‘Did you do that job in Dubai?’ Steve asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘I heard everything went tits up?’

‘Yeah.’

A car rounded the corner and they both instinctively checked their watches. It glided past. Wrong car. ‘It’s not them,’ Steve said, unnecessarily.

On the plus side, they had a long driveway that curved away from the gate so that you couldn’t see the house from the road. And the driveway was bordered by a lot of bushes. No security lights, no motion-sensor lights. Darkness was the friend of covert ops. Not today, they were doing this in daylight. Neither broad nor bright, the fag end of the afternoon. The dimming of the day.

Another car came round the corner, the right one this time. ‘Here comes the kid,’ Steve said softly. She was five years old, straight black hair, big brown eyes. She had no idea what was about to happen to her. The Paki kid, Steve called her.

‘Egyptian. Half,’ he corrected Steve. ‘She’s called Jennifer.’

‘I’m not racist.’

But.

The snow was still fluttering down, sticking to the windscreen for a second before melting. He had a sudden, unexpected memory of his sister coming into the house, laughing and shaking blossom off her clothes, out of her hair. He thought of the town they were brought up in as a place devoid of trees and yet here she was in his memory like a bride, a shower of petals like pink thumbprints on the dark veil of her hair.

The car pulled into the driveway and disappeared from view. He turned to look at Steve. ‘Ready?’

‘Lock and load,’ Steve said, starting the engine.

‘Remember, don’t hurt the nanny.’

‘Unless I have to.’

Wednesday

‘Watch out, the dragon’s about.’

‘Where?’

‘There. Just passing Greggs.’ Grant pointed at Tracy Waterhouse’s image on one of the monitors. The air in the security control room was always stale. Outside, it was beautiful May weather but in here the atmosphere was like that of a submarine that had been under too long. They were coming up to lunchtime, the busiest time of the day for shoplifters. The police were in and out all day, every day. A pair of them out there now, all tooled up, bulky waist-belts, knife-proof vests, short-sleeved shirts, ‘escorting’ a woman out of Peacocks, her bags stuffed with clothes she hadn’t paid for. Leslie got sleepy from peering at the monitors. Sometimes she turned a blind eye. Not everyone was, strictly speaking, a criminal. ‘What a week,’ Grant said, making a gurning face. ‘School half-term and a bank holiday. We’ll be going over the top. It’ll be carnage.’

Grant was chewing Nicorette as if his life depended on it. He had a stain of something on his tie. Leslie considered telling him about the stain. Decided not to. It looked like blood but it seemed more likely that it was ketchup. He had such bad acne that he looked radioactive. Leslie was pretty and petite and had a degree in chemical engineering from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and working in security in the Merrion Centre in Leeds was a short, not entirely unpleasurable dogleg in her life’s journey. She was on what her family called her ‘World Tour’. She’d done Athens, Rome, Florence, Nice, Paris. Not quite the world. She’d stopped off in Leeds to visit relatives, decided to stay for the summer after she hooked up with a philosophy post-grad called Dominic who worked in a bar. She had met his parents, been to their house for a meal. Dominic’s mother heated up an individual ‘Vegetarian Lasagne’ from Sainsbury’s for her while the rest of them ate chicken. His mother was defensive, worried that Leslie would carry her son off to a faraway continent and all her grandchildren would have accents and be vegetarians. Leslie wanted to reassure her, say, It’s only a holiday romance, but that probably wouldn’t go down well either.

‘Leslie with an “ie”,’ she had to tell everyone in England because they spelt it with a ‘y’. ‘Really?’ Dominic’s mother said, as if Leslie was herself a spelling mistake. Leslie tried to imagine taking Dominic home to her own family, introducing him to her parents, how unimpressed they’d be. She missed home, the Mason and Risch piano in the corner, her brother, Lloyd, her old golden retriever, Holly, and her cat, Mitten. Not necessarily in that order. Her family took a cottage on Lake Huron in the summer. She couldn’t even begin to explain this other life to Grant. Not that she would want to. Grant stared at her all the time when he thought she wasn’t looking. He was desperate to have sex with her. It was kind of funny really. She would rather stick knives in her eyes.

‘She’s passing Workout World,’ Grant said.

‘Tracy’s OK,’ Leslie said.

‘She’s a Nazi.’

‘No she’s not.’ Leslie had her eye on a group of hoodies lurching past Rayners’ Opticians. One of them was wearing some kind of Halloween fright mask. He leered at an old woman who flinched at the sight of him. ‘We always prosecute,’ Leslie murmured, as if it was a private joke.

‘Ey up,’ Grant said. ‘Tracy’s going into Thornton’s. Must need her daily rations topping up.’

Leslie liked Tracy, you knew where you were with her. No bullshit.

‘She’s a right fat pig,’ Grant said.

‘She’s not fat, just big.’

‘Yeah, that’s what they all say.’

Leslie was small and delicate. A cracking bird if ever there was one, in Grant’s opinion. Special. Not like some of the slags you got round here. ‘Sure you don’t want to go for a drink after work?’ he asked, ever hopeful. ‘Cocktail bar in town. Sophisticated place for a sophisticated laydee.’

‘Ey up,’ Leslie said. ‘There’s some dodgy kids going into City Cyber.’

Tracy Waterhouse came out of Thornton’s, stuffing her forage into the big, ugly shoulder bag that she wore strapped, like a bandolier, across her substantial chest. Viennese truffles, her midweek treat. Pathetic really. Other people went to the cinema on an evening, to restaurants, pubs and clubs, visited friends, had sex, but Tracy was looking forward to curling up on her sofa with Britain’s Got Talent and a bag of Thornton’s Viennese truffles. And a chicken bhuna that she was going to pick up on the way home and wash down with one or two cans of Beck’s. Or three or four, even though it was a Wednesday. A school night. More than forty years since Tracy left school. When had she last eaten a meal with someone in a restaurant? That bloke from the dating agency, a couple of years ago, in Dino’s in Bishopsgate? She could remember what she’d eaten – garlic bread, spaghetti and meatballs, followed by a crème caramel – yet she couldn’t recall the bloke’s name. ‘You’re a big girl,’ he said when she met him for a drink beforehand in Whitelock’s.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Want to make something of it?’ Downhill from there on really.

She ducked into Superdrug to pick up some Advil for the Beck’s headache she would wake up with tomorrow. The girl behind the till didn’t even look at her. Service with a scowl. Very easy to steal from Superdrug, lots of handy little things to slip into a bag or a pocket – lipsticks, toothpaste, shampoo, Tampax – you could hardly blame people for thieving, it was as if you were inviting them. Tracy glanced around at the security cameras. She knew there was a blind spot right on Nailcare. You could have taken everything you needed for a year’s worth of manicures and no one would be any the wiser. She placed a protective hand on her bag. It contained two envelopes stuffed with twenties – five thousand pounds in all – that she’d just removed from her account at the Yorkshire Bank. She would like to see someone trying to snatch it from her – she was looking forward to beating them to a pulp with her bare hands. No point in having weight, Tracy reasoned, if you weren’t prepared to throw it around.