I didn’t sleep much. I was so cold. No position was comfortable; every part of me ached. When I saw the light behind the curtains I realised I must have slept a little, but I didn’t remember it.

I sobbed, quietly, for the person I’d become. I’d lost the will to fight. I wanted to give in now, I wanted it all to be over with. I was covered in shame.

And now, as if things weren’t dreadful enough, all I could think about was Naomi.

‘Naomi?’ I’d said.

‘She was a job. A source. She was married to someone we were after. I recruited her – sweet-talked her into working with us. She was going to feed us information so we could bring him down.’

He looked down at his knuckles, the bruising on them, flexed his fingers and smiled. ‘She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I was supposed to be working on her, but instead I fucked her and fell in love with her. They didn’t know, they thought I was just doing what I was being paid to do, but after the first time I couldn’t control it. I was going to leave the job, I was going to buy her a house, miles away, somewhere she’d be safe from that shit of a husband.’

‘What happened?’ I whispered.

He looked at me as though he’d forgotten I was there. Flexed his fingers back into a fist, looking at the skin around his knuckles turning white. ‘She was screwing me over as well as screwing me. All the time she was giving me intelligence about what he was up to, he was busy telling her what to say.’

He leaned his head back against the wall with a heavy sigh, then banged it back against the brickwork. And again. ‘I can’t believe I was that fucking stupid. I fell for everything she said.’

‘Maybe she was too afraid of her husband,’ I said.

‘Well, that was her mistake, wasn’t it?’

I considered this for a moment. ‘What happened to her?’

‘There was an armed robbery, just like we’d been waiting for, except we were waiting for them on the wrong side of town. We were all sitting there parked up like idiots, while another jeweller lost a quarter of a million pounds’ worth of stock and a shop assistant got her skull opened up with a baseball bat. Just when I was wondering what the fuck had gone wrong, I got a text from Naomi asking to meet me. I went to the usual place, opened her car door, and there inside was her old man. He was having a good old laugh about it. I’d served my purpose, he said. They’d both completely fucked me over.’

He brought his knees up and rested his bruised hands on them, loosely, all the tension gone.

‘A week later I had a phone call from her. She was in tears, told me all this shit about him putting her under pressure, how she was scared, wanting to know if I meant what I’d said about getting her away from him. I told her to pack her bags and meet me in the usual place.’

‘You helped her escape?’

He laughed. ‘No. I cut her throat and left her in a ditch. Nobody reported her missing. Nobody even looked for her.’

He stood up, stretched as though he’d just told me a bedtime story, opened the door and left me behind, turning the light off and plunging the room into darkness.