Slow Burn

Book 17: The Spider Shepherd Thrillers

by Stephen Leather

Genres: Action & Adventure; Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

The fight against terrorism never ends, and Dan "Spider" Shepherd is in the front line of Britain's defence against the extremists.

When an ISIS bombmaker arrives at Heathrow Airport asking for asylum in exchange for revealing details of his paymasters, Shepherd is given the case. The bombmaker specialises in drone strikes, and homegrown jihadists that he has trained are already back in the UK, planning their attacks. But before he'll agree to talk, the terrorist insists that his wife and son are rescued from a refugee camp in Turkey. Shepherd is tasked with bringing the family back to London, but he soon discovers that dark forces are out to stop him. And if he fails, hundreds will die.

(P) 2020 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Release date: July 23, 2020

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 400

Sample

The eight helicopters – four twin-rotored Chinooks and four Black Hawks – flew fast and low across the Syrian desert. They were fired on twice by militant groups on the ground, but each time retribution was swift and sure from the MQ-9 Reaper drones that were providing armed support from high overhead.

The flight from a US military base in Erbil, Iraq, to the Syrian village of Barisha took just over seventy minutes. On board the helicopters were elite special forces soldiers from Delta Force and the 75th Ranger Regiment, trained to kill and eager to put that training to good use.

Their target: a walled compound some three hundred metres outside Barisha, just three miles south of the Turkish border.

Their mission: to capture or kill the feared ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a man responsible for thousands of deaths in the region. The raid had been codenamed Operation Kayla Mueller, in honour of an American aid worker who was taken captive in Syria and kept as a sex slave by al-Baghdadi before she was finally killed in 2015. Al-Baghdadi was a nasty piece of work and there wasn’t a man on the mission who wouldn’t have killed him with their bare hands, given the chance.

On the other side of the world, President Donald Trump and his army chiefs had gathered in the Situation Room below the West Wing of the White House to watch events unfold in real time via satellite links.

As the assault force approached the compound, the helicopters came under fire again, this time from two houses occupied by militants. The Black Hawks retaliated, firing air-to-surface missiles that completely destroyed the buildings.

Once the ISIS strongholds had been neutralised, the helicopters landed and the troops piled out, taking with them military robots and specially trained dogs. They were wearing night vision goggles and carrying a range of weapons. Delta Force favoured AR-15 and AR-18 Armalite automatic rifles, and HK416 assault rifles, while the Rangers were equipped with MK 16 and MK 17 carbines.

They gave the occupants of the compound a chance to surrender, shouting instructions in Arabic to lay down their weapons and come out.

The soldiers had intelligence that the main entrance had been booby-trapped, so they used explosives to blow their way in through a side wall. They came under fire and retaliated, killing four men and a woman.

As the American soldiers poured into the compound, Baghdadi fled into a tunnel network under the main building, taking two of his young sons with him. The soldiers gave chase and cornered the ISIS leader in a dead end. When they sent in a dog and a robot, Baghdadi detonated the suicide vest he was wearing, blowing himself and his sons to bits and collapsing the tunnel.

The soldiers dug through the debris to get to Baghdadi’s remains so that they had a DNA sample, then they ran back to the helicopters, taking with them two prisoners and any intelligence information they could find, including mobile phones and USB flash drives. Less than two hours after arriving at the compound, the helicopters were in the air on the way back to Iraq.

As the helicopters headed east, F-15 jets blasted the compound with missiles, reducing it to rubble. Back in the White House, a jubilant president was already tweeting about the successful mission.

‘Why don’t we just fly it into a plane now, Sid? Plenty of British Airways planes coming and going. Let’s fucking do it. Strike while the iron’s hot.’

Siddhartha ‘Sid’ Qasim looked up from the drone in the back of his hatchback. ‘Mo, bruv, we’ve got a plan and we stick to that plan.’

Mo Harawi threw up his hands. ‘No offence, bruv. You’re the boss.’

‘Yeah, I’m the fucking boss,’ said Qasim. ‘This is just a test run, so that we can store the GPS coordinates in the drone’s memory. Then we can program another dozen drones with the same coordinates and that’s when we do it for real. You hear me?’

‘I hear you, bruv.’ The two bumped fists.

They had parked the car on Stanwell Moor, two miles to the west of the airport. The drone could be controlled at up to three miles away, so the airport was well within range.

The drone was about two feet across with four rotors and a camera underneath it. Qasim took it out of the car and placed it onto the ground. They couldn’t see the airport from where they were standing, but the drone’s camera would give them a perfect view once they launched it. Qasim picked up the controller. Like the drone it was gleaming white, with a tablet attached that would show the view from the camera and give him all the drone’s flight details, including GPS position, height and speed.

The UK had surprisingly lenient laws when it came to flying drones. Using a drone up to twenty kilograms in weight didn’t require a licence, though the drones weren’t allowed to fly above four hundred feet, within an airport’s flight restriction zone, or be closer than fifty metres to people. The penalties for breaking the rules were an unlimited fine or up to five years in prison, but Qasim had no qualms about breaking the law. If his plan worked, he’d be bringing down a jet and killing hundreds of people, so breaking a few rules wasn’t a worry.

He switched on the drone, then put it into automatic launch mode. The rotors whirred and it rose smoothly to thirty metres, where it remained in a perfect hover. Qasim looked at the screen and used a joystick to point the camera towards the airport. It came into view on the tablet. A United Airlines plane was coming in to land, flaps extended, nose up.

Harawi was right, it would be the easiest thing in the world to fly the drone into one of the plane’s engines. But that wasn’t going to happen, not that day anyway.

Qasim flicked the joystick with his thumb, sending the drone west. He pulled back on the altitude joystick as well, sending it higher into the air.

Harawi shaded his eyes with his hand as he watched the drone fly away. ‘That is one mean fucking machine,’ he said.

Qasim kept the camera angled slightly down so he could see the grass flash by and at the same time see the airport getting close. There was a button on the bottom of the controller and he pressed that with his right index finger, storing the height and location as a waypoint so that it could be revisited at any time in the future.

The drone flashed across a road. The tablet showed its speed as five metres per second. It continued to climb. Qasim planned to have the drone at one hundred metres above the ground when it reached the runway.

Harawi continued to stare up at the drone, though it was now little more than a dot in the sky.

The United Airlines jet landed with puffs of smoke coming from its tyres. Suddenly the picture froze. Qasim frowned at the screen. Then he realised the image hadn’t frozen, the drone had stopped moving. He swore under his breath.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Harawi.

‘I don’t know. It stopped.’

‘Stopped? Stopped how?’

‘How the fuck would I know, bruv?’ He twiddled the joystick but the drone wouldn’t move forward. Then he pulled the joystick and the drone backed away from the airport. He moved it forward again, but it stopped after a few feet. ‘Fuck it, they’ve blocked it,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘They must be using some sort of jammer,’ said Qasim.

‘So we can’t reach the airport?’

Qasim moved the joystick but the drone refused to move any nearer to Heathrow. ‘That’s what it looks like. Bastards.’ He cursed again.

‘Now what?’

Qasim looked around. ‘If they can jam the drone, there’s a chance they can track where it’s being controlled from.’

‘So they know we’re here?’

‘Maybe, bruv.’ He tapped on the screen, programming the drone to return to the spot where it had been launched.

‘Then we need to get the fuck out of here,’ said Harawi.

‘I know, I know, you get the car started.’ He peered up at the sky. The drone was on its way back.

Harawi climbed into the car and turned on the engine. The drone was too far away to be heard above the traffic on the road. Then Qasim heard a siren, off in the distance. ‘Come on, come on,’ he muttered. The drone reached the first waypoint and hovered where it was. ‘Come on!’ shouted Qasim impatiently, before realising he had to press the button for it to descend. He cursed and touched the screen. The drone dropped and came to a halt again six feet above the ground, just in front of him. Qasim grabbed it, turned it off and put it in the back of the car along with the controller. He slammed the door shut and hurried around to the passenger door. The siren was louder now but there was another – even louder – sound, that of a fast-approaching helicopter. Qasim looked up. It was a police helicopter, heading their way.

He opened the passenger door and as soon as he’d climbed in, Harawi hit the accelerator. They were already moving as Qasim slammed the door, tyres squealing on the tarmac.

They headed south, towards Egham. A police car was barrelling down the road after them, blue lights flashing and siren wailing. Qasim’s stomach lurched as he realised it was a BMW X5, the type used by the capital’s armed police.

‘Faster, bruv!’ shouted Qasim. ‘These bastards have got guns.’

Harawi looked nervously in the rear-view mirror.

‘Don’t fucking look at them, bruv, just get the fuck away from them.’

The helicopter swooped overhead in a banking turn.

‘We can’t outrun a chopper,’ said Harawi.

‘All they can do is follow the car, they can’t stop us, bruv,’ said Qasim. ‘Drive to Thorpe Park, we can leave the car there and they’ll never find us in the park.’

‘It’s too far, we’ll never make it,’ said Harawi.

‘Fifteen minutes, max,’ said Qasim. ‘Just stay cool.’ He twisted around in his seat. The BMW was about a hundred metres behind them. As he turned back, he saw that they were about to collide with the back of a black cab. ‘Bruv!’ he screamed. Harawi twisted the wheel to the right to overtake, but as he stamped down on the accelerator he realised that a massive truck was heading towards them. The truck’s horn blared and Harawi yanked the wheel to the left, but he was too slow and the truck crashed into the small hatchback, smashing it into pieces. Qasim and Harawi died instantly.

It had been more then twenty-five years since Brendan O’Carroll had visited the Abney Park cemetery in Stoke Newington, north London, but little seemed to have changed. He was wearing a long black overcoat and under the coat he was holding a folding shovel. It was starting to get dark, but there were still people around, mainly dog walkers following their charges with plastic bags, waiting for them to do their business. The cemetery covered a little over thirty-one acres and the grave O’Carroll was looking for was in an out-of-the-way and little-visited section.

Almost two hundred thousand people were buried there, but it was as much a woodland park and nature reserve as a graveyard. There was a towering angel to O’Carroll’s left, overgrown with ivy, and next to it a cross that had tilted to the left over the years. The cemetery grounds were well tended by a team of gardeners, but the gravestones were left alone, and in places the cemetery looked as if it had been staged for a horror movie, especially as the sun went down and the shadows lengthened.

The track he was walking along was about six feet wide and the branches of the trees either side were intertwined above, giving it the feel of a tunnel. He looked over his shoulder but there was no one behind him, and he took a narrower trail to his left. The gravestones were smaller now and less impressive. The one O’Carroll was looking for was ten paces from the track. It was a simple block of granite that had been laid on the grass, and the carving on it had been almost unreadable when he had first seen it, weathered over the years and covered with lichen. Now, a decade and a half later, the stone was completely covered with moss and a bush had grown over half of it. O’Carroll was wearing thick leather gloves and he rubbed lichen away until he was able to make out the name of the deceased: MARY O’BRIEN. She had passed away in 1860, aged just twenty-two. O’Carroll had often wondered what her story had been. In his mind he had always pictured her as a rosy-cheeked Irish girl, dark haired with piercing blue eyes, probably pressed into service for a wealthy family in the area and occasionally visited at night by the master of the house. There had been no clue as to what had ended Mary’s short life, but in O’Carroll’s mind it was probably tuberculosis or pneumonia, some illness that these days would be cured with a quick course of antibiotics.

He took a final look around, then snapped the shovel into place and used it to lift up the gravestone and ease it to the side. It was heavier than he remembered, or maybe he wasn’t as strong. There were worms and beetles under the stone and a network of white roots from the bush. He scraped away the roots and then hacked away at the peaty soil. After a few minutes the spade hit the lid of the plastic box and he carefully scraped away the soil until all of the lid was visible. The box was about two feet square; the base was white plastic and the lid was pale blue. He popped off the lid. Inside the box were thirty-two individually wrapped blocks of Semtex explosive, each one weighing half a kilo, and there were half a dozen small Tupperware containers each containing six bubble-wrapped detonators.

The Semtex had arrived in Ireland in 1986, in the last of four arms deliveries paid for by the then Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi. Gaddafi had been so impressed by the IRA hunger strikes that he decided to help the terrorist group and sent over four shipments of guns, ammunition and Semtex. Included were a thousand Kalashnikov rifles, heavy machine guns, surface-to-air missiles and RPGs, but pride of place went to the six tons of Semtex that arrived in the final shipment. The IRA used the Semtex with a vengeance, killing hundreds with bombs and booby traps, but by the time the terrorist group called it quits in 1997, there were still more than two tons unused, hidden away in arms caches in Ireland and the UK. The detonators in this cache had been stolen from a quarry outside Limerick. They had been designed to work with dynamite but were more than capable of detonating Semtex.

Three men had known about the arms cache in the Stoke Newington cemetery, but Eoin McKee had been shot in the back of the head by a UVF hitman in Belfast just a week before the IRA ceasefire, and Seamus O’Malley had died six weeks previously in St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, after suffering a major heart attack in his Kilburn flat.

O’Malley’s body had been flown back to Northern Ireland, and the funeral was in Crossmaglen, close to the border with the Irish republic. O’Carroll had attended the funeral, along with hundreds of others, most of them IRA stalwarts. Despite the Good Friday Agreement and the IRA’s declaration that the armed struggle was over, six men in ski masks and paramilitary uniforms fired a salute with AK-47s over the coffin. In the local pub afterwards, O’Carroll had chatted with old friends and colleagues, and he realised that no one was aware of the arms cache in Stoke Newington. It had fallen below the IRA’s radar. In effect, it had ceased to exist.

Back in London, O’Carroll had started wondering if there was a way he could make money from the long-forgotten explosives. He was the only person who knew it was there; if anything were to happen to him it would be lost forever. There were sixteen kilos in the cache, and that had to have a value. He tried googling to see how much Semtex sold for, but didn’t have much luck. Then he went onto the dark web and saw Semtex being offered for £400 per half-kilo block, with detonators selling for £80. At those prices, the cache was worth more than £15,000. The money would come in useful, no question of that. O’Carroll was in his sixties and hadn’t worked for more than a decade. He had a bad back and a wonky knee so his days of labouring on building sites were well over. For a few years he had worked security, standing on the doors of a few Irish pubs and bars in Kilburn, but the council had taken away his licence after he’d thumped a drunken customer who wouldn’t take no for an answer. Now he survived on benefits and lived in a council flat, and his only pleasures were cheap cider and roll-up cigarettes. With fifteen grand, he could start living again.

He knew a Russian cocaine dealer in Queen’s Park who sold handguns as a sideline, and he’d asked him if there was a market for explosives. O’Carroll only knew him as Ivan, he’d never told him his family name. Ivan had said there was an Asian guy who had bought two Glocks off him who was on the look-out for explosives and detonators. ‘Fucking jihadists?’ O’Carroll had said, and Ivan had laughed and said yeah, probably. O’Carroll thought about it, and then realised that the identity of the buyer didn’t really matter – the targets would be the same and when push came to shove, all that mattered was the money.

Ivan said that he didn’t know how much the Asian guy would pay, but that he’d ask. Two days later he got back to O’Carroll and said that the guy could come up with ten grand, cash. O’Carroll had figured that the dealer was probably shaving off twenty-five per cent, maybe more, but beggars couldn’t be choosers so he’d agreed.

He pulled a Lidl reusable shopping bag from his coat pocket and put the Semtex and detonators in it. There was a handgun wrapped in plastic at the bottom of the box. O’Carroll had forgotten about the gun. He didn’t even know if it was loaded. He slipped it into his pocket, figuring that he might be able to sell it to Ivan, then resealed the plastic box and replaced the gravestone. He used his gloved hands to pat the soil down around the gravestone, then stood up and looked around. A woman was calling for her dog off in the distance but there was still nobody in the vicinity. He wiped the soil off his spade, then folded it in half. He took off his gloves and put them in his pocket with the gun, took a final look around and then headed for the exit.

As he walked out of the cemetery, a helicopter flew overhead. O’Carroll’s heart started to pound faster even though he knew that the helicopter would have nothing to do with him. Thirty years ago he might have worried about being under police surveillance, but those days had long gone. He walked along the pavement towards Ivan’s car, a black Jaguar. Ivan popped the boot as he walked up and O’Carroll put the shovel and the holdall in the back. He opened the passenger door but Ivan put a hand up. ‘Hey, no, it’s okay, I don’t need you for the next bit.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked O’Carroll.

‘The guy who’s buying the stuff, he’s not going to want you seeing him.’

O’Carroll sat down and slammed the door shut. ‘Fuck that. Do you think I was born yesterday?’

‘You don’t trust me?’

‘Ivan, you’re a drug dealer who sells guns on the side, how the fuck can anyone trust you?’

‘My word is my fucking bond,’ growled Ivan. ‘If I ripped people off, I wouldn’t stay in business.’

‘Yeah, well that’s maybe true, but we’re not talking about a twenty quid wrap of coke here. Ten grand’s a lot of money and I’m not letting that bag out of my sight until the cash is in my hand.’

Ivan glared at him for several seconds, but O’Carroll glared back. He knew that if he let the Russian drive off with the bag, he might well never see him again. And if he did rip him off, it wasn’t as if O’Carroll could complain to the cops. Eventually Ivan threw up his hands. ‘Fine.’

‘Fine?’

‘You can come.’ He took out his mobile phone and tapped out a message on WhatsApp. A few seconds later he received a reply. He put the phone away and started the Jaguar.

Ivan drove north on the A10 and then headed west towards Harringay. There was a small blue hatchback waiting for them in the station car park. ‘That’s them,’ said Ivan.

‘There’s three of them in the car,’ said O’Carroll, peering through the side window.

‘They always travel in threes,’ said Ivan. ‘It’s their thing. Two in the front, one in the back. And they always drive those little hatchbacks because they can’t get insurance for anything else.’

‘You said one guy. You said there was one buyer.’

Ivan laughed. ‘One buyer, but these Asian cunts always travel in packs. Do you want your fucking money, or not?’ He put the car in neutral but left the engine running.

‘You want me to take the bag and get the money?’ asked O’Carroll.

‘No, you stay here. It might spook them if the two of us go over.’

‘Sure.’ O’Carroll figured that the Russian didn’t want him there when the money was handed over so that he wouldn’t see how much he was skimming as his commission. ‘But are you not worried that there’s three of them?’

‘I’m not scared of Pakis,’ sneered Ivan.

‘Well, yeah, but you’ve already sold two Glocks to these Pakis which means they’re probably carrying.’

‘And the guy I deal with paid for the guns in cash. And I’ve known him for six months, he’s always buying weed from me. Big fan of the weed, he is. Most of them are because they can’t touch alcohol.’

O’Carroll shrugged. ‘Up to you,’ he said.

Ivan unzipped his jacket just enough to reveal the butt of a gun in an underarm holster. ‘This isn’t my first rodeo, as the Americans say.’ He grinned, pressed the button to pop the boot open and climbed out and went to the rear of the car. He took out the Lidl bag and slammed the boot shut, then walked across the car park to the hatchback.

As he drew closer, the hatchback’s internal light came on as the two doors opened. Two Asian men climbed out, one from the driver’s seat and one from the back. The section of the car park they had parked in was dimly lit but Ivan had left the lights on so the car and the men were easy enough to see. The men were all bearded. The one in the back was the youngest, in his late twenties maybe, while the other two were in their late thirties. All were wearing hoodies with the hoods up, with dark blue jeans and trainers.

The driver held up a hand in greeting. Ivan waved back. When he reached the hatchback, Ivan put the shopping bag on the bonnet. The guy who had been in the back seat was now at the rear of the hatchback. The driver was looking into the shopping bag. He reached in and took out one of the packs of Semtex. He said something to Ivan and Ivan nodded. He put the Semtex back in the bag and took out one of the Tupperware containers. O’Carroll wondered if the man had any idea what he was looking at. Or if he knew how to use a detonator.

The Asian guy put the Tupperware container back into the bag, then patted Ivan on the shoulder.

‘Just give him the money, you fucking Paki,’ O’Carroll muttered – but then he gasped as the man behind Ivan pulled out a carving knife and stuck it into the Russian’s back. The attacker moved quickly, stabbing Ivan four times in quick succession, before the guy in front of Ivan, who had also pulled out a knife, slashed it across the Russian’s throat. Ivan’s legs buckled and he slumped to the ground.

The three Asian men were staring at O’Carroll now, or at least looking towards Ivan’s car. Could they see him through the windscreen? He had no way of knowing. He looked across at the steering wheel. The key was in the ignition, the engine was running. O’Carroll swung his right leg over the central console. As he moved, two of the Asian men began running towards him – the driver and the guy who had started the stabbing. O’Carroll swore out loud as he hefted himself over to the driving seat.

The younger man was waving his bloodstained knife as he ran to the passenger side and grabbed for the door handle. It wasn’t locked, O’Carroll realised. It wasn’t fucking locked. He reached over but it was too far and he couldn’t get to it.

The other man reached the driver’s side. O’Carroll fumbled for the lock and managed to get to it before the man grabbed the door handle. O’Carroll’s hands were trembling as he grabbed the steering wheel and stamped on the accelerator. The engine roared but the car didn’t move. It wasn’t in gear. Shit, shit, shit, it wasn’t in gear.

The attacker on the passenger side pulled the door open and leaned in. ‘Fuck off!’ shouted O’Carroll. He reached for the gear stick and pushed it, but it wouldn’t move. ‘Fuck!’ he screamed. Then he remembered it was an automatic – he had to put his foot on the brake to change gear. He stamped on the brake pedal but before he could move the gear stick, the man lashed out with the knife and cut O’Carroll’s hand. It was a deep cut, severing the tendons, and his fingers flopped uselessly as blood spurted over the console. ‘You fucker!’ he yelled. He ignored the pain in his hand and tried to pull the gearstick into ‘DRIVE’, but it wouldn’t move. There was a button that needed to be pressed to move the stick, but his thumb wouldn’t work and he screamed in frustration.

The window to his right exploded in a shower of glass and O’Carroll felt as if he’d been punched in the head. Then everything went red, and faded to black, as his blood pooled over the car seat.

Dan Shepherd stared up at the ceiling. He was pretty sure his time was up, but he’d left his watch in the bathroom. The girl was breathing softly and evenly and he couldn’t tell if she was asleep or not. She’d said her name was Jasmine, which was almost certainly not true, but as he’d also lied about his name he couldn’t really fault her for that. Charlie Warner was the name he’d used. Her hair was jet black and glossy and her soft warm breath fluttered against his side. Her left hand had hardly any weight as it lay on his chest, over his heart. She was barely five feet tall but her high stiletto heels had added four inches to her height. She’d kept them on when she’d walked into the flat and he was almost certain that she’d marked the wooden floor, but it was a rented flat so he didn’t care either way.

She must have sensed that he was looking at her because she opened one eye. ‘Are you sure a massage is all you want?’ she whispered.

‘I’m sure,’ he said.

She rolled on top of him, her jet-black hair cascading around her shoulders. ‘You paid for everything,’ she said. ‘Two shots if you want.’ She was still wearing her black bra and pants. The dress had somehow come off when she was giving him his massage.

He laughed. ‘Two shots? You sound like an assassin.’

She went to kiss him on the lips but he turned his head.

‘What?’ she said. ‘Don’t you like me?’

‘I think you’re amazing,’ he said. ‘I just …’ He left the sentence unfinished.

‘Because of your wife?’

Shepherd nodded.

‘Charlie, it’s been almost six months since she died, you said. That’s ages.’

‘I know,’ said Shepherd. ‘I just need some time. The massage was great, it was just what I needed. But that’s all I need.’

‘But I want to fuck you,’ she pouted.

Shepherd laughed and rolled her off him. ‘Maybe next time,’ he said. He sat up. ‘I’m going to shower.’

She rolled over onto her back and smiled. ‘How old are you?’ she asked.

‘Old enough to know better,’ he said, and grabbed for his towel which had fallen onto the floor.

She giggled like a schoolgirl. She looked about thirty but she had said she was twenty-two. She’d said she was Japanese but Shepherd was sure she was Chinese. Almost everything she’d said was a lie, but then almost everything he had told her was just as false. ‘You look good for your age,’ she said. It was probably the ninth or tenth compliment she’d paid him since she had walked in through the door.

‘You don’t know how old I am,’ he laughed. He rolled off the bed and headed for the bathroom. He closed the door but left it ajar just enough so that he could see the foot of the bed. He went over to the shower cubicle, reached inside and turned on the water, then tiptoed back to the door. He saw a flash of olive skin and waist length hair as she slipped off the end of the bed and out of the bedroom. He smiled to himself. He’d give her plenty of time.

He went back to the shower and got in, enjoying the feel of the warm water playing over his skin. He shampooed his hair, soaped himself all over, then stood under the water for about twice as long as usual. Eventually he stepped out of the shower, dried himself and put his watch back on before wrapping a towel around his waist and heading back into the bedroom. She was sprawled across the bed. The bra had joined her dress on the armchair by the window. She reached her arms towards him and smiled lazily. ‘Come on, baby, let me really relax you.’

Shepherd laughed and sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘I’m knackered,’ he said. ‘I just want to sleep. I’ve got an early start.’

She pouted and ran her hands over her perfect breasts. ‘I’ll do all the work,’ she said.

Shepherd laughed again and tapped his watch. ‘It’s getting late and I’ve a lot to do tomorrow. There’s a rush to get everything done before the Christmas break.’

‘Why don’t you book me to be your Christmas present?’ she said. ‘I’ll tie a big bow around me and you can unwrap me.’