‘For that reason we’ll avoid Tuesday and Friday,’ Abbott told the men. ‘I want no family members involved in this. Add that to your list of objectives, please. No innocents are to die. Anybody armed then brass ’em up. Anybody else, if they’re obviously trafficked children then they’re to be extracted. Any persons that you have doubts about, zip-tie them and we’ll deal with them before we blow the place. Here . . .’ He’d sketched a plan of the Kemptown site, pointing out where sentries might be expected to appear. ‘This room here,’ he indicated, ‘is where the men tend to hang out in the evening. Here,’ he moved his finger, ‘this is the inner sanctum. This is the site of objective number two. It’s where I expect to find Doyle. I anticipate that by the time we reach it, things will have got noisy, thus we can expect Doyle to barricade himself inside. Door is solid, but hinges are on the outside. I can take them out with the charges and use the shotgun as a back-up if necessary.’

‘Blow the door, but unless it peels clean, they’ll be waiting for us,’ said Miller.

‘But we know what to do about that, don’t we, Ward?’

‘Distraction charge?’ said Ward.

‘Exactly what I’m thinking. If you can set a charge in the car park here, and then blow it, make it loud and pretty, they’ll be turned to the window wanting to know what’s going on, at which point we’ll blow the door, get in the room and take out any X-rays that stand in our way.’ He looked at Ward. ‘Do you think you can do that?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘And after that, the dems charges. I want the whole complex totalled by the time we leave. We’re sending a message here. Nobody else is going to move in there and take over the operation.’

‘It’s why I’m here,’ said Ward. ‘Who’s carrying out the CTR?’

The CTR, a Close Target Recce, would be carried out during the planning phase. Abbott already knew the complex well, but experience taught him that you bypassed a CTR at your peril. He didn’t dare carry it out himself, instead entrusting it to Ward and Miller while Brace sourced the equipment.

A week later, the team was based in the Welcome Break hotel on the A50 in Derby, where they met in Ward’s room and the two operators reported back on the results of the CTR, the results being that there was an increased presence at the factory. More activity than Abbott had suggested. More men on site. More cars coming and going and, perhaps most disquieting of all, more kids. More civilians.

Abbott called McGregor.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘Let’s meet,’ he was told, and a couple of hours after that they were in a greasy spoon.