Grace grinned. Branson was closer to the mark than he realized.

Tom Bryce was seated in a long, narrow ground-floor boardroom in a small office block on an industrial estate close to Heathrow airport – so close that the jumbo he could see out of the window seemed to be on a flight path that would land it slap in the middle of this room. It screamed overhead, flaps lowered, wheels down, passing over the roof like the shadow of a giant fish, with what seemed like inches to spare.

The room was tacky. It had brown suede walls decorated with framed posters of horror and science fiction films, a twenty-seater bronze meeting table that looked as if it had been looted from a Tibetan temple, and extremely uncomfortable high-back chairs, no doubt designed to keep meetings short.

His customer, Ron Spacks, was a former rock promoter, wheezy and nudging sixty. Sporting a toupee that looked as if it hadn’t been put on properly and teeth that were far too immaculate for his age and his substance-ravaged face, Spacks sat opposite Tom, dressed in a very faded and threadbare Grateful Dead T-shirt, jeans and sandals, sifting through the BryceRight catalogue and muttering ‘Yeah’ to himself every few moments when he alighted on something of interest.

Tom sipped his beaker of coffee and waited patiently. Gravytrain Distributing was one of the largest DVD distributors in the country. The gold medallion around Ron Spacks’s neck, the rhinestone rings on his fingers, the black Ferrari in the lot outside, all testified to his success.

Spacks, as he had proudly told Tom on previous occasions, had started with a stall off the Portobello Road, flogging second-hand DVDs when no one even knew what DVDs were. Tom had little doubt that much of the man’s empire had been founded on pirated merchandise, but he was in no state to make moral choices about his customers. In the past Spacks had ordered large, and always paid on the nail.

‘Yeah,’ Spacks said. ‘You see, Tom, my customers don’t want nothing fancy. What you got new this year?’

‘CD beer mats – on page forty-two, I think. You can have them overprinted.’

Spacks turned to the page. ‘Yeah,’ he said, in a tone of voice that said quite the reverse. ‘Yeah,’ he repeated. ‘So how much would a hundred thousand cost – get ’em down to a quid, could yer?’

Tom felt lost without his computer. It was at the office, once more being resuscitated by Chris Webb. All the costings for his products were on that machine, and without them he daren’t start discounting – particularly on a potential order of this size.

‘I’ll have to get back to you. I can email you later today.’

‘Have to be a quid max, yeah,’ Spacks said, and popped open a can of Coke. ‘I’m really looking for close to seventy pence.’

Tom’s mobile rang. Glancing at the display he saw it was Kellie and pressed to terminate the call.

Seventy pence was no go, he knew that for sure – they cost him more than that – but he decided not to tell Spacks for the moment. ‘I think that would be tight,’ he said tactfully.

‘Yeah. Tell you something else I’m interested in. About twenty-five gold Rolexes, yeah.’

‘Gold Rolexes? Real ones?’

‘Don’t want no copy rubbish – the real deal. Want ’em etched with a logo. Can you get me a price? Need ’ em quickly. Middle of next week.’

Tom tried not to show his surprise, particularly after Spacks had told him he didn’t want anything fancy. Now he was talking about watches that cost thousands of pounds each. Then the phone rang again.

It was Kellie once more, and this worried Tom; ordinarily she would just have left a message. Maybe one of the kids was ill? ‘Mind if I answer?’ he said to Spacks. ‘My wife.’

‘She who must be obeyed must be answered. The Oyster – that’s the classic Rolex, innit?’

Tom, who knew about as much of the world of gold Rolexes as he did about chicken farming in the Andes, said, ‘Yep, definitely.’ Then with a nod to Spacks he picked up the phone and accepted the call. ‘Hi, honey.’

Kellie sounded strange and vulnerable. ‘Tom, I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ve had a phone call that’s spooked me.’

Standing up and moving away from Spacks, Tom said, ‘Darling, what happened? Tell me.’

‘I went out to have my nails done. About five minutes after I got back in the phone rang. A man asked if I was Mrs Bryce, and I – I said yes. Then he asked was I Mrs Kellie Bryce, and I said yes. Then he hung up.’

Outside it was a damp, rain-flecked day and the air conditioning made this room unnecessarily cold. But suddenly something far colder squirmed deep inside him, cupping hard, icy fingers around his soul.

The threat last night? The threat in those seconds before his computer memory had been erased. Was this call connected with that email he had received?

If you inform the police about what you saw or if you ever try to access this site again, what is about to happen to your computer will happen to your wife, Kellie, to your son, Max, and to your daughter, Jessica.

Except of course he had not informed the police or tried to access the site again. He tried to think through the possibilities. ‘Did you try and do a ring-back? One four seven one?’

‘Yes. It said number withheld.’

‘Where are you now, darling?’ he asked.

‘Home.’

He looked at his watch and saw his hand was shaking. It was just past midday. ‘Listen, it’s probably nothing, probably just a wrong number. I don’t know. Maybe someone checking an eBay delivery or something? There could be a ton of reasons,’ he said, trying to sound reassuring, but not doing a good job of convincing himself. In his mind all he could see was the beautiful long-haired young woman in the room, being butchered by the man.

‘I’m just in a meeting. I’ll call you back as quickly as I can.’

‘I love you,’ she said.

Glancing at Spacks, who was thumbing through more pages of the catalogue, he said, ‘Me too. I’ll be five minutes, ten max.’

‘Wimmin!’ Spacks said sympathetically when he hung up.

Tom nodded.

‘Can’t win with wimmin.’

‘No,’ Tom agreed.

‘So. Rolex watches. I need a price for twenty-five men’s gold Rolex watches. With a small engraving on them. Delivery end of next week.’

Tom was so concerned about Kellie that the potential value of the request barely registered. ‘What kind of engraving?’

‘A microdot. Tiny.’

‘Leave it with me. I’ll get back to you. I’ll get you the best price.’

‘Yeah.’

Glenn Branson’s driving had always made Grace uneasy, but since Branson had taken his advanced police driving course, as part of his application to transfer to the National Crime Squad, it scared him witless. To make things worse, his colleague always had the car radio tuned to a rap station, with the volume loud enough to make Grace’s brain feel like it was inside a blender.

The APD course enabled drivers to take part in high-speed pursuits, so in order to show off his prowess, Branson had chosen the only route that took them along a stretch of road where it would be possible to have a really bad high-speed smash without trying too hard. It was a mile-and-a-half-long stretch of two-lane tarmac, which ran like a spine across the open Downland countryside that lay between the industrial estate where CID headquarters was and central Brighton.

It was like a racetrack. Grace could see the road for a mile ahead: the two gentle bends, the straight, the sharp right-hander at the end of it, and then half a mile on the sharp left-hander where there had last been a fatal smash less than a week ago. He eyed a lorry heading towards them and then looked at Branson, hoping he had noticed that they would probably hit the right-hander at about the same time. But Branson was concentrating on the fast, sweeping left-hander coming up.