‘Can you loop that bit?’ Foster said, as he saw the arm emerge from the crowd. ‘And slow it right down?’

Bethan did, and the shot played through on the screens in front of them. The grainy arm punched through, and Keller’s hand came forward. And then it repeated, again and again, the arm staying grainy and the guy’s face staying blurred.

Foster leaned forward until he was cheek-to-cheek with Bethan, his lips next to her microphone.

‘Time’s up,’ he said.

‘Did you find anything?’ Abbot asked as they all headed back down the glass-and-steel steps. Foster was quiet and brooding.

‘Nothing,’ he said distantly. ‘Just an arm disappearing into the crowd. Dead end.’

‘CCTV?’ Abbot asked.

‘Cullen’s going to get hold of it, but I don’t expect they’ll find anything. There are too many people moving around the grounds, and we haven’t had a good enough visual on this guy to pick him out in such a massive crowd.’

They walked in silence back to the Range Rover, Foster’s strong hand gentle but persistent in the small of Keller’s back. When they reached the car, there was a note waiting for them on the windscreen. It was typed on cheap white paper, folded once and tucked under the wiper blade. Foster skimmed it and then handed it to Keller while he started up the car. Soon it will all be over. You deserve what’s coming. And if you don’t know why, then you deserve it even more.

CHAPTER 21

THE HEAVENS OPENED as Foster drove back towards the hotel. Plump raindrops smashed onto the Range Rover’s roof like meteors, and red brake lights kaleidoscoped across the rain-drenched windscreen.

‘Is this normal?’ Keller asked irritably as they sat idling in the traffic.

‘Pretty much,’ Foster said. The black sky mirrored his mood. The strength was slowly coming back to his arm, but with it came a throbbing pain and an unwelcome sense of his own vulnerability. They were almost at Elephant and Castle when he said, ‘I can’t do this any more.’

Keller looked at him, aghast.

‘The job?’

‘The traffic.’

He gave her a reassuring smile, then pulled the Range Rover onto the kerb and cut the corner into a side street. It took them five minutes to find an old-fashioned London boozer and they wasted no time in getting out of the rain. The place was called the Boar’s Head, and it had an air of perpetual night-time about it. Oppressive black beams held up low-slung ceilings that were stained yellow from the smoke of a hundred thousand cigarettes, and the timber bar looked as if it had sailed rough seas for too long. The place was full of dark corners fit for pirates and smugglers and people who didn’t want to be found. People like Foster, Abbot and Keller.