‘Watch where you’re fucking going,’ bellowed the ginger lad.

Gwen hopped around them, still staring down the alley at Jack who was about to turn another corner. ‘Smoking can seriously damage your vocabulary,’ she told them before haring off down the alley.

She had dropped well behind now, fifty metres at least. It was obvious from the way Jack was running that he’d taken out his revolver, a curiously old-fashioned pistol that he seemed to prefer to anything modern. And it was also apparent that he was unable to take clear aim at the fleeing figure of Wildman. Too many early evening pedestrians were wandering these side streets. A group of girls from a private school, incongruous in their expensive blazers, formed a buzzing crowd outside a clothes shop. Two business men walked in parallel but were oblivious to each other in their separate mobile phone calls.

A couple of dusty construction workers laughed as they began to secure a makeshift door in the chipboard wall around a building site. Their appearance and manner told Gwen that it was the end of their shift. Their yellow hard hats were clipped to their belts and their fluorescent jackets were off their shoulders and hanging behind them from the waist. So they were unprepared for Wildman to barge straight at them. One he smacked with his shoulder, and the other caught a solid blow when Wildman swung the side of his briefcase into the man’s head. They stumbled aside, and Wildman pulled the door open again.

The workmen staggered back to their feet and cursed him with the fluency of long practice. The younger man, a crew-cut teenager with a cauliflower ear, had taken the blow from the briefcase. He was attempting to seize Wildman by grabbing onto his beige raincoat when Jack approached at full pelt and yelled at him to step aside.