’t know what’s going on here.’

‘You believe in quality, I’ll say that for you,’ Beard added. ‘That Clarissa bird. Bloody hell … you’d never know she was a bloke. And Raimunda! Some dong, that. John fucking Holmes in drag.’

‘John Holmes, Lightning,’ Trenchcoat said. ‘Remember him? No, course you don’t. Too young. There are similarities between you and him, nevertheless. For example …’ He drew a leather-gloved hand from his pocket; it contained an iPhone. ‘You’ve both been immortalised in naughty films.’

An MPEG began running. It had been shot from several different angles, all of which were most likely covert, but it was in full colour and painfully clear. It was also full of action, a ‘highlights reel’, snippets of different sessions involving either Dean and Raimunda, Dean and Clarissa, or more usually Dean and both of them, each sequence trimmed to the bare essentials and then edited together.

Fleetingly, the footballer was too numb to respond.

‘All right …’ he finally said. ‘All right, you’ve caught me. But I’m not sure this’ll be quite as damaging as you fellas seem to think. Raimunda and Clarissa are trans women. Yeah … so what? It’s not so shocking these days.’

‘That’s true.’ Trenchcoat pocketed his iPhone. ‘We live in a very inclusive age. But the problem is, Lightning … you’re a married man. And your wife, Lydia, well … she’s been wondering for some time where you’ve been disappearing to for two or three nights a week. So she asked us to find out.’

‘You’re saying you’re private detectives?’ Dean wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or even more horrified.

‘Good job it doesn’t take you that long to get to the back of the net,’ Beard chipped in. ‘Otherwise, no one’d give a shit what you get up to in this secret nookie nest of yours.’

‘She doesn’t trust you, pal,’ Hatchet Nose said. ‘She never has.’

Trenchcoat smiled again. ‘When Lydia married you, Lightning, she knew she’d landed on her feet … and she was in it for the long haul. She was going to milk it for everything she could … even if it ended up in the divorce court—’

‘Wait a minute,’ Dean interrupted, glimpsing hope. ‘Just wait … you’re saying she doesn’t suspect anything specific? She’s just watching me?’

‘She half suspects,’ Trenchcoat said.

‘You must admit, you’ve been away from home a lot recently,’ Hatchet Nose added.

‘And if she’s not getting it in the bedroom, which she presumably isn’t,’ Beard said, ‘she’s going to wonder.’

‘On top of that, she’s never been entirely convinced that you’re doing these houses up yourself,’ Trenchcoat said. ‘She doesn’t believe you know the first thing about DIY. Isn’t that why you spent a million quid getting someone else to fit that new bathroom in your mansion down Alderley Edge?’

‘So you’ve been watching me for a few weeks,’ Dean said. ‘But you haven’t reported back to Lydia yet? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘That’s the sum of it,’ Trenchcoat replied. ‘Want to know why?’

‘I’m guessing it’s not because you like football.’

‘You guess right where I’m concerned,’ Beard replied. ‘I fucking hate it.’

‘I, on the other hand, do like it,’ Hatchet Nose said. ‘I’m even a Man U fan. But the Reds were great before you, Dean, and they’ll be great again after.’

Dean’s eyes flitted from one to the other. ‘So …?’

‘So we want to get paid twice,’ Beard said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your wife’s giving us two hundred grand to tail you for four months,’ Trenchcoat explained. ‘To find out exactly what’s been going on, and whether or not it’s dodgy … and if it is, to provide indisputable evidence. Now, we’ve got that evidence, as you’ve seen. But, you see, here’s the thing … we don’t like to ruin people’s lives. We only do it if we absolutely have to. So, our normal method, once we’ve collected said evidence, is to give the guilty party an opportunity to buy it back.’

‘I think I understand,’ Dean said, with a dull, sinking feeling.

‘Course you understand,’ Trenchcoat replied. ‘But do it our way, and it all works out beautifully. We go back to your missus, tell her you’re clean as a whistle. You then go home and get hugs and kisses instead of a solicitor’s letter. Everyone’s happy. And we get paid twice.’

‘And how much is this going to cost me?’ Dean asked.

‘Well, your wife’s paying us two hundred. We thought the very least it’d be worth to you, given that your kids won’t see Mummy and Daddy split up, and the Chelsea boot-boys won’t suddenly have a whole new generation of nasty names to call you … maybe four times that.’

‘Eight hundred grand?’ Dean was stung, but he could easily afford it.

‘Makes it a round million.’ Hatchet Nose grinned. ‘And we only get taxed on a fifth of it.’

‘You look surprised, Lightning,’ Trenchcoat said. ‘No doubt you thought, as someone who earns two hundred grand a week just for showing up, the cost would be a lot more. Well … the sad fact is there’s always a danger that something could slip out to the press at a later date. Not straight away, obviously. But we’ll still have your best interests at heart, so every so often it’ll be worth us checking in with you … just to ensure that it’s a false alarm.’

Dean nodded. It was unbearable of course, but he had no choice.

‘Okay.’ Trenchcoat’s tone lightened, almost became friendly. ‘Well, that’s it. There’s nothing else to discuss. We’ll be in touch shortly, about how and when this needs to happen.’

He turned and walked away, Hatchet Nose going with him. But the larger, bearded individual remained, hovering like an ape in the half-darkness – before lurching forward, coming close to Dean, nose to nose.

‘You got off easy,’ he grunted. ‘No one on this fucking planet thinks you and those other prima donnas are worth the fortune you earn. You may reckon they love you, superstar, but don’t be fooled. Away from the footy ground, if half of them saw you lying in a gutter burning, they’d rescue your wallet before even thinking about calling the Fire Brigade.’

Then he turned and lumbered away too, vanishing into the gloom.

Chapter 8

The woman was called Janet Dawson, and she was het up. Lucy met her at her father’s house just after ten that morning. She was in early middle age and tubby, with curly fair hair running to grey, and a pale, worried face.

The address was 8, Atkinson Row, and it belonged to an OAP called Harry Hopkins.

‘I’ve been ringing Dad for the last three days,’ she said, ushering Lucy down a short hall into the interior of a terraced house so neat and tidy it could have passed for a show home. ‘I’ve been asking around too. His friends and the locals down the pub. No one’s seen him.’

‘He keeps a tidy home,’ Lucy said, looking around the lounge and then heading upstairs.

‘Oh, yes.’ The woman followed. ‘He’s always been very house-proud.’

‘There’s absolutely nothing out of place?’ Lucy asked, looking into the two bedrooms.

‘Nothing obvious. Oh … apart from out at the back. Do you know about that already?’

‘Yeah, I was told about that before I got here.’

What had really panicked Janet Dawson, on calling to see her father this morning and discovering the house empty, had been the back door and back gate, which were both wide open. She’d quickly called the police. Uniform had arrived first and, not liking it either, had passed the info to CID.

‘We’ll look down at the back in a sec,’ Lucy said, still checking around upstairs.

She noticed a large, circular cushion on the carpet next to Harry’s bed. A well-chewed rubber bone sat in the middle of it.

‘Your dad has a dog?’

‘Yes. Milly … she’s a Pekingese.’

‘Does he take her out a lot?’

‘Yeah. She gets at least two walks a day. But he leaves her in when he’s off to the pub or the bookies, or something like that.’ The woman’s voice trembled as she spoke.

Lucy pondered. She didn’t say it aloud, because she simply wasn’t sure, but the absence of the dog made foul play a little less likely. If you were going to abduct someone, would you really go to the trouble of abducting their pet too? It seemed more possible that something had happened to the old guy while he was out walking the dog, but if there’d been an accident, or he’d dropped dead from a heart attack, someone ought to have found him by now. And then there was the mystery surrounding the back door and the back gate.

‘Could your father have left her here, forgotten to lock up at the back, and she’s just run away?’ she asked.

‘I honestly don’t think she’d run away,’ the woman replied. ‘And I’ve never known Dad make a mistake like that before. Plus, why would he go out without his hat and coat?’

They went downstairs and through into the lounge, where the television was playing away to itself, a range of Saturday-morning chefs producing a selection of mouth-watering dishes.

‘And that’s not like Dad either,’ Janet Dawson said. ‘The telly being on.’

‘It was on when you arrived here this morning?’ Lucy asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Could he not just have left it on as a security measure while he was going out … you know, to make thieves think he was in?’

‘Yes, but he only does that at night.’

The implication was evident.

‘What time did you arrive this morning?’ Lucy asked.

‘Just after eight.’

‘So you’re worried the television might have been left on all night?’

The woman looked even paler than before. ‘I can hardly bear to think what that might mean if it’s true.’

‘Your father doesn’t own any other property that we might look around?’ Lucy asked. ‘An allotment with a shed perhaps? A garage?’

‘No, I’m sorry.’

‘Okay.’ Lucy walked back through the house to the kitchen, where she halted next to one of the spotless worktops. A mug containing a dry teabag and an unused spoon sat alongside the kettle. This was more suggestive than anything she had seen at the house so far.

Most telling of all, though, was the open back door.

Lucy pulled on a pair of disposable latex gloves.

‘Oh, my God,’ Janet Dawson moaned.

‘It’s just a precaution.’ Lucy checked along the door’s edge and down the edge of the door-jamb. ‘There’s no sign of any damage here.’

‘I don’t think anyone forced entry. I mean, there’s no damage anywhere. And it’s not like there’s any sign of a scuffle. Nothing’s broken, there’re no blood spots or anything.’

‘So, if someone came into the house this way,’ Lucy said, ‘your father must have let them in willingly.’

‘I suppose so.’ Janet Dawson gave a weak, forced smile. ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’

Lucy didn’t mention that most of the violence in modern society was inflicted by persons known to the victim. Instead, she said, ‘How many of your father’s house-callers are in the habit of coming to the back door?’

‘I must admit … I can’t think of any who would do that, or why.’

They crossed the garden together. It was smoothly turfed aside from a crazy-paved path, with a brick platform on the right covered in potted plants. At odds with all this neatness, the back gate hung ajar.

‘The gate was like this, this morning?’ Lucy asked, again noting an absence of damage, which meant that this hadn’t been forced open either.

‘Exactly like it is now.’

‘We shouldn’t necessarily read something bad into this,’ Lucy said. ‘There are lots of possibilities here at present.’

Internally, however, she’d closed in on three main ones: a) an intruder had approached the house from the rear and had got inside that way, because Harry Hopkins had forgotten to lock up; or b) Harry Hopkins had gone outside himself, leaving the property by the back door and the back gate, and for some unknown reason had still not returned; or c) neither of those unpleasant alternatives had happened, and he was simply going about his everyday business, absent from home at this moment, again having neglected to lock up (and having left his hat and coat behind), and by pure coincidence had also been absent every time in the last three days when his daughter had phoned the house.

You wouldn’t earn a police commendation for working out which of those options seemed least likely.

Lucy stepped through into the back alley. ‘How often have you tried to contact your father in the last few days, Janet?’

The woman followed her out. ‘First it was every few hours, but then … I mean yesterday and last night, it was once every ten minutes.’

‘Is your father hard of hearing, by any chance?’

‘He wears a hearing aid, but no … he can hear when the phone’s ringing. He normally answers straight away.’

Lucy surveyed the alley. It was narrow, cobbled, and little more than a service passage running behind the row of houses. At present, it was clear of vehicles, or bins, or sacks of rubbish. On the other side, a high red-brick wall rose about ten feet, screening off the rest of the estate.

Lucy wasn’t comforted by this. A narrow backstreet hidden from view on one side.

She turned back to the gate – and stopped in her tracks. Like the house’s front door, the back gate had been painted a bright canary-yellow, but on the outside it had been spattered top to bottom with dried black trickle stains.

‘This is a bit of a mess, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘Oh.’ Janet Dawson looked genuinely surprised. ‘Dad’ll go mad if he sees that. He hates scruffiness.’

‘He’d scrub it off, would he? Even though it’s on the outside?’

‘Certainly. As soon as he saw it.’

Which likely means this has happened since he went missing, Lucy thought to herself. Or did it happen at the time he went missing?

She wondered what might have caused it. A vehicle travelling at speed would have kicked up ground water, spraying the gate, though not today of course; it was sunny today, unusually warm for mid-September. She glanced around. The cobblestones were bone-dry. Thinking about it, the last time they’d had proper rain – the sort that would leave proper puddles – was on Tuesday afternoon.

Three days ago.

Alan Rodwell was somewhere in his late twenties, bald, bespectacled and bearded. He stood barefoot on his front doorstep, wearing mismatched shorts and a T-shirt, blinking at Lucy’s warrant card as she explained who she was and why she was here. A few seconds later, his wife, Sam, came down the hall from the kitchen. She was about the same age, a petite woman, also wearing shorts and a T-shirt, but with flipflops on her feet. She had shoulder-length brown hair, and plain, pale features still marked with makeup from the previous night.

‘We haven’t seen Harry for a couple of days,’ Alan Rodwell said, shaking his head.

‘When do you think you last saw him?’ Lucy asked.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Could be a week ago, easily. I don’t keep a record.’

‘So definitely not since last Tuesday?’

‘Nah, no way.’

‘Do you ever hear him?’ Lucy asked. ‘I mean through the dividing wall between the houses?’

‘Oh, yeah.’ This time it was the woman who answered. ‘In fact, you can hear his TV now. It’s been on for ages. It was on all night last night, and … oh?’

Only belatedly did this seem to strike her as strange.

‘It was on all night?’ Lucy asked.

‘And the night before, I think. And … maybe … hell, I don’t know … maybe the night before that, as well.’

For the last three days in fact, Lucy thought.

‘It never occurred to you, maybe, to go and knock on his door?’

Oddly, the couple glanced at each other with half-smiles, as if they were harbouring some mischievous secret.

‘We don’t really like to complain,’ Alan Rodwell said. ‘I’ll be honest, Harry does that quite a bit with us.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Lucy said.

‘Whenever we’ve got friends round,’ Sam Rodwell explained. ‘During the summer holidays usually. He gets upset if our barbecues go on too late and comes around, making a fuss. We don’t want to do that back to him … he’d just think it was retaliation.’

‘And, you know …’ Alan Rodwell shrugged. ‘Complaining’s not really our thing.’

Lucy looked at them askance. ‘I didn’t mean knock on his door to complain, I mean to check if everything was all right.’

‘Oh …’ Their impish smiles faded.

They shuffled their feet awkwardly but didn’t look guilty or afraid. Hardened criminals often had the ability to brazen things out when they were under suspicion; they could put on a front that even a seasoned detective might find it difficult to penetrate. But when ordinary people like these two had done something wrong, there were usually clear signs. Not so on this occasion. It was as though it hadn’t even struck them yet that they might be in the frame.

‘You’ve been hearing his television play continuously since – when?’ Lucy said. ‘Could it have been as far back as last Tuesday?’

‘Around then, I suppose,’ Sam Rodwell replied. ‘Tuesday night was probably the first night we heard when it hadn’t been turned off.’

‘That’s right,’ her husband agreed. ‘We were in bed and I could hear gunfire – like movie gunfire, you know. And cowboy film music. I said to Sam, “Christ, Harry’s pulling a late one.”’

Lucy nodded, and scrawled some notes in her pocket-book, one of which was to check if there’d been a western on TV late on Tuesday night.

‘Is this going to take long?’ Sam Rodwell asked. ‘You see, we were just going to—’

‘It’ll take as long as it needs to, I’m afraid, Mrs Rodwell. We have a pensioner missing, and we’d like to get to the bottom of whatever’s happened to him. So, I’d like you both to throw your minds back to Tuesday. Not just the night, but during the daytime as well. Did anything unusual happen? Doesn’t have to be serious, but anything that seemed like a break from the norm, apart from the telly being left on?’

Their faces turned blank as they tried to think it through.

‘You didn’t hear any raised voices, perhaps?’ Lucy prompted them. ‘Any shouting or even laughing?’

They still looked blank.

‘Any vehicles coming and going? Maybe at the back of the house?’

‘Oh yes, wait …’ Sam Rodwell said. ‘There was something like that. Hell, I think this was on Tuesday night too. We heard like a screeching of tyres along the Backs.’

Lucy watched her carefully. ‘Definitely along the Backs?’

The young woman nodded. ‘Like a vehicle was tearing away, you know. It was quite unusual, because it’s very narrow back there.’

‘Yeah, I remember that now,’ her husband said. ‘Only lasted a second and then it was gone.’

‘What time would this have been?’ Lucy asked.

‘I don’t know.’ Sam thought about it again. ‘We weren’t in bed at that stage, so not too late. Half-past ten, something like that.’

‘You don’t really think something bad could have happened to Harry, do you?’ Alan asked, finally sounding concerned.

‘That, sir,’ Lucy replied, ‘is what I’m trying to discover.’

‘What do we think about the daughter?’ Stan Beardmore asked from Lucy’s laptop screen.

Lucy sat back in her office chair. ‘I think she’s genuine. She took a long time coming around to check, but she lives in Blackburn, plus she’s a radiographer at the hospital there, so she works shifts. Sounds like this morning was the first chance she had to visit.’

‘And the neighbours?’

‘There’s no one in No. 6. An old lady owns it, but she’s in long-term care. The Rodwells, the couple who reported the speeding vehicle, live at No. 10. I don’t get any particularly bad vibes about them. Typical young suburbanites. Bit self-centred maybe, but who wasn’t at that age?’

‘These were the ones Hopkins didn’t get on with?’

‘I don’t think it was a case of him not getting on with them. Sounds more like the odd disagreement. Plus, if they were involved, wouldn’t they just have turned his telly off, locked the house up, tried to make it look like he’d gone away?’

‘Not if they wanted to make it look like he’d been attacked by an intruder,’ Beardmore suggested.

‘Outside his house at the back?’ Lucy said. ‘Late at night? If you were making a story up, would you seriously expect someone to buy that?’

Detective Sergeant Kirsty Banks, who was sitting on the desk behind Lucy, now cut in. She was a hefty woman, with an unruly mop of blonde hair and a penchant for wearing big cardigans over her T-shirts and jeans, though as it was warm today and electric fans whirred in the otherwise empty CID office, the cardigan at least had come off.

‘I must be honest, Stan,’ she said, ‘if the Rodwells had done something to Harry Hopkins, and were trying to make it look like an intruder, surely they’d have wrecked the interior of his house … tried to make it look like a burglar had broken in?’

‘That’s your gut instinct, is it, Kirst?’

‘I think Lucy’s on the money. This needs further investigation.’

Beardmore thought about it. From his open-neck polo shirt, the garden chair he reclined in, the kids running around the lawn in the background and the muted conversation of friends and neighbours, he too was spending his Saturday at a barbecue.

‘Lucy,’ he eventually said. ‘What other work have you got on?’

‘Just bottoming off the paper from the dog-fighting arrests,’ she replied.

‘Get that done ASAP. Then you’re on this exclusively till we get some kind of result.’

‘No probs.’

‘Kirsty … how buried is Tessa Payne?’

Banks flicked through the crime log. ‘Not very. Plus, she’s on call today.’

‘Okay. Lucy … you’ve got Tessa.’

Lucy nodded. That would suit Tessa, she thought. The youngster had come into CID excitedly, and even more so on learning she’d be working with Lucy, whose recent results had caught the imagination of many young women in the job. Whether having an adoring student along for the ride was ideal for her, Lucy was less sure, but help was help.

‘Right … you all know what you’re doing.’ Beardmore reached forward to switch off his laptop. ‘If you need me, get on the blower.’

‘Oh, boss …?’ Lucy said.

‘Yeah?’

‘Can we copy Serious Crimes Division in?’

Beardmore sat back, looking suspicious. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t know …’ She shrugged. ‘But I’m hearing second-hand that some homeless people have dropped out of sight recently.’

Beardmore pondered this. ‘Pensioner age?’

‘They’re older people, certainly. And two different sources have now drawn my attention to it.’

‘Any suggestion these mis-pers have been abducted?’

‘I don’t know about that. I’ve not looked into it yet.’

There was a long pause while he considered it.

Lucy had already mentioned the vehicle at the back of Harry Hopkins’s house, but she’d purposely said nothing about a black van. In truth, the thought had occurred to her immediately on hearing about the screeching tyres, but, on reflection, it was a real stretch. Firstly, no evidence had been found that any such vehicle existed. From the outset, the black van had been more legend than fact. They’d gone after Les Mahoney through intel received by the RSPCA. It had seemed possible at the time that there was a connection with this rumoured black van, but it wasn’t the van, or any vehicle in particular, that had led them to his farm. Secondly, even if the black van was real, dog-napping didn’t easily equate to kidnapping. Where was the actual link between the two?

‘Copy Serious in if you want to,’ Beardmore said, interrupting her thoughts. ‘But be careful how you word it. Tell them this whole thing is open-ended as yet, and we’re only marking their card. Underline that we’ve observed nothing thus far to make us suspect that a series of abductions is under way.’

Lucy nodded and Beardmore leaned forward again and cut the call.

Banks stood up. ‘Big difference in MO, that, Luce. Grabbing someone from off the streets and grabbing someone from their own back door.’

‘I know …’ Lucy was equally uncomfortable with it. ‘Hunch, sixth sense, whatever you want to call it.’

‘Well, don’t beat yourself up too much.’ Banks headed back to her own desk. ‘Hunch and sixth sense have caught killers in the past.’

Killers, Lucy thought.

She wouldn’t have used that word herself. Not yet. But there was something disconcerting about all this, and the weirdness didn’t reduce it to merely silly. Despite the arrests at Wellspring Lane, over twenty dog-napping cases were still wide open, along with rumours that a late-night vehicle had been prowling the housing estates where they’d disappeared. And now they had people disappearing as well, and yet another late-night vehicle was possibly involved in that.

It was like an urban myth coming slowly to life right on their doorstep.

But no, no … she resisted that idea strenuously.

They only had fragments of information, none of which necessarily married up. This whole thing could still turn out to be nothing. And the only way they could make firm judgements on that was if they started gathering and collating some real evidence.

No. 8, Atkinson Row and the backstreet behind it were now officially designated crime scenes. The first CSIs would be there later today. That could only help. In addition, there were witness statements to be taken. As soon as Tessa Payne checked in, Lucy would send her to speak to the Rodwells – because she herself had someone else she needed to speak to, and that would be far from straightforward. If she wanted to learn more about these alleged missing homeless, to try and work out whether they actually had disappeared, rather than left the area of their own volition, the only thing to do was go and talk to the homeless themselves.

Or at least to their spokesperson.

‘Sister Cassie,’ she muttered, taking a Greater Manchester A-Z from the drawer in her desk and flipping to the page on which a street map of Crowley, and the St Clement’s ward especially, were displayed. ‘Where on earth do I find you today?’

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