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scrunch up their faces like that? It made not one jot of difference. You could squeeze up, anticipate as much as you wanted, but the result was the same), then the touch of the muzzle to the head, held there for just the tiniest of seconds, then the trigger pull and the discharge, the bullet entering the head, the brains being blown out and the physical reaction of the body.
    Pure fucking poetry, he thought.
    Over in a jiff, but implanted in his mind for leisurely replay, over and over again.
    So, having balanced Percy, Hawke simply did what he was supposed to do – killed him – then stood over the dead body and put another round into him.
    Hawke exhaled as he stood in the centre of the living room, pulled off the hood, one dead body either side of him; then he breathed in the reek of blood and cordite in the air as though he was sniffing a flower glade in spring.
    He glanced at his handiwork. Job well done, money well earned, he congratulated himself.
    Until he suddenly tensed up when he heard the noise.
    Henry walked through the open gates and up the fifty metre long driveway, the packed gravel scrunching underneath the soles of his shoes. The house ahead of him, illuminated by discreetly placed ground level lights, was a modernized executive detached property; from the rear Henry knew there were sweeping panoramic views of a wide curve of the River Wyre. He recalled there was even a small jetty where Percy kept a speedboat, though access to the river was dependent on tides.
    Three cars were parked on the wide turnaround at the front of the house. He recognized Percy’s Aston Martin with the personalized number plates, but not the black Porsche 911 or the brightly coloured Fiat 500. None of the cars seemed to be out of place, just the sort of array Henry would expect to see outside a wealthy person’s home in this neck of the woods.
    On the face of it, therefore, nothing unusual.
    Except for the open gates and the fact that a person who had made a desperate phone call was not now answering his phone.
    The instinct acquired over thirty years of being a cop gave Henry a bad feeling about it all. He paused at the back of the Aston Martin, glancing at the registered number, fleetingly thinking about the amount of money the car had cost, plus the number plate. Henry had gone to town with his Audi, but the cost of the Aston dwarfed what Henry had forked out. It took real wealth to run one of these beasts. But these were only passing thoughts, running parallel to everything else going on in his mind.
    He walked past the car, placing his hand on the sleek, low bonnet, feeling the heat from the engine, then alongside the Porsche. He flashed his torch beam across its glossy, but slightly ugly and squat, black bodywork. He registered the stick-on sign in the back window indicating the car was actually a rental. He touched the rear bonnet and it was cold, no heat from the rear-engine car.
    Then he went past the gaudy Fiat. In a very sexist thought, Henry saw it as a woman’s car, and when he saw the pink, dangling, fluffy pair of dice hanging from the rear view mirror, and the eyelashes on the headlights, his stereotype was only reinforced.
    He went up the steps to the front door, all frosted glass, which opened into a large vestibule. Henry pushed the door and found it to be open, another little, almost inconsequential factor to add to the growing list of inconsequential factors, which made his nostrils dilate and his senses click up a gear, his tiredness replaced by tension. The front gate open, the front door open, at this time of day.
    He swallowed drily, realizing how dehydrated he was from his long day, which had included a lot of coffee but no straight water or juice. And crap food.
    He stepped into the intricately tiled vestibule, ten feet to the next, inner door, beyond which was a wide entrance hall, stairs off to the right and access to the reception rooms, dining room and kitchen. He placed his hand on