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Her mother’s eyes narrowed. “You saw him last night?”

She nodded.

Her mother gave her a long look. “Well, I hope you took precautions this time.”

“Mum!”

“Don’t ‘Mum’ me, Abigail Parker. You look well and truly shagged.”

“Mum!” She was repeating herself but couldn’t think of a lot else to say.

“And about time,” her mum said. “I’ve been worried about you, with just Jenny and your job. A woman your age needs a man.”

“I haven’t got a man. It just… happened.”

“Again. Just tell me one thing—that he won’t hurt Jenny.”

“I don’t know.” She chewed on her lower lip. “He’s not a good man. But I don’t think he’s a bad man either. He’ll maybe want nothing to do with her.” She pressed a finger to her forehead. “We’ll have to wait and see. But I plan to tell him today.”

Really she did mean to tell him. But by eleven she still hadn’t made the call. She realized she didn’t actually have a number for him and was going to have to call the club and hope they would put her through.

“Are you okay?” Jack asked.

She glanced up from the desk where she was working on the shifts for next week, when she was off desk duty and back to heading the emergency call team. She was looking forward to it; she liked to be out on the streets.

“I’m fine. Just busy.”

He perched himself on the edge of the desk. “So what did Logan McCabe want with you last night.”

That got her attention. “You know him?”

“No, not personally. But I worked on the money laundering case Declan McCabe brought in last year.”

“Money laundering?” She hadn’t been involved with the case.

“Some cartel was using the family company to launder money. Declan McCabe stumbled across it and came to us. So I met the family. Declan was a good man, though he had no love of the police. Now, his father is a real piece of work—I got the impression he was pissed off at his son for involving us. He would rather have solved the problem himself.”

Declan was the brother Logan had mentioned the previous evening, the one with the matching nipple ring.

“Could he do that?”

“Probably. He has the contacts. Rory McCabe’s father came over in the forties, carved himself out a piece of the East End, and held on to it by sheer bloody-mindedness. They were into everything—drugs, illegal gambling, prostitution…”

“But not anymore?”

“No. Rory took over and for a few years he was the scourge of the East End, but something changed and he decided to go straight, clean up the company. Declan was groomed to take over, and as far as I know they’re squeaky clean now.”

“And Logan?”

“He wasn’t involved with the case, though I met him once. He now manages the nightclubs. But he’s been inside, Abby.”

It pissed her off that Jack was telling her this, as though she wasn’t capable of making her own judgments.

“I know. And don’t worry—it was nothing important.”

He looked as though he wanted to ask more, but he knew her well enough to recognize when to not push. “Well, keep away from him. He’s trouble.”

She didn’t answer, but irritation flicked at her insides. Jack had admitted he didn’t know Logan, so how could he know he was trouble? Of course, there was the little fact that helookedlike trouble. Big trouble. But that was beside the point.