‘She didn’t happen to be a vicar’s wife too, by any chance?’

‘Excuse me?’

He sighed. ‘Did she see any documents? Service record, receipt? Did this kindly grandmother invite her into her house for tea and biscuits while they did the deal or did your friend buy it off the side of the road?’

‘I don’t know about the documents, but I do know that the woman lived on the other side of London so she offered to bring the car to Lydia to save her the journey.’

‘How kind of her.’ His intonation suggested she had been anything but kind and he underlined it by saying, ‘She must have thought it was her birthday and Christmas all rolled into one.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Your friend was sold a cut’n’shut, Annie. A car welded together out of two wrecks. The front half of one car and the back half of another.’

She shook her head. ‘That can’t be right. She’d bought it new-’

‘The classic “one careful lady owner”.’ He shook his head. ‘Your sweet little old lady sold your friend a deathtrap, Annie. If that abomination had come apart while you were driving at any speed…’

He left the outcome to her imagination.

Her imagination, in full working order, duly obliged with a rerun of the carefree way she’d driven down the motorway, relishing her freedom as she’d buzzed along in the fast lane, overtaking slower moving traffic.

All it would have taken at that speed would have been a small piece of debris, a bit of a bump and she could have ended up in the path of one of the lorries thundering west…

And if it hadn’t been her, it would, sooner or later, have been Lydia.

‘Xandra hadn’t seen one before but, when she spotted the welding, she asked me to take a look.’

So that was how he’d got his hands dirty.

‘You do understand what this means? It’ll have to be crushed. I can’t be responsible for letting it back on the road.’