‘Jimmy Rafferty, age twenty-three. Howard Iley’s nephew. Apparently Howard lent him the car six months ago so he could go to job interviews.’

‘He lent him the car?’ says Vos.

‘Jimmy’s just come out of prison,’ Seagram says. ‘Four years for aggravated assault. Apparently he beat some kid half to death with a wooden paling as he was walking home through Scotswood Park. Claimed the kid had been “disrespectful” to his girlfriend at the time.’

‘Christ almighty. Just the sort of person you want driving your wedding car.’

‘What’s his connection to Okan Gul?’ Ptolemy asks.

‘Good question,’ Seagram says.

‘Huggins and Fallow are at the house now?’ says Vos.

‘Yes, boss,’ says Seagram. ‘That’s their car there.’

Seagram brings her own car to a shuddering stop in the middle of the road, and she, Vos and Ptolemy jump out. Fifty yards away, armed officers from the Rapid Response Unit have already battered down the door of the ground-floor, two-bedroomed flat that Jimmy Rafferty shares with his mother, Barbara, on the Meadow Well Estate in North Shields. By the time they reach the gate, the flat has already been cleared.

‘Rafferty’s not there,’ says Huggins, emerging from the front door. ‘His mother is, for what it’s worth.’

‘That’s him?’ Vos says, staring at a mug shot of a young man with short brown hair parted sharply from the left and a jagged S-shaped scar running from the base of his neck up along his jawline to his left ear.

‘Yeah,’ says Huggins. ‘That’s him.’

Barbara Rafferty is a breathtakingly ordinary-looking woman of forty-eight, with the same forgettable face as her brother, Howard Iley, and the same lank brown hair as her son Jimmy, except hers is worn to shoulder length. Her features are slack and her eyes are dead. She is sitting in an armchair in the front room, still staring at a fifty-inch plasma screen TV, which until a few moments ago had been showing Cash in the Attic.

‘Where’s Jimmy, Mrs Rafferty?’ Vos says.

‘I don’t know.’ When she speaks, it’s in a low, dreamy monotone.

‘Come on, Barbara, I don’t have time for this.’

‘He’s gone.’

‘Gone where?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘Wednesday.’

‘And he didn’t say where he was going?’

‘Jimmy is very . . . He keeps himself to himself.’

‘He’s very what, Barbara?’ Seagram says.

She taps her temple with a stubby finger. ‘Up there.’

‘Mad? Schizo? What, Barbara?’

Jimmy Rafferty’s mother snaps briefly out of her dreamlike state. ‘Intelligent,’ she says. ‘He’s a very intelligent boy.’

Vos looks around the flat. The furniture is functional but the room is utterly lifeless. There are no pictures on the wall, no indication of any personality at all. Barbara herself looks like a faded painting. There is something about this whole setting that gives him the creeps.

‘Sir.’

Ptolemy is gesturing to him from the doorway. He follows her into the bathroom, where Fallow is staring at the mirrored medicine cupboard above the sink. Its shelves are packed with bottles of pills, mostly prescription antidepressants.

‘That explains a lot,’ Vos says.

‘He’s cleared out,’ Fallow says, returning from Jimmy Rafferty’s bedroom. ‘All that’s left in his cupboards are a couple of pairs of socks.’

Vos is thinking this is starting to look like déjà vu.

FIFTEEN

There are six beds in ward 26A of Newcastle General Hospital. The one occupied by Delon Wombwell is positioned between an elderly man crazed by a bladder infection and another man in his thirties, with pancreatitis, who does nothing but lie on his front all day moaning with pain. Delon is trapped, unable to move due to the fact that his shattered right leg has been bolted to a metal frame, which is in turn suspended from an intricate gantry arrangement above his bed. To take his mind off his predicament, he listens to Slipknot and Metallica on his iPod and stares blankly at the subtitled daytime shows on the flatscreen TV on the wall at the end of the ward.

The hours blend into one on ward 26A, delineated only by mealtimes and bed baths. But Delon, numbed by pain medication, lost track of time long ago. When Severin and Ptolemy arrive shortly after lunch, he is asleep – but only because his body clock still works independently of his brain.

‘Wakey-wakey,’ Severin says, tickling Delon’s bare foot with his fingernail while Ptolemy draws the privacy curtain around the bed.

Delon stirs and his eyelids flicker. ‘Fuggov, Sammy,’ he says dreamily. Then his eyes snap open and terror freezes his features. He knows all about Sam Severin by now. Knows he is polis; knows what happens to people who talk to the polis. ‘Sammy?’ He tries to shift backwards but succeeds only in clanging the back of his skull against the iron rungs of the bedstead.

And now he emits a tiny yelp of fear and pain as Severin grabs his big toe between finger and thumb and begins to twist it.

‘DC Ptolemy and I don’t have long, Delon,’ Severin says calmly. ‘That’s why we’ve come to see you instead of Philliskirk – or Mr Tiernan for that matter.’

Half-formed thoughts smash against each other in the void behind Delon’s eyes. ‘What do you want, Sammy?’

‘I want you to tell me about a 1986 Jaguar XJ6.’

‘Wha—?’

‘It was stolen last week. I want to know where from.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

‘Of course you know, Delon. You were the designated driver for all of Tiernan’s crews.’

‘I don’t remember,’ Delon says.

‘Delon,’ says Ptolemy in her sweetest voice. ‘Do you know what will happen when Mr Tiernan goes to court? DC Severin here will be called to give evidence, and the first question they will ask him is, “Who tipped you off about Mr Tiernan’s operation?” Do you know what he will say?’

‘I’ll say it was you, you fucking halfwit,’ Severin says, giving Delon’s toe another painful tweak. ‘And Mr Tiernan will be sitting in the court when I say it – and he’ll be looking at you, Delon. He’ll be looking at you and working out just how soon he’ll be able to break every other bone in your body.’

‘But—’

‘No buts, Delon,’ says Ptolemy.

‘So think again, my man,’ says Severin. ‘Think nice and hard, and maybe I’ll say it was Philliskirk who was pissed and running his mouth off in that pub. Where was the XJ6 taken?’

Delon needs no more encouragement. He blurts out the location.

‘There now,’ says Severin. ‘That wasn’t so hard, was it? And now I’ll get the nurse to bring the bedpan, shall I?’

*   *   *

In a smart house in the sprawling Newcastle suburb of Heaton, Alex Vos is staring at the gently smoking neck of a glass bong being held under his nose by his best friend, Chris.

‘Come on you fucking dweeb,’ Chris says. ‘Get your lips around it.’

His words are met with a murmur of approval from the three other teenage boys sprawled in Chris’s attic bedroom.

‘I’ll be sick,’ Alex says.

‘So you’ll be sick,’ says one of the other boys. ‘So fuck?’

‘Everybody’s sick, Alexei,’ says Chris. ‘That’s why you’ve got to do it.’

‘That’s not terribly logical, C.’

‘Fuck logic, you tool! Who the fuck are you? Mr Spock?’

Another boy, who happens to have brought the weed to the party, makes a stoned lunge for the bong, but Chris flaps him away.

‘It’s Alex’s turn,’ he says firmly. Then he pushes the bong even closer to Alex’s face. ‘It’s your turn,’ he says.

With a deep sigh of resignation, Alex takes the bong in both hands and brings it to his lips. He takes a hit of the tangy smoke and immediately begins coughing.

Chris grins, taking back the bong and patting his friend on the back. ‘You da man,’ he says. ‘Now let’s go out.’