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  She pulled at her hair, which was now cut by a proper hairdresser, not hacked at by one of the other girls. She smiled into the mirror. She’d never be beautiful, she knew that, but now her face wasn’t regularly swollen from black eyes, and with everything else she’d had done, perhaps she’d even find a proper boyfriend.

  The smartphone in her handbag pinged. It was a text from her sister in Shenyang in north–eastern China where she came from. The smartphone was the first thing she’d bought with her new income, a prized possession. She’d proudly shown it to Dawn, her social worker, who’d admired it and then, for the tenth time at least, reminded the new Kitty how essential it was she had no contact with anyone from her previous life in Nottingham. No one, not a single person. She kept on and on about it every time they met. Kitty understood; she owed none of them anything and had no reason to contact them. As far as they were concerned, she’d been deported back to China. That’s what the newspaper reports had said and none of the women she’d shared her life with in and around Forest Road West had any reason to doubt it.

  Except one. Except Apple Chan. Apple was different; Apple had arrived after Mandy and was even plainer, skinnier and more mousey than she was. How was she ever going to get decent clients looking like that and with almost no English? Mandy had taken her under her wing and they had commiserated with each other, swapping stories of brutality and meanness from their clients, planning to get away, or at least find clients who gave them a tiny bit of respect.

  Apple would be totally lost without Mandy. None of the other women took any notice of her; it was like she wasn’t there. Despite the rules, Mandy simply couldn’t let her friend down. She’d thought of telling Dawn about her, but that would probably have resulted in Apple being picked up and deported, a death sentence given the money she owed. No, the newly created Kitty couldn’t risk telling Dawn.

  However, she did contact Apple. She called her to tell her about her good fortune, tell her she’d bring her to Birmingham as soon as she could. Apple of course swore secrecy, swore she’d die rather than reveal Mandy’s secret.

  The March evening was wet and cold as Kitty walked back to the high-rise in the suburb of Nechells, north–east of Birmingham city centre, that was home. She glanced at the new watch on her wrist. Nine o’clock. Later than she’d intended but it didn’t matter; she felt buoyant. Her English was improving and she’d found herself chatting to her workmates more and more. None of them was in fact ethnically English, rather they were their own United Nations of nationalities, although all of them had the local nasal twang Kitty had initially found difficult to understand.

  There had been cake during the afternoon tea break — one of the girls was celebrating her birthday — and Kitty’s supervisor, Nadine, had suggested a few of them go for a drink after work. It had been fun, relaxing, and there was talk of a night out over the coming weekend.

  When she got home, Kitty was planning to call Apple, encourage her to simply get on a train and leave. It had been seven months now and she felt increasingly confident. Apple could hide out in her flat for a while until she thought of something to do with her.

  Although when compared to Shenyang, the twenty-storey apartment blocks in Nechells dominating the surrounding streets of two-storey semi-detached houses were small fry, they helped Kitty’s sense of feeling at home. Living on the tenth floor was perfect for her since it not only gave her a good view, but also the comfort of knowing no one was going to break into her flat through the windows. As for the front door, Dawn had arranged for it to be well secured with three different deadlocks to give her peace of mind.

  As Kitty pushed open the door after releasing all three locks, she bent to pick up her bags — after leaving the bar, she’d been food shopping in a large Chinese supermarket that stayed open all hours, an Aladdin’s cave of a store that stocked every ingredient she could possibly want, a small part of China in central England.

  “Cooking up a storm, Mandy?” said a voice from behind her as she walked towards the kitchen counter. The person must have been hiding behind the door.

  Kitty spun around, still clutching her bags.

  “My name’s Kitty,” she said, “not Mandy. You’re in the wrong flat. Please leave.”

  “Very cool, Mandy,” said Olivia Freneton, clapping her hands slowly as she kicked the main door shut. “Surely you know who I am, don’t you?” she added, her smile so cold Kitty felt she was being stabbed with icicles.

  Then the smile disappeared. “I certainly know who you are, Mandy.” She held up her left hand and waved it slightly. “This has never been quite the same since you plunged your little knife into it, and it aches like hell in cold weather.”

  Kitty wasn’t really listening; she was too shocked by the intrusion into the flat she’d thought of as secure by this strange woman with tattoos on her neck, a black headscarf that made her look like a pirate, black lipstick and leather motorcycle gear. Who was she? What did she want?

  She watched the woman’s lips move, saw the dark intent in her eyes, and suddenly she knew. She was the crazy woman. The bitch had found her. All her muscles tensed as she thought rapidly about where the nearest thing to a weapon was.

  As Kitty’s face hardened, Olivia uttered a scornful laugh. “Thinking about where the knives are, Mandy?” she sneered, as if reading the girl’s mind. “Well, you can forget it; I’ve moved them. Nothing important is where you left it.”

  “What you want?” growled Kitty, as she slowly adjusted the position of the shopping bags so her hands and arms could propel them more effectively.

  “That’s a simple enough question to answer,” replied Olivia, her eyes fixed on Kitty’s as if trying to hypnotise her. “I have a list of names I’m working my way through until no one’s left. And you, Mandy, I’m delighted to say, are on it. You see, until I saw your friend Apple’s phone, I thought you’d gone back to China. Big mistake telling her about your new identity, Mandy. A fatal mistake, in fact.”

  “Apple …?”

  “Oh, she’s fine. I would have killed her, of course, if she’d come back when I was searching her room. Lucky for her she didn’t and she’s none the wiser about my visit.”

  Kitty frowned. She didn’t understand what the crazy woman was talking about, and she didn’t want to be distracted by trying. She was waiting for her moment.

  Olivia’s eyes were still fixed on her. She knew exactly what the girl was doing from the minuscule adjustments of her body, so she’d help her along. She let her eyes leave Kitty’s and seem to look towards one of the kitchen cupboards. The instant she did, Kitty burst into action, flinging the two shopping bags hard at Olivia, but Olivia was ready. She took two rapid skips sideways to her left, blocking the way to the main door, and stood poised as the bags and their contents crashed to the floor.

  “Whoops, that was careless, Mandy,” she said as she shifted her weight onto her left foot.

  Kitty hunched slightly, the disappointment of her failed move crushing her. She was now expecting the crazy woman to launch herself at her, grab her around the waist and pin her arms. What she didn’t anticipate was the full-extension kick as Olivia’s right leg lifted and snapped straight, her foot driving into Kitty’s windpipe.

  The girl collapsed on the floor, clutching at her throat. Olivia watched her struggling to breathe, in no hurry to finish her off. The little bitch deserved no better than to die in terror. Perhaps she’d crushed her thorax, in which case she’d probably just choke to death as she lay there.

  But Kitty’s thorax wasn’t crushed, at least not completely. Her desperate gasps became slightly easier as she forced air down into her lungs. She tried to move. She needed to get into a crouching position so she could defend herself. Olivia watched her with almost detached interest, as if she were watching some violent movie and not personally involved. She sighed and glanced at her watch. Better get on; she’d other fish to fry.

  She launched another powerful kick, this time at Kitty’s temple,
feeling the bone break as she connected. There would be no returning from that, but for good measure, she took a short length of rope from her pocket and wound it around the girl’s neck, pulling it tighter and tighter. There was little resistance; the kick had severely compromised a number of Kitty’s brain functions and in less than a minute her body was limp. As Olivia pushed the lifeless body away from her, she gave the rope one final pull for good measure.

  Chapter Three

  Thursday, 11 March 2015

  Detective Constable Derek Thyme finished his extensive routine of warm-up stretches and headed for the track, pulling his balaclava over his head and slipping on his thermal gloves as he emerged into the frosty evening air. With the temperature hovering around three degrees and threatening to go lower, he had to be careful: cold was the enemy of the sprinter. If his powerful leg and back muscles weren’t fully warmed, they could pull with alarming ease. He could have trained indoors; there was a top-class indoor track at the east-London centre he and dozens of other prime athletes used, but there was an outdoor meet in Bristol at the weekend and he wanted his body to be prepared for the expected conditions.

  Tonight’s routine would consist mainly of light jogging — light by Derek’s standards, not the average mortal’s — with a few short sprints thrown in. Nothing too extreme and comparatively speaking, almost a night off. In little over an hour, he’d be back on the Tube heading for the warmth of his small apartment near Edgware Road Station and some longed-for sleep.

  After having been shortlisted for Team GB’s Rio squad, Derek’s training schedule had gone from gruelling to punishing, and trying to work it in with a day job in the Met’s Fraud Squad was wearing him down. The posting had been designed to give him the time for his training, a generous gesture on the part of the force, but he couldn’t appear to be skiving, to be a part-time police officer on full-time pay.

  The problem was he disliked the work: fraud inquiries simply weren’t his thing. He had quite a mathematical brain, so it wasn’t the numbers or the complexity, nor was it the nature of the criminals he was investigating — he was appalled by the shameless cunning and deceit apparently law-abiding citizens would employ to cheat their fellow man, all with smiles on their charming, trustworthy faces as they squirrelled away fortunes of other people’s money. They were everywhere, rats in a sewer, and he loathed them. Yet, even though catching them and putting a stop to their activities was important and should feel rewarding, try as he may, the enthusiasm wasn’t there. He missed the SCF, the Serious Crime Formation in Nottingham, and the buzz that went with the hard graft of tracking down a murderer, a rapist or a kidnapper.

  However, the SCF as he’d known it would never be the same again. It had been decimated by the Olivia Freneton case, literally. Lives lost, reputations ruined. And it was still continuing. Only that afternoon, he’d heard from one of his ex-colleagues in the SCF that their old boss, Mike Hurst, had been found dead in his car at the bottom of a reservoir late the previous evening. It wasn’t clear what had happened, although they knew he’d been having a hard time coping with retirement.

  For Derek, that fateful night in Harlow Wood, the night Rob McPherson died, replayed constantly in his head. It had been so horribly close; he had only just arrived in time to prevent Freneton from killing Jennifer Cotton. Even now, months later, his buddy and inspiration was still convalescing from her injuries, the worst of which was the result of the one vicious kick that Freneton had managed to deliver to Jennifer’s head. In his recurring nightmares Derek was always delayed by another thirty seconds, giving Freneton time to pound Jennifer’s head repeatedly with blow after blow. As it was, Jennifer’s survival had been a miracle, and Derek had literally wept for joy when it was clear she was going to recover fully, albeit slowly. The medics had prescribed a long period of convalescence and her stepfather had insisted this would be in his Sardinian villa. Jennifer’s new bosses in the Met’s Art Fraud Squad were patiently letting her have all the time she needed, knowing she would be a strong asset once she reported for duty.

  Jennifer had remained enthusiastically supportive of Derek’s training and new job, listening to his doubts and encouraging him to put aside his worries and think of all the positives that would arise when he was chosen for the Olympic squad. Their frequent and lengthy calls on Skype were peppered with their usual banter, all designed to raise Derek’s spirits and keep him motivated. Truth be told, he loved her, and not just as the mate she had been for nearly a year. However, he had no illusions as to his chances. Even though he didn’t know what sort of bloke would fit Jennifer’s bill when the time came, he doubted it was him.

  As he pounded the track at the end of long days at work, or pumped iron in the gym, or tuned his muscles with the arcane punishments his physio delighted in inflicting on him, it was thoughts of Jennifer that kept him going.

  Things were reaching a head in the training, the final selection for the prime squad was to be made within two weeks. Everyone was on edge and the book was wide open, full of amazing talent. Derek knew he had a good chance, although he worried about being up to it psychologically. But then again, he knew everyone else felt the same. The pressure was huge, and while there would be no shame in not being picked, he would be gutted if he weren’t.

  It was with these thoughts running through his mind that he made his way home. A short walk to Stratford Station and the Central line, a change at Oxford Circus to the Bakerloo line followed by a brisk ten-minute walk from Edgware Road.

  In older parts of the Underground, like the Central line, he found the limited space claustrophobic. At six foot two, his broad, muscular frame seemed too large for the curved, low-ceilinged tunnels that weaved through the earth under the heart of London as he made his way from one platform to another. Claustrophobic too because there were always so many people, all in a hurry, all tired after long days at work, all lost in their smartphones, earbuds and whatever worlds they inhabited inside their heads.

  It was almost impossible to hurry when the tunnels were crowded, or to dawdle. You had to go with the flow as the human droplets streamed along the pipes and burst out onto the platforms, spreading in either direction from the entrances but held back by an invisible barrier from spilling over the edge onto the electrified track — very few stations in the system had platform screen doors. On the older, narrower platforms, like those in Oxford Circus, it was a miracle how seldom people fell, given the crowds. People were wary, generally careful, resorting to jostling only once a train had arrived at the platform and its doors were open.

  Derek considered the entire system antiquated and dangerous. The electrified track terrified him and whenever he could, he hung back from the platform edge. It would be one thing to fall onto the tracks if the power were from overhead lines, but there was no space for such luxuries, the trains only just fitting as the ancient tunnels sleeved around them. By necessity, the power was in the third rail, and if you touched that, you were dead.

  Tonight, even though it was after eight o’clock, the Tube was crowded and the platform packed. An earlier breakdown had blackened the mood of the jaded commuters and everyone wanted to get on to the increasingly infrequent trains.

  Every train arrival was preceded by a build-up of air pressure and a rising rumble of wheels as the train pushed a column of air ahead of it. Like a pounding migraine, the sensory overload would grow and grow until the front carriage burst from the tunnel’s mouth at what seemed to be recklessly high speed. Derek would try to position himself where the front end of the train would stop, coming to a halt as it drew alongside him. Tonight he’d failed. Tonight, owing to the flow of the crowd, he’d had no choice but to turn the other way as he emerged onto the platform, soon finding himself near the point where the train would blast from the darkness.

  He was two people back from the front of the crowd as the first increase in pressure from the next arriving train was felt and the roar commenced. The rattling made it sound as if the train were bouncing of
f the tunnel walls as it pounded towards the station. The noise rose to a crescendo and the crowd tensed as one, involuntarily moving forward a fraction, preparing for the squeeze into the carriages. When the train burst from the tunnel, Derek sensed a movement behind him, as if someone had tripped. He half-turned his head and as he did, he felt a prod in his side from something firm and unyielding, something propelling him towards the platform edge. The sudden movement shifted the rucksack on his back, pulling him onwards, and he stumbled. He took a short step to steady himself, but it wasn’t enough; he needed another. When he took it, he found himself treading on thin air. In horror, he dipped forward, falling straight into the path of the oncoming train.

  Chapter Four

  Thursday, 11 March 2015

  Jennifer Cotton reached out of the water to tap the end of the twenty-metre heated pool and glanced up at Alicia, her personal trainer.

  “Dieci secondi, Jenni! Dieci secondi!” yelled Alicia as she scrutinised her stopwatch, her Italian laced with her soft Umbrian Cs, her face beaming encouragement. “You were ten seconds faster. That’s brilliant; you’re improving every day. At this rate it won’t be long before you’re getting back to the times you were logging before last August.”

  She bent down towards the full-time client who had become a good friend.

  “’igh five, cara! ’igh five!” she squealed in English.

  “It felt good, Ali, really good,” replied Jennifer in Italian as their palms connected, her refined Milanese accent in marked contrast to Alicia’s strong dialect. She sprung out of the pool and grabbed a towel to brush the surplus water from her arms and legs before putting on her robe. She felt energised by the swim and thrilled with the time. After months of slow recovery, she was at last feeling she had turned a corner, that she was on the way to regaining her full health and strength.