‘So I can have you all deported so fast that your human rights won’t touch the ground,’ I said. ‘Want me to make a call to my colleagues at Border Control, the tax office, immigration?’

His smile faded. He called Nesha over. The boy reluctantly set down his wheelbarrow, now empty, and approached us.

‘Go,’ the foreman told Nesha.

He hesitated for a moment and then handed in his hard hat and his hi-vis jacket and followed me silently.

There were two middle-aged women coming down the road, pulling suitcases on wheels, and once upon a time they would have been friends off on holiday but now I knew they were more likely to be foreign housekeepers or cleaning ladies returning home after working in one of the East End’s new luxury apartment blocks.

The women saw me coming with Nesha trailing reluctantly by my side, every inch the policeman with his suspect, and quickly crossed the street and hurried by on the far side of the road, as if I was bad trouble just waiting to begin, and as if they were a long way from home.

When we reached the car, Lil smiled at Nesha brightly.

‘Hello, sweetheart!’ she said. ‘Hello, Harry!’

‘Hello,’ said Nesha.

‘Where’s all your kit?’ I asked him.

He directed me to a nearby industrial estate where a dozen dead cars were lined up in the shadow of a giant carpet warehouse. The dead cars were inhabited by perhaps twice as many men. Nesha was staying on the back seat of a Vauxhall Corvette that had lost its wheels many years ago.

The men – and they were all men – stood around a fire in an old oil barrel, trying to get the chill out of their bones, and they watched us without fear or interest as Nesha collected his things. There wasn’t much. He filled half a black bin bag and he was ready to go.

Lil leaned into Edie. ‘Is that our Harry?’ she said.

‘Harry’s dead,’ Edie said.

We dropped Edie and her grandmother back at her flat and then I drove back to Smithfield and parked on Charterhouse Street.

I needed to talk to Nesha Novak.

‘We got him,’ I said. ‘The driver of that lorry. The one who drove your sister and those other women to London. As far as we can tell, his name was Zlatko Draganov. He was Bulgarian Roma. He made a living out of people like Hana and now he’s dead. Because we got him.’ I thought about it. ‘Well – we didn’t get him. Someone else did. But they got him because we were closing in on him.’

The boy traced a finger over his face to indicate scarring.

‘That man?’ He clicked his fingers twice. ‘That man is dead?’