‘I never wanted anyone to die. Look – I only brought those people in because I couldn’t stop them. Nobody can. You have no idea what it’s like for the drivers down there. Look at those jungle bunnies chucking trees into the road! They’re going to be in the back of my lorry if I get paid for it or not. So why not get paid for it?’

Edie scrunched up her eyes.

‘Because when you get nicked you do hard time – the kind of hard time that lasts long enough for your parents to die, your children to grow up and your friends to forget you. How about that for a good reason?’

The lorry driver grimaced with frustration.

‘And what do I get if Troy thinks I’m ratting him out?’

‘Troy’s not going to think that,’ I said. ‘You were never arrested. Most of those Afghans you were bringing into the country were never collared. The ones that were haven’t been anywhere near West End Central. Nobody knows you’re here with us.’

He covered his face with his hands, not buying it. I felt for the poor bastard. But this is how it works with CIs. We suck the juice out of them in return for not locking them up.

‘When would I go?’ he said.

‘Now,’ Whitestone said. ‘We would like you to go immediately. Make contact today. Make the run back in the next day or so.’

‘I don’t have a rig.’

‘We’ve got your lorry out of the pound,’ Billy said.

He held up a set of keys.

Lee Hill reluctantly took them.

‘And when does it end?’

‘When I say it ends,’ Whitestone said.

Lee’s lorry was waiting outside the great subterranean car park of West End Central, which is round the back on Old Burlington Street.

Billy walked him down.

‘But he already failed to make one delivery,’ I said when they were gone. ‘Even if most of them got away. You don’t think it looks like he’s been turned?’

‘Maybe,’ Whitestone said. ‘But he’s all we’ve got.’

Edie was staring at her phone. All of her attention was suddenly somewhere else.

I recognised that look.

It is only our family who can make us feel that way.

We searched for Lil all day. In the markets and the shops and the parks of Holloway and Islington and Highbury, from the old Arsenal stadium all the way to the Angel. But as the sun faded on another bitterly cold day, we realised we were looking in the wrong part of town.

‘I know where she will be,’ Edie said.

Her grandmother had gone looking for her old neighbourhood deep in the East End.

But that neighbourhood was long gone.