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have mummy issues. He was quite clearly a psychopath – but of the most organised and calculating variety. To start with he was aloof and confident, unfazed by the extreme emotions he aroused among his fellow inmates, amused by the frustrations of his captors. He could withstand the fiercest interrogations; he didn’t respond to threats, bribes or trickery, never giving anything away unless it served his purpose. As such, any information the authorities had accrued on Rochester was paper-thin. Even his basic background remained sketchy; his full list of criminal activities was incomplete, his catalogue of known associates empty. It was some considerable time after he was first incarcerated before the British police were even able to establish his true identity.
    Rochester, it was now known, was a British national, a native of the Home Counties, who, having been rejected by the British Army on medical grounds when he was still only seventeen, joined the French Foreign Legion, later seeing action in Bosnia, Kosovo and Ivory Coast, and impressing in almost every theatre. It was only afterwards, when he felt he’d risen as far as he could in one of the world’s official military elites, that he became a mercenary soldier and in due course an international criminal, peddling drugs, guns and even human cargo, and finally forming the so-called ‘Nice Guys Club’.
    The subsequent British investigation into this previously unknown organisation uncovered evidence that was almost too horrific for words. The Nice Guys’ modus operandi was alarmingly simple: for seventy-five thousand pounds a shot, they would abduct any woman a paying client nominated, and provide a safe, private space where said client could rape and abuse her to his heart’s desire. The Club would provide the necessary security, and undertook to dispose of all the evidence afterwards, including the woman – none of their victims were known to have survived.
    The case was finally broken by one Scotland Yard detective in particular, DS Mark Heckenburg of the Serial Crimes Unit, though he was shot and almost killed in the process. The Nice Guys also suffered fatalities – five died in total, but despite this, and despite the conviction of Peter Rochester, there was dissatisfaction at various levels: the Club’s numerous British-based clients got away scot-free thanks to the untimely disappearance of some very vital evidence, whilst Heck himself was never convinced the Nice Guys had all been accounted for, especially those he suspected of running parallel operations overseas. A series of internal investigations at Scotland Yard attempted to ascertain the reason why a general police response to the crisis had been so slow to emerge, and finally punished those senior officers deemed culpable for this – but that didn’t make anyone especially happy.
    The key to everything, of course, was Peter Rochester – now serving a full-life term in Britain’s toughest high-security prison, and yet increasingly a man with leverage. Heck’s comments about the possible existence of foreign Nice Guys Clubs hadn’t gone unnoticed, and Interpol and Europol were now handling daily communiqués from police forces across the world concerned about their own extensive lists of inexplicably vanished women. It was anyone’s guess whether Rochester would eventually play ball, so when he’d gone into apparent cardiac arrest without warning, Gull Rock had suffered a collective nervous breakdown.
    Though medical staff managed to stabilise him, he’d now slipped into a coma, and the next response was to have him transferred to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, King’s Lynn, where there was a fully equipped cardiology unit.
    Transfer of any prisoner beyond prison walls when he was deemed as high-risk as Peter Rochester was a complex task, and would almost always fall to SOCAR, Scotland Yard’s specialised Serious Offenders Control and Retrieval division. By pure good fortune, an armed