‘There’s five thousand bits of paper here,’ Miles told them. ‘This is gonna take a few hours, so a latte and a cheese roll would be great.’

The hipster coffee place didn’t do sandwiches, so Julius and Georgia took a fifteen-minute stroll to the high street. She got asked for two selfies while they queued in a baker’s and a guy on the street asked Julius if he was Georgia’s bodyguard.

She worried that someone would tip off the press, but they made it back to the workshop without getting tailed.

Miles barely acknowledged the arrival of lunch and let his latte get cold, as he flicked more documents and made more notes. As the others killed time, eating lunch and playing with phones, Miles called his office and told someone to cover his one-thirty meeting.

‘Who’s this Eddie?’ Miles asked.

‘The polar bear?’ John asked, which made Georgia laugh.

‘Yes, Dad, with the ice caps melting, polar bears are increasingly turning to careers in financial services …’

‘Eddie’s the guy I met at the West African Development Bank,’ Julius explained, more helpfully, as he walked towards Miles at the desk.

‘These are broken-ended transactions,’ Miles explained admiringly. ‘They’re the holy grail of money laundering. Virtually impossible to detect and the banking industry’s dirty secret.’

‘What’s one of them then?’ Georgia asked.

Miles turned his office chair to face his audience. ‘When you have money in a bank, it’s just a number stored in a computer,’ he began. ‘So what stops the bank from saying your hundred-pound deposit is really fifty pounds? Or a thousand pounds? Or a million?

‘Banks would have us believe their systems are flawless. They’ll never admit billions of transactions per day are handled by aged mainframe computers, running code written by dead guys, in languages modern programmers don’t understand.

‘Transaction dates get scrambled, interest is wrongly calculated. Money pops out of thin air, or vanishes into accounts that don’t exist. If you know where the bugs are, a guy like Eddie can transfer money to another bank without leaving a trace.’

‘If it’s untraceable, how come you worked it out?’ Julius asked.

Miles rattled two pieces of paper. ‘Because you gave me papers showing both ends of the transaction. This piece shows money being transferred from an account at West African Development Bank into an account that doesn’t exist. The other shows money arriving at a bank in the Cayman Islands.’

Miles fanned himself to show how exciting this was.

‘I haven’t added up every transfer, but we’re looking at between forty and fifty-five million pounds that have been transferred from Ondo State to companies owned by SJ Adebisi.’

‘Just my uncle?’ Julius asked. ‘SJ is the politician. My mum deals with business and money.’

‘Your mother is nowhere in these transactions,’ Miles said.

‘Your uncle wanted his own nest egg,’ John suggested.