Brad rubbed his sleeves over his eyes to clear the blood running down his face. He saw a thick oblong of light from beyond the open door, and knew he was alone down here.

He got up and rushed through the doorway into the wide stairway he’d come down. As he arrived and cast his gaze upwards, he saw the heavy door at the top swinging shut.

He was soon in the ground-level corridor. He stopped and wiped blood from his eyes again. His vision cleared enough to show him the bar women staring at him from an office dead ahead, both scared by what they had just witnessed. They were the only ones here: Seabury and Grafton’s wife must have already made the street.

Carla had a cordless phone in her hand. Brad leaned into the office and slapped it out of her grip.

‘No fucking cops,’ he yelled, then rushed for the exit.

The street was busy with cars and pedestrians and his hopes of catching Seabury and Liz Grafton fell away. He wiped his eyes again and scanned left and right, but they were gone. Lost in the crowd. People were giving him a wide berth, just as you’d expect of a guy with blood flowing down his face. Another reason to regret the Varsity jacket, because it had white arms, and the blood smeared on both sleeves almost glowed.

But it gave him an idea.

He concentrated on the bloated pavements. Left, in the direction of West Ham Station. Then right, towards Springfield Lane. If a guy dripping blood unnerved the crowds of shoppers keeping to themselves then so would a couple running frantically, blackened by dirt.

But the crowd wasn’t parted or scattered, as if avoiding the path of a rampaging tiger. Seabury and the woman had gone. He cleared away the blood from his eyes again, but more immediately trickled from the gashes above his eyebrows. He was lucky his eyes hadn’t popped like egg yolks when the woman, after cracking him with a tin of whatever she had found, leaped onto his back like a damn monkey and dug her expensive nails into his face. He scanned the street again. They were nowhere to be seen. But then he noticed something.

Everyone sauntered along without a care, eyes on the pavement or mobiles or shop windows. But Seabury and the woman were dirtied and running and oozing panic, and they would have caused a commotion in the crowd. But there were no pointing fingers or excited chatter.

They hadn’t made the street at all. Instinct told him where they had headed.

He turned around and rushed back into the bar. In the corridor, Carla was in the office doorway with her phone in her hand again, so he slapped it out of her grip for a second time as he rushed past. He swatted aside the black curtain. Four doors, three of them shut. Brad was reaching for the first handle when a gut feeling told him they would rather run than hide. They would want distance, not camouflage. So, he ignored the doors and ran to the curtain on the back wall, and tugged it down.

Here, a doorless doorway into a kitchen as narrow as the downstairs bar. Like the train carriage, it had a door at the far end which was open to expose 197 million square miles of hiding places beyond.

As he hurtled through the kitchen, he passed a table with a local newspaper lying next to a pair of hair straighteners. The screaming headline was enough for a two-second pause. Out back was a bare garden, with a gate in the back wall. He rushed through and found himself on a road. No sign of them left or right, and on the other side of the road was a chain-link fence.

The fence was too high to climb, so he focused on a pair of vehicles a hundred feet down the road. A big beast with curtains pulled in the cab so the driver could sleep. It provided the only cover, so Brad ran to it, and along the side, and stopped at the back. The rear doors were wide open to show thieves that there was nothing worth stealing. And that there was nowhere for a fleeing couple to hide. He bent and peered under the vehicle, just in case.

He cursed and wiped his forehead again.

With his phone in his hand and no joy at the prospect of calling Mick with the bad news, he walked down the short corridor between the truck and the fence. He killed the call after one ring. Because this wasn’t over yet.

As he walked along the fence, he spotted two concrete posts just two feet apart, like a doorless passageway. If they’d slipped through the gap, they were gone. Beyond the fence: muddy, thick scrubland for 160 feet and then woods.

He pulled his phone out again, but slotted it away almost instantly as he heard something: moving water. He slipped through the gap and, after thirty feet, he was standing before a river at the bottom of steep banks.

And a rickety wooden beam bridge.

A bad sign. If they’d gone across, into the woods, they were gone for good. He cursed and reached into his pocket.

But the call could wait ten seconds. If he told Mick about the bridge, Mick would ask if he’d checked under it. So, he would do that first and then he was out of here.