1

DS CATRIN PRICE stared at her phone. She didn’t want to listen to her messages. She already knew what was waiting for her.

She pushed the phone under a stack of bills on the table. It was no longer visible, but she still stared in a daze at the papers under which it lay. The phone had a new number, a new SIM card, but already he was calling again.

She forced herself to move away, peered through the curtains. Beyond the huts on the pier, the estuary sparkled. In the haze of the horizon a ferry lay motionless. She pulled the curtains tight. She had hung some blackout drapes over the velvet. That way no light entered and no one could see if she had the lights on inside.

Padding over to the small windowless bathroom, she sat on the edge of the bath as the water flowed. Her afternoon routine of Shen Chuan and Krav Maga hadn’t calmed her. The calls were getting to her. That and everything else.

She turned off the tap and listened for a moment. Around her, the other flats were silent. It was too early for people to have come back from work. She could hear only the crying of the gulls. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, her brown eyes, their ink-dark surrounds, her small breasts, the black swoops of her tattoos whose meaning only she could decipher. Lowering herself into the warmth of the water, she closed her eyes, shutting out everything except the sound of her own breathing.

Maybe she could deal with the withdrawal if it wasn’t for the calls. Maybe. But she’d never know, because the calls kept coming. He was probably calling right now, filling up her voicemail, even as she sought peace in water. She could hear his voice in her ear, a voice she could almost place. Almost, but not quite.

The water may have been cold for all the comfort it was offering. She gave in. She had to know. Uncertainty was worse than having her fears confirmed. She got out, huddling a towel around herself, pulled her phone out and switched it on. She put in the code to access her voicemail.

The automated voice told her there was only one message. She knew it would be the same as before. But still she listened.

‘Cat,’ the voice said, ‘it’s Martin.’

The message usually urged Catrin to call back as soon as she could. But today, the pattern was broken, a new detail was added.

‘Meet me in Tregaron,’ the voice continued. ‘I’ll tell you everything at the house.’

Although there were more words this time, still there was no discernible accent. The voice sounded taut, the speaker betrayed no signs of fear or hesitation. At first she’d thought they were all the same message, recorded. But now, with this new detail, she knew they were not.

Cat looked at the map of Wales Blu-tacked on the wall; put there to help plan her biking routes. She stared at it. Tregaron: a small town in the middle of nowhere. It was bordered in the south by the wilderness of the Brecon Beacons, and to the north by the Cambrians. On all sides was a sea of green, empty pasture and hills.

Cat had never been to Tregaron. She knew of no one who lived there except her old colleague DI Jack Thomas. She doubted the calls were linked to Thomas. He had told her he didn’t want to keep in touch with the old-timers. He had moved more than a year ago, and she had not heard anything from him since. Maybe he’d talked about her to some nutter who could follow her changes of number on the force intranet? It was just about possible.

She snatched up her phone but then hesitated, feeling the need to dress before she called Thomas. She slipped on some old joggers and a battered ‘Death to the Pixies’ T-shirt, then flipped to Thomas’s number. He answered on the second ring.

‘Well, well. Catrin Price.’ He gave what sounded like a morose chuckle. ‘I move out to the sticks and still you hound me. Do I need a restraining order?’

Others might have said that as a joke – made it sound affectionate, even – but with Thomas there was always an edge.

‘Things quiet enough for you out there, Thomas? Any missing cats need chasing down?’

He half-chuckled. ‘Not calling to pass the time of day, are you, Price?’

She told Thomas about the calls from Martin in Tregaron.

‘Never mentioned you to anyone. Think I’m always yapping on about you? Can’t get you out of my head?’

Again, the edge in his voice.

‘No, I don’t think that. Not at all.’

He paused. Cat heard him exhale. ‘Sorry, Cat. There was no need for that. Sorry.’

It was only the second time he’d ever apologised as far as she could recall. Once before he’d said sorry about his behaviour on a certain night out. After a certain number of drinks. In a certain car. He’d said sorry about that when she’d explained how he’d made her feel. Thomas was crude, but he did know that other people had feelings, when you reminded him.

‘I can’t help you with the calls. I don’t know anything about them.’ His voice was softer now.

She could tell he might have liked to talk more, but didn’t want it to show. She wondered if he was lonely; of course, he would never admit to that.

‘Jack,’ she used his first name, ‘can I ask you something?’

‘As long as it’s not on geography,’ he said. ‘I’m crap at geography.’

‘Why did you leave the city?’

The derisive snort told Cat he thought her naive for asking.

She ended the call, having learned nothing. She groped for her pouch of Drum, made a roll-up and heeled up to the headboard, pressing her back to it. Cat looked at the magnolia walls she’d never got round to repainting. She thought about Thomas’s response to her question. She did know why he’d left the city, why he’d bailed out to the sticks. It was the same reason she’d gone on the tranks.

Cat’s eyes lingered on the magnolia. She took a long drag. She’d always smoked rather than cried. She had the sense that the past was approaching her from below, winding its tendrils around her ankles and pulling her down.

She frisked her iPod out of her jacket. She span to Nick Drake, jammed it in the sound dock, and stuck on Five Leaves Left. The melancholia of the album would not help her state of mind, but she needed to think and sadness helped her do that. She lay back down and made another roll-up, sprinkling this one with canna.

If it had been a wrong number, the calls would have stopped when she changed the SIM card. But they hadn’t stopped and the caller had used her name. The rate of calls was increasing, now up to six a day. When she called back, the phone was always switched off. She’d run a check on the caller’s number, but it was a pay-as-you-go bought for cash in a backstreet store in Swansea a year back. The phone had no previous call history. Her next move was to check on mast signals for a fix on the phone’s whereabouts. But now Tregaron had been named.

She moved over to the edge of her unmade bed. The sheets were tangled from another sleepless night. The mattress showed through the thin sheets a livid orange, the cover had come loose from the duvet. As she pulled, it tore. Fierce, sudden anger shot through her.

The online research she had done told her there would be times like this, that anger and fear were two sides of the same coin. She should expect a period when she felt little else, that it was part of the healing. She should have seen a doctor about coming off the tranks, of course, but trusting anyone with her head was as alien to her as putting a hole in it.

She peeled the cover off the duvet then threw it into the basket. She pulled the basket into the kitchen and jammed its contents into the washing machine. There was a stool there and she sat, watching the chamber filling with foam. Just put your mind and body in neutral, this had been her sensei’s mantra. Let nature reassert itself. But the Klonopin and sleepers had taken their toll. Now she was paying the price: insomnia, anxiety, almost constant headaches and an apprehensiveness that never seemed to leave her.

She wrinkled her nose at the stuffiness of the flat, and walked to the window, grabbing at a breath of outside air. The only Martin she knew had been a boy in her class at school. She had not seen him for seventeen years. But they had been close enough that she could imagine him feeling he could depend on her.

She let her mind drift back. Martin Tilkian had been the least popular boy in the year, a loner and an outcast. She had been the least popular girl, though for very different reasons. They had formed a brief alliance. Hard case and the geek. Despairing at his unpopularity, and not approving of her influence over him – because that was how they wrongly saw the friendship – his parents had sent him away to a private school and they had lost touch.

She went to the wardrobe and rooted through the classic biker mags and old monitors and keyboards. She found what she wanted and brought it out into the light. It was the only photograph she had of him. It wasn’t a good one. He looked like an Armenian Andy Warhol, dark glasses and his hair grown in bangs to hide as much of his face as possible. His skin had been the main reason for his unpopularity: dry, scaly patches often covered his cheeks and forehead. Sometimes he had come to school with his face in plasters, only his big brown eyes peeping out.

If this Martin was her caller he was unlikely to be a threat to her. They had shared that uniquely intimate bond of adolescent friendship. Tough little Cat had saved him from the bullies who had stolen his money and covered his head with bags, tying him to the railings like a scarecrow. He had been grateful for her protection, and had sworn undying allegiance to her in a blood oath. She had done the same. She smiled at this, gently mocking the theatrics; their friendship had been so melodramatic. She wondered if her name in the press over the Dinas case had brought her back to his attention.

Over at the desk she booted her Mac, running his name on Google. Not much came up. A Wikipedia stub written a few years before described Tilkian as a ‘games designer’ and referred to some US games companies she had never heard of. It mentioned a wife who had died, and a daughter, Esyllt. There were a few entries from websites specialising in historic gaming, name-checking him in relation to a series of antiquated fantasy games with titles like ‘Gorgon’s Revenge VII’ and ‘Infiltrator versus Atilla’. After 2003, the year his wife had died, his involvement in that industry seemed to have ceased. She could find no further references to him. He seemed to have switched profession. Maybe gone to live the quiet life with his daughter in Tregaron.

She clicked over to the police portal, and went into the National Police Intelligence Service. Tilkian had no form, and no current address was listed. Next, she tried searches on the names of the wife and daughter, but nothing came up. No Facebook or other social networking sites for the daughter, nor any reference to where she was at school. Cat tried the villages around Tregaron, but drew a blank. Why the fuck would you ask someone to come, but give no address and refuse to answer the phone? It made no sense.

She was getting nowhere. Frustration was rising, her muscles tightening around her neck and forehead. She needed to get out of the flat. Pulling on some old trainers, Cat locked the door and went down to the yard. Her flat came with a garage and a store room as large as the living space above, and this was the reason she had rented it.

Without switching on the lights, letting the daylight filter in, she pulled the deadbolt behind her. On one side was where she kept her small collection of motorcycles. The rest was taken up with punchbags hanging from the ceiling, a rack of free weights and a beaten-up sofa.

She gazed into the gloom. Ahead was her giant poster of Brando in The Wild One. Next to it, pictures of the Welsh Formula One cars from the Fifties. They had been left by the previous occupier. It had been a doomed team. On the day the cars were to compete in their first Grand Prix, the driver of the transporter had raced against the German transporter through the Portuguese mountains. He had careered down into a valley, destroying the cars. The team had never raced again. She had first heard the story as a girl, but it had always held a certain bleak fascination for her.

In the damp, some of the pictures had dropped from the wall and she knelt to pick them up. Outside it was quiet. In the dimness the chrome of the bikes glimmered. There was the Laverda she used for everyday, and next to it her Triton. It had the elongated tank and narrow handlebars of the classic café racer. The tank was matt and the rest polished to a shine. In the obscurity it seemed to hover above the ground.

As she flicked the light, she noticed something. In the dust under the Triton there were takeaway flyers and beneath them, an envelope. Most of the post came to the main entrance, but sometimes items would get pushed under the doors of the garage.

The envelope had her name handwritten on it. She held it under the one bare bulb. Inside was a single sheet, thick and expensive by the feel of it. There was an address in Tregaron at the top. Then two lines written in a sloping, old-fashioned hand.

Cat – I need some help. Can you come to see me? I’d prefer not to discuss this on the phone. Martin Tilkian.

So, her guess was right. She knew now who the caller was. Better still, she knew where to find him.

She felt calmer. Cat looked at the junk mail. Most of it was undated, but there were one or two advertising special offers relating to specific events. Assuming that the strata of junk mail were still lying in approximate order of delivery, it looked as if Tilkian had first tried to get in touch about a week ago.

The discovery made more sense of the messages. He had first called in person. Rather than leave a note in the communal box and risk her not getting it, he had left it in her garage. Then, when she’d not responded, he’d begun calling. The only reason he hadn’t been leaving his name on those messages was because he assumed she already had it. He hadn’t responded to her calls because, presumably, he wasn’t responding to anyone. That didn’t explain how he’d got her number, but already she felt herself relaxing. Most likely he just wanted her help in her capacity as police. An oddball like that, he probably had few friends to turn to. She had protected him once before. Now he was turning to her again. She nudged together a roll-up, lit it, and blew the smoke into Brando’s face.

 

2

REALLY, THERE WAS no decision to make. Although it was pledged more than half a lifetime ago, and although she now found their intense behaviour almost ludicrous, still, they had made a blood bond. They had meant it at the time, and once meant, well, one couldn’t take that lightly. She noticed how good it felt to be needed again.

An unusual optimism seized her. She would take the Laverda on a run up to Tregaron, she would open up the bike, feel the wildness of old Wales that still clung on up in the hills. It would be a drive back into a better past. Suddenly everything felt up for grabs again.

Cat turned fluidly, delivering a roundhouse kick to a hanging punchbag. So this was what feeling good felt like? She had forgotten. She palmed her phone from her joggers and called her new boss, DCI Gwen Kyle, hoping to get the answerphone. Requesting permission for the trip was just a formality. Cat was on flexi-time, doing desk work while she dealt with her withdrawal. Out of the loop on the Drug Proactive Unit’s current operations as she was, notifying Kyle was just a courtesy.

A secretary answered, a new girl, nervous and clearly a jobsworth, because she covered herself by telling Cat to talk in person with Kyle about it. The girl said Kyle was on the set of a docudrama about the drugs bust at Penarth Marina. She would be back in the office in about an hour.

Cat decided to go and talk to Kyle in person rather then risk missing her again. Kyle was a prickly sort, she would be easier to handle having just visited the site of the bust, her greatest triumph, where her ego would have been getting a stroking.

Some old scaffolding resting between the breeze blocks had become her clothes rail, and Cat flipped a hanger off the pole. On it was her battered all-in-one leather suit. She had bought it second hand and because it lacked logo or graphic design, and was scuffed up on the arse and back and knees, it was her favourite. She pushed legs and arms in, then eased up the chunky zipper to snug herself in.

Cat found gloves and helmet then swung the door open. She started the Laverda and nosed it out. The journey wasn’t far. Although some po-faced Penarth burghers might dispute the fact, Penarth was now just another suburb in the sprawl of Cardiff. She could have ridden into town with her eyes closed – in fact, she might have been tempted to try had there been no other traffic on the roads.

On the far side of the water the familiar streets and shapes of the city gave abruptly into the Bay development. Up-scale regeneration had bulldozed the old streets, sooty terraces become proud civic structures and landmark hotels, cocktail bars and pizzerias. Even after all these years it still felt wrong.

Cat took the flyover into the centre of Cardiff, rat-running from the Bay to the DPU building in Cathays Park. The unit had oversight of drugs policing for all Wales but from the outside it looked like a tax office, which was essentially what it was.

Her office was at basement level next to the parking. There was damp on the walls and the window overlooked a toilet block. It was one of the spaces allocated to officers on flexi-time, far from the operations hub on the upper floors. But she didn’t mind the solitude.

Cat quickly checked her work emails. There had been over twenty minor seizures since she had last checked in, mostly skunk and Es. Her task was to upload details of busts in Wales onto the National Criminal Intelligence database for use nationally. This allowed officers to track supply networks and vectors of transmission for each drug type. The uploading was usually given to civilians or officers on disciplinaries. But it could be important work. The charts might predict where moody gear would turn up next. Pills with one gang’s press showing in another’s territory could signal the start of a messy turf war. Classic brands were often bootlegged by the challenger’s labs. D&Gs, Calvin Kleins, M25s, Mitsubishis, once a sign of purity and quality, were stepped on with adulterants and cheap amphetamines: small differences in the press could distinguish real product from knock-offs and potentially save lives.

Cat called Kyle’s secretary again: Kyle was delayed on the film set, she wasn’t sure how long for but thought at least another hour. Cat scanned the room quickly to check no new files had been dumped on her. They hadn’t. Mostly, she guessed, because nobody from the plusher upstairs above could be bothered to carry them down so far. She sighed, looking at the two personal items she had added to the decrepit office: a photo of Giacomo Agostini taken at the Isle of Man TT, his sunburnt features incongruous in the damp half-light, and beside it, an origami raven which she had owned since she was sixteen years old. She nipped the raven between two fingertips and stared at it. The past weighed so much, while the future she had glimpsed earlier that afternoon, the image of her hooning deep into old Wales to help an old friend, still weighed almost nothing in her mind.

She thought she heard footsteps, glanced outside. But no one was there. On the wall the same graffiti had been up for months and no one had cleaned it off. ‘Narc Dog’. This was the term used of undercover drug officers, and she had been one once, but the letters had long preceded her period in the office. She didn’t know who had put it there, or who it had been directed at, but she left it. She shut down the computer, put down the raven and headed to the marina.

By the time she reached the road above it, dusk had fallen. Ropes clacked against masts, along the quays the small weekender cruisers bobbed next to unmoving ocean-goers. The marina was another regeneration project, older than the Bay. She had mucked about there as a child, sploshing its crumbling pieces down into the bay water, feasting on the bilberries that grew up around its concrete. She saw the part of the marina where the bust had gone down was starkly lit by the film crew’s arc lights. The near side was blocked by two film trucks, and glowing behind them were the cigarettes of the crew, hunkered down out of the stiffening wind.

Some gulls flapped slowly back towards the shore, seeking discarded chips and KFC. Further out, a large black bird she didn’t know the name of glided at an even height, hardly moving its wings, above the glistening foam.

Cat toed the Laverda into neutral. She let the heavy bike glide down the ramp to where a line of rubberneckers were being kept back by the uniforms. A crowd was pressing around a large black car, but she couldn’t see who was in it. Most of them looked young, student-types. One of the PCs recognised her and waved her through.

Inside the filming cordon, Cat spotted Kyle on the far side of the lights. She was talking to another tall blonde – the actress playing Kyle, Cat guessed. The actress looked healthy and attractive. Kyle would be happy about that. The omens were good, Cat thought, for her trip to Tregaron.

Despite all the people on set, there was a respectful hush. No one was speaking above a whisper. Cat walked forward and stared at Kyle, trying to catch her attention. Kyle flicked out a glance but then quickly turned her attention back to the actress. Cat had the sense she was ignoring her.

She leaned back against one of the crew’s trucks. In front of her, a man in a puffer jacket – the director maybe – was studying some grainy footage on a monitor. She recognised it immediately. This was the famous security footage of the bust, now presumably being used to choreograph the reconstruction.

On the screen, four gang members could just be made out, their heads covered by hoodies, walking slowly along the quay towards the shore. The four men then disappeared out of shot, off the marina’s walkways and into the shadows of the shoreline’s buildings. Cat looked up from the footage towards the arc lights of the marina – four actors, dressed identically to the men on the screen, clustered, their heads down.

The man in the puffer jacket raised his hand, and the silence deepened. The quay was still except for the gently shifting shadows of boats and gulls.

Then, from the right-hand corner of the quay, the four actors walked out. They were heading back towards their boat, heads still covered. They carried on their shoulders an object that looked like a large coffin. Their burden was heavy as the four men moved slowly, in swinging, syncopated steps.

On the screen the men were a few steps ahead now, moving closer to the boat. Cat knew the footage well, knew what was coming. It had become something of a cliché. Every week one of the news channels would find a reason to drop it into a package, and it was a favourite on YouTube. Like the shots of Diana on the fateful night, or those of the 7/7 bombers walking through the station, the film seemed to hold a fascination for the public. It had become iconic, as had the leader of the busted gang, Griff Morgan. It had been the largest synthetic drug haul in recent memory, and Morgan had risen to a cross between Dillinger and Moriarty in the popular imagination, a pin-up in squats and student houses all over the land.

It took a while before she could make out the shape the actors were shouldering. As they passed under a light it became clear that it was a four-man canoe. A sea-going kayak, a serious piece of kit.

The men lowered the canoe carefully onto the deck of a large motor cruiser, visible just on the edge of the shot. Then the taller man – the one playing Morgan – covered the canoe with a tarp and the men climbed back onto the quay.

The shot cut and the men walked hastily back to their marks. A bulky arm shot across the screen as the man in the puffer jacket reached forward and sped up the original security footage. It just showed the same moves being repeated many times: four men leaving the motor cruiser then returning to it with a canoe held between them. After ten canoes had been placed on the deck and tarped over, the four men stayed on the boat and the large cruiser – now visible on the grainy night footage as a receding blur of white – purred out of shot towards the sea lock.

The sequence was still running in fast forward. Cat didn’t need to watch to know what happened next. The men would return to collect more canoes and would be ambushed by Kyle.

The director had stood up. Over by the canteen van, he was talking with the actors who had been joined by others dressed as armed officers. Cat’s attention was caught again by the crowd around the black car. Whatever was inside was apparently more interesting than the filming. Some looked like students, and were wearing T-shirts with Griff Morgan’s face in iconic Warhol style. Others looked like press and passers-by who had got drawn in out of curiosity. At the edge, a woman in strappy heels and a sharply cut trouser suit was trying to peer through the car’s back window. Despite the heels, she was pushing and shoving like the best of them. Cat recognised Della Davies, former police press officer and her one-time love rival, her suit creasing as she scrummed in deeper. People were pressing in around the car from all sides now, but whoever was inside seemed invisible behind the heavily tinted glass.

Out on the quay the final scene was taking shape. The arc lights had dimmed, and the concrete pathways lay in near darkness. On the cruiser deck, the actor playing Morgan was pulling the tarpaulin over a canoe. For a moment he glanced upwards, face still hidden, his eyes a momentary flash of light. At his side was his lieutenant, Mike Tulle. The third gang member, Huw Tulle, Mike’s baby brother, was walking down the gangplank, ready to move back to the warehouse. The fourth man had his back to the scene and was staring out towards the open sea.

Tulle junior was the first to notice something was wrong. He stepped back towards the boat, his hand reaching instinctively into his hoody’s front pocket. Looking at the original on the screen, she thought he was over-acting it a touch. The first shot caught Tulle in the shoulder. He staggered backwards like a drunk. On the second impact, he fell on the gangplank and lay still. Tubes of light flashed, the torches of the black-clad Armed Response, their faces masked, closing in around him. Quickly they were on him, and he was secured with plastic cuffs and left in place for the medics.

Then the actress playing Kyle appeared. Colleagues had levelled many accusations at DCI Gwen Kyle but nobody could ever call her a coward. Because although the ARs had taken out one gang member, there were still three more, and judging by the actions of the first, they were all armed. The woman stood now in full view of the gang, in full view also of the cameras. She was shouting at Morgan to surrender. In front of her, the ARs had fanned out in a semicircle, their Heckler lights trained on the men on the deck. Everything seemed to slow down. Kyle stood on the edge of the water. In the darkness there was a spark above her, rising into a long flame.

Later it had come out that Morgan had threatened to blow the boat and everything with it, but somehow in those desperate seconds Kyle had persuaded him to surrender. He had come quietly along with his lieutenant, Mike Tulle. Only the fourth man, one of Morgan’s soldiers known as Diamond Evans, had swum for it. On cue, there was a splash. The AR actors immediately tramped the gangplanks, swinging torches across each bobbing inch of water and peering down the sides of the marina’s every boat. The Kyle actress loudly called for back-up and for the entire marina to be locked down and searched. But to no avail. Somehow, in the darkness and the confusion, lucky Diamond Evans had got away.

Cat remembered how the press briefings had played down the escape of the fourth man, a minor player who had only recently joined Morgan’s crew. The main prize had been the capture of Morgan himself, a fugitive who’d been on the run for ten years. He was that rare thing, a major criminal with no previous record, a figure so elusive that some, encouraged by the internet’s conspiracy centrifuge, had even begun to doubt his very existence. But there he was, banged-up courtesy of the smart reactions and operational nous of DCI Gwen Kyle.

The criminal spook had human form after all.

Of the canoes recovered at the marina, nine were found to be loaded with MDMA, and the tenth with almost a million Mandrax pills. These were a niche product, but highly profitable. The street value of the total haul had been estimated at an eye-watering fifty million. A lot of money, Cat thought, and maybe twice that if the first ten canoes had not been lost. In all the hoo-ha over trapping the elusive Morgan, this point was also conveniently glossed over. Neither that first load nor the men that handled it had ever been found.

‘Price.’

Cat looked up to see that the real Kyle was standing next to her.

Cat realised it was the first time they had been one-on-one. Since being transferred to Kyle’s unit, Cat had been working down in the basement, and when they had passed each other in corridors Kyle was always hurrying along with a secretary or task-force officers and merely levelled a stiff, silent glare.

‘Ma’am,’ she replied.

Kyle said nothing, just looked away across the set. Kyle’s face appeared so often in the press that it was like looking at someone Cat had known all her life. The short, fair hair, cut close to the scalp Joan of Arc style, the strong, classical nose and small, decisive chin. But closer, there was a dusky pallor to the skin, the long work hours showing in black circles beneath her eyes, a fragility uncaught by the camera’s gaze.

‘The thing is,’ Kyle’s cut-glass voice broke in. She turned to face Cat then, scrutinising her and making no attempt to hide it. She was taking in Cat’s scuffed leathers and witchy hair. ‘Everyone’s telling me you’re a screw-up, Price.’

Cat looked down to her hands and finished making her roll-up.

‘Want one?’ Cat asked.

Kyle looked at the roll-up as though it were dog shit.

‘I think you probably are up a screw-up.’ It was the kind of forthright remark Kyle had a reputation for, then momentarily her face seemed to soften. ‘But I keep an open mind.’

Kyle was clearly in a hurry to leave. She was raising her hand towards a man parked in a Range Rover up on the marina’s ramp. He was keeping his distance. Through the driver’s window, Cat could make out the broad chest and bull neck of a body-builder, Kyle’s driver presumably.

‘I know why you’re here.’ Kyle sounded irritated. ‘Jill at the office told me.’

‘Ma’am.’ Cat could feel a throbbing over her left temple, one of the more persistent symptoms of her withdrawal. The timbre of Kyle’s voice was making it worse.

‘Don’t leave town, not on my time,’ Kyle said.

‘No, ma’am.’

Their conversation was interrupted by movement beyond the cordon. The black car at the centre of the crowd was pulling out at speed. Following were a couple of other cars, one of them a convertible driven by Della Davies. Kyle silently watched her pass, her feelings expressed by a pair of pursed lips and an extra frown line.

‘Who’s in the Volvo?’ asked Cat, curious.

Kyle shot a palely amused look at Cat. ‘The Volvo? Griff Morgan. Who else would it be? It’s his film.’

Cat couldn’t really see much through the tinted back windows, but as the car turned the angle and the light shifted she got a brief view through the windscreen, beyond the driver into the back of the car. In the rear passenger seat, she saw the bunched-up shape of a man in a dark coat. He seemed thin. His pose somehow exhibited anxiety or something fragile, rather than anything commanding or curious. The man had long hair, fashionably unkempt – not unlike Griff Morgan’s hair in the iconic poster shot – but it was grey and pitifully thinning.

Cat knew, of course, that the figure couldn’t be Morgan. He was down for thirty years, and he would never get out of prison alive. They don’t let prisoners out to watch a movie being made, even if it is about them. She would have asked again, only Kyle was already gone, striding away past the film trucks, face set against the wind. She looked fierce and pure, like a heroine from an older, simpler world. One of the rubberneckers from behind the cordon was following Kyle, asking for an autograph perhaps. She waved him away and got into the front of the Range Rover. Cat thought she saw Kyle reach across towards the driver, then the car sped away, merging with the lights of the passing traffic and into the night.

The black car had moved down the dock, beyond the film trucks, apparently with carte blanche to go where it pleased. Della Davies’s convertible prowled after it, a terrier at the heels of a deer. Cat watched the show for another few minutes, wondering about the figure in the back of the Volvo. Then she’d had enough, and she left.