Alex and Chloe sat outside the home of Gavin Jones. They had knocked on the door but there had been no answer, so they returned to the car to wait. The journey there had passed with the bare minimum of communication exchanged along the way, the attention of both women focused on the case and neither wishing to return to what had happened at the end of the meeting earlier.

‘The man who called in this morning,’ Chloe said. ‘Richard Peters. When are we expecting him at the station?’

‘This afternoon. He claims the man might be his brother, but the fire has probably ruined our chances of a DNA test. We’ll have to seek out his dental records. Peters says he hasn’t spoken to his brother for a couple of years, but he seemed pretty sure it’s him in the footage taken from the café.’

There followed a silence that was uncomfortable for them both.

‘Look,’ Alex said, finally breaking it. ‘I’m sorry about this morning. I shouldn’t have reacted like that.’

‘It’s okay,’ Chloe said, still keeping watch out of the passenger window in case a returning Gavin Jones should make an appearance.

‘Put it down to getting old.’

‘I never guessed an innocent Victoria sponge might cause so much offence.’

She turned to Alex with a smile, but it wasn’t returned. Alex’s eyes remained focused on the street ahead, concentration etched in the lines of her furrowed brow.

‘You can talk to me if you want,’ Chloe said.

Alex turned sharply. ‘Talk about what?’

‘Saturday night. The car. It wasn’t an accident, was it?’

She turned back to face the windscreen. ‘Someone cut my brake fluid line.’ There was no point in keeping it from her; if Chloe suspected something untoward, then she wouldn’t stop pestering Alex until she had the truth. Alex knew she should be grateful for the concern, but in her current frame of mind it was difficult to find it anything but annoying.

‘Have you reported it? Who would do that?’

‘I don’t know. Well, I think I might know, but I can’t prove anything so what’s the point.’ She took the keys from the engine and nodded at the windscreen. ‘Break time’s over.’

Gavin Jones was walking along the front of the terrace a hundred metres or so along the street, the hood of his jacket pulled up over his head, oblivious to the greeting that would be awaiting him at his front door.

‘Hold that thought,’ Chloe said, getting from the car. ‘You’re not escaping this conversation that easily.’

They approached Jones as he was searching for his front door key. He had his head lowered, cursing beneath his breath as he scrabbled in his pockets.

‘Gavin Jones?’

‘Yep.’

Alex pulled her ID from her pocket. ‘Detective Inspector Alex King. This is DC Chloe Lane.’

‘News travels fast,’ Gavin said as he unlocked the front door and left it open behind him for the women to follow him inside.

Alex glanced at Chloe. It was hardly the reception they had been expecting. ‘Meaning?’

Gavin unzipped his jacket and threw it over the end of the stairs. ‘Well I assume you’re here about this,’ he said, pointing to his head. He turned to the side, giving them a view of the dried blood that matted his thinning hair.

‘What happened?’

‘Got jumped, didn’t I? How did you know about it anyway?’

‘We didn’t,’ Alex told him. ‘Have you reported it?’

Gavin shook his head and went through to the living room. They followed him in, having to pick their path between furniture stacked in piles and cardboard boxes overflowing with clutter. ‘Only just moved in,’ he said, by way of explanation of the chaos. ‘No, I haven’t reported it. We don’t grass round here.’ He gestured at the sofa, but neither Chloe nor Alex accepted the offer of a seat. ‘I’ll deal with it in my own way.’

‘Where were you on Saturday evening between the hours of eight and nine o’clock?’ asked Alex.

Gavin narrowed his eyes and moved his focus from Alex to Chloe. ‘Why?’

‘Just answer the question, please.’

He folded his arms across his chest. ‘You already know I’ve done time, right? Jesus Christ, give me a break. You lot just can’t wait to trip people up, can you?’

‘There’s an easy answer to that,’ Alex quipped. ‘Don’t break the law.’

Gavin smiled, yet there was nothing pleasant in the expression. ‘I was in Wetherspoons in Ponty on Saturday night. Got there about seven o’clock, left about ten thirty. There should be a few witnesses – the place was packed.’

‘I’m guessing you’ve heard about the petrol attack on a teenage boy?’ Chloe said. ‘Happened not far from here.’

Gavin’s arms dropped to his sides. ‘Hang on a sec. You’re here about that? I don’t know nothing about that.’

‘A petrol can was found in a nearby garden,’ Alex told him. ‘Can you explain how your fingerprints came to be on it?’

For a moment, the colour drained from Gavin’s face. ‘Actually, yes,’ he said, heading to the kitchen door. Alex thought for a moment he was going to attempt to make a run for it, but instead he turned back to them. ‘You coming, or what?’

They followed him through to the kitchen, where yet more boxes were waiting to be unpacked. He unlocked the back door. The outside space was minimal, just a small square of grass that had been left to grow wild, but it backed onto a garage that separated the house from a lane at the back of the row of terraces.

‘Got broken into last week,’ he said, shoving the door open. ‘Look.’

He pushed his way through the junk that filled the garage and went to the main door, gesturing to its broken lock. It looked as though it had been forced open with a bolt cutter. ‘Bastards took a load of stuff,’ he said. ‘Half my tools … God knows what else. They must have had the petrol can along with it.’

‘You reported this?’ Chloe asked, knowing what the answer would be.

‘What’s the fucking point? You lot don’t do nothing anyway.’

‘So we’ve just got your word for it,’ Alex said flatly.

‘Listen,’ Gavin said, turning sharply and colliding with a box of paperwork, which fell to the ground and spilled envelopes across the garage floor. ‘I don’t care what you want to believe, I told you where I was on Saturday night. I didn’t attack that kid – what the hell would I do that for?’ He stopped to catch his breath. ‘Look, I moved into this place for a fresh start, right? I don’t want no more trouble. I didn’t hurt that kid. I’ve never even seen the lad, all right? It’s not me that goes around attacking people. You want to talk to anyone about that, you should be talking to those fucking Hassan brothers.’

‘The Hassans?’ Alex glanced at Chloe. ‘Why would we want to talk to them?’

Gavin jabbed at his head with an index finger. ‘They attacked me last night. Knocked me out cold, right.’

‘You saw them?’

He rolled his eyes, exasperated. ‘I didn’t need to see them.’

‘So you don’t know it was them, then.’

‘Jesus fucking Christ. I didn’t need to see them. We had a bust-up last week. It was nothing. One of them thought I said something racist, so the other one just went for me. And I didn’t say nothing racist, by the way, they were just playing the Paki card.’ He paused for breath again, the colour having risen in his cheeks. ‘I know it was them, okay.’

The Hassan brothers’ names kept recurring, but there was as yet no apparent reason for it. Alex had asked Jake Sullivan to research the family; by the time they returned to the station later something useful would hopefully have arisen.

‘You need to come to the station to make a statement,’ she told Gavin. ‘Unless,’ she added, as he began his objection, ‘you’d prefer to do things the more complicated way.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means we’ve got your prints on a petrol can and at the moment only your word that you were somewhere else. Meaning we can arrest you and do things that way.’

Admitting defeat, Gavin sighed and led them back to the house. Alex wanted out of there, and the sooner the better. It was time she met both older Hassan brothers for herself.