‘Must be a bit of a culture shock after that place in London. I looked it up online – very smart. Like bloody Hogwarts, those buildings.’

‘Luke,’ Dennis had warned.

‘What? I’m showing an interest,’ he said. ‘It must have cost you a fortune, Rob – no wonder you’re skint.’

She gave him a scathing look. ‘Actually, Lennie got a scholarship. And you went to private school yourself, didn’t you?’ She’d stopped, the triumphant riposte dying on her tongue. He had gone to private school – because he’d failed the eleven-plus for the grammar. Her parents had paid for him to go private precisely to avoid the automatic default: Savvy’s.

On the whiteboard this morning, Maggie had tapped The Spot then underlined it. ‘So, what’s going on? Drugs is the obvious question – is someone dealing there?’

‘Especially with the club bit upstairs. Though, do you remember,’ said Robin, ‘when we went in, the manager – David – said he was pissed off the day Becca didn’t show up because she was supposed to be doing an event in a private room, a party?’

‘Hm.’

‘This syndicate he mentioned, the owners – is the place a front for something? Gambling? If they were running illegal betting there, it got out of control, Becca saw or heard something …’

‘If the police had got wind of anything, they’d be taking this more seriously.’

‘But if they’ve managed to keep it on the down-low … “I run a tight ship” – remember?’

Maggie’d nodded.

‘And the police did go there. He told us. He said they’d wanted to know if she’d had any trouble with the punters. Possible he was trying to deflect us, point us towards the clientele rather than The Spot itself.’

She’d nodded again. ‘Yep.’ Turning to the board, she wrote Drugs? Gambling? ‘Right. I’ll get on the blower to some of my peeps round and about, see what I hear. Why don’t you see what you can find out online? About the owners, too. That word, syndicate – I never like it.’

Robin had spent the rest of the morning waiting for Lorraine’s decrepit Dell to load web pages, one by agonizing one. She’d almost been able to feel herself ageing. To think she’d ever moaned about the Met’s hardware.

And it wasn’t just the hardware. At the Met, she’d have been able to check in a moment whether any of them had previous, but as a private investigator, she had no access to that information. Even to check her own police record, she’d have to apply by post, with copies of her passport and birth certificate. The only way to check someone else’s was if you were a company thinking of hiring them for work in health or childcare, and even then you had to be certified.