Five bar staff tonight: the Aussie they’d talked to, Justin, plus two other blokes and two women, all in their early to mid-twenties, all wearing the navy shirts, all good-looking. She took a line through the crowd that looped her far enough away to make it hard for Justin to see her, and edged her way through to the back room, dodging drinks and bags, catching snippets of bellowed conversation: ‘And I said to her, you’ve got to tell her it’s not on; she just can’t do that, who does she think she is?’; ‘You going next Saturday, mate?’

Maggie had stayed in town so she’d sent the cab for Robin. When she’d phoned to tell her, they’d had a brief catch-up. She’d spoken to two contacts on the city centre team, she said, a sergeant and a PC, neither of whom had heard rumours about anything illegal going on here. She’d also spoken to a friend, Sara Kettleborough, who was a journalist at the Post. ‘Word is, it’s kosher, she says. Last year, apparently, the manager found out that one of their weekend doormen had a little sideline in blow and fired him immediately, called the cops. Same for a couple of punters they caught with pills upstairs. Zero tolerance.’

‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much? Deliberate tactic, so they look lily-white?’

‘Maybe. Either way, it doesn’t get us any further.’

It was the same with the syndicate so far. Via Google, she’d managed to glean details on two of them, Iain Ferguson and Steve Perry, both of whom had decent legitimate income sources, Ferguson being an estate agent and Perry owning a nursery out near Evesham – plants, not babies. Perry had organized a sponsored walk of the Cotswold Way last summer and in 2014, Iain Ferguson had run the London marathon and raised twenty-three thousand for the hospice where his father had died. The photo in the Dudley News showed him and his twin daughters, aged ten, posing outside with a giant cheque. If either he or Perry had had trouble with the law, they’d managed to keep it off the Internet.