Morrow wanted to fly through the windscreen and engulf him then, smother him with her body, swallow him. Instead she dropped her chin to her chest, hiding her face in case anyone saw her on the many cameras that were dotted around the yard, and stomped around to the passenger door. She opened it, the handle mechanism so much like a physical memory that she felt her hand cup her own younger trusting hand, felt the warmth from her smooth skin.

Heat billowed out from the cabin. Brian had the heater up full, just as he had the day at the bus stop. Later he’d told her it was so that she’d feel it when he wound the window down and asked her in, so she’d be tempted to come into the warm.

She dropped into the seat and slammed the door behind her. Raising a hand she flipped the sun shield down so that her wet eyes couldn’t be seen from outside, not by the cameras or passersby coming on shift or going out in cars.

Morrow looked out of the side window, searching for a phrase or a line or a thing to say, but there were no words for this. Her eyes skirted over the bonnets of the cars lined up with theirs, over to the shit-brick wall around the yard, and she began to trace a journey through the mortar to the building. Next to her, far away, she was aware of Brian sighing.

A wrist touching her wrist. For the first time since Gerald died she didn’t draw away from him, didn’t flinch at the touch. It was so warm in the car she’d hardly noticed the movement of his hand as it flattened against the back of her hand.

Hand against hand, his wrist slipped up until it was on top of hers, edge to edge. His pinkie moved a millimetre, stroking her pinkie, and then, quick as a landslide, their fingertips found each other, working through and over in the secret language of lovers, saying things there were no words for.

Morrow’s face was wet, her breath short, her eyes smarting bitterly, but she kept working her way across the wall, through the rough dips and dark valleys as she struggled for breath, remembering her place in the maze even when she shut her eyes to shed the shuddering veil of tears. She kept going until, quite suddenly, she found herself at the far wall with no further to go.

Out of the blue Brian said, ‘I got sacked.’

She looked at the hand wound tightly around hers. A fine hand. Tiny hairs. The fingers loosened on hers, the tips stroking her fingertips. ‘Haven’t been in since…’

She looked out of the window at the wall. People were moving outside, blurred uniforms, getting in cars, pulling out. ‘We in trouble? Financially?’

‘Might need to sell that house.’ His fingers were moving quickly over hers, anxious, nervous, waiting for the warmth to turn.

She turned to look and found him turned away, face to the window, fat tears dripping off his chin. ‘Oh, Brian. I hate that fucking house.’

Fingers through fingers, tight, tight and unmoving, Morrow raised Brian’s hand to her lips and there it stayed.

Her belly touching the steering wheel, Sadiqa looked up apologetically at Morrow and MacKechnie. ‘I’m fat…’ she said simply.

It didn’t look very safe. ‘Can’t you push the seat back a bit?’ asked McKechnie.

‘My legs are short,’ she said, looking around the cabin as if she might find something there to lengthen them.

Morrow leaned down to the open window. ‘Can you drive it though?’

Drawing her stomach in Sadiqa made a determined face, nodded at the wheel. ‘Yes. Yes, I can drive. I‘m not really confident about motorway driving though.’

‘Will you be OK?’

She looked at the dashboard, uncertain, as if she had been asked to fly a plane and decided, ‘Yes.’

‘Now, the officers are there already, you know where you’re going?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You get out, put the bag behind the emergency telephone, get back in and rejoin the motorway, OK?’

‘Then come back here?’

‘Then come back here.’

It was freezing in the Obs van. Gobby was crouching on a small foldaway stool by the back doors. There was no room for him on the bench; MacKechnie and Morrow were perched there, giving them the best vantage point to watch the boxy grey screens.

The motorway cameras were high up and the images angled, one of four grey lanes, crash barrier in the middle. It was a long stretch of straight road, good for reading the number plate on any car, and the camera was angled so that the drivers’ faces could be clearly seen, well lit by the street lights. They could go back over any one of them and still and print it. Great in court.

It was a main artery, a busy bit of road for the time of night. A steady parade of cars and vans and lorries came towards the camera, drove under it, front seat faces talking, silent, singing, picking noses or slack, hypnotised by the blandness of the road. Another boxy screen showed a lay-by with an emergency phone in the foreground. The image was still apart from passing lights licking the edge of the image. They had two other screens, both trained on junctions, in case the kidnappers got that far before they were intercepted.

‘Everybody where they should be?’ asked MacKechnie, not actually knowing where they should be.

‘Sorted, sir,’ said Morrow.

MacKechnie was delighted with her but it only highlighted how poorly he had thought of her before. He was imagining the glory before them, she felt, and points at which to siphon it off. His respectfulness made her uncomfortable. Morrow was born on the back foot and only ever felt easy as an underdog.

They sat in silence for ten tense minutes, watching the grey shapes shifting in front of them, their eyes flicking from screen to screen. She had ordered radio silence; if the kidnappers were at all professional they’d be listening to the police frequencies. She rang Harris on his mobile. He was where he was supposed to be and nothing had happened.

‘’Kay,’ she said. ‘Be ready.’

The bench was small and there wasn’t a lot of room to move. MacKechnie looked at her casually and it felt like a prelude to an awkward kiss. Morrow checked her watch – they were almost ten minutes late for the one hour deadline.

‘There!’ she said pointing to the four lane screen.

They could see Sadiqa trundling slowly towards them, saw another driver change lanes to avoid her. Then, on monitor two, a lorry hurried past and frightened her into slowing down even more. Unused to motorway driving, Sadiqa took the outside lane, drawing attention to herself by driving at the speed limit and verging slowly to the right every time she checked her rear mirror. She disappeared off camera for a moment, should have been pulling into the drop point.

On another monitor, in grainy black and white, reverse lights flashed on the emergency phone as Sadiqa backed up in the lay-by. MacKechnie breathed a curse, watching as she missed the emergency phone post by inches.

Sadiqa stopped, pulled on the handbrake so hard the car seemed to be taking a deep breath. The door opened and she got out. Stagily, she looked at the cars passing, standing at the open door, and waddled around to the boot, opened it and pulled out the black holdall. Sadiqa then dropped it heavily onto the road, tried to pick it up again and seemed defeated. She bent down, inelegantly bending her little legs out to the side, taking one of the handles, dragging it over behind the emergency post. She stood up, looking at it. She seemed to be talking to the bag. She turned and went back to the car, opened the door, sat down and shut the door. The engine restarted,

‘I can hardly bear to watch her pull back out,’ said MacKechnie to no one.

A couple of stalls, and she finally made it back onto the road, reappearing in a further screen a good bit further down the road. But they weren’t watching Sadiqa. They were watching the bag.