Whitestone and I watched the lorry at the far end of the runway in silence. Glenn was giving Billy a wide berth as he called out instructions and Billy slowly eased the giant truck off the icy grass.

‘Billy’s going to France,’ Whitestone said quietly, and I exploded.

‘The guy’s used to sitting behind a desk in West End Central!’

‘Don’t raise your voice to me, Detective.’

‘Ma’am,’ I said, almost begging her now. ‘These people operating out of Dunkirk, they have already murdered two men. They saw that Zlatko Draganov was going to be lifted and they turned him into roadkill. They knew – or maybe they just suspected – that Lee Hill had been turned by the law and they lynched him.’ I remembered Troy’s hideous face leering at me, warning me not to hang around because I looked too much like pig. ‘If they have any suspicions at all that Billy is not what he claims to be, then they will kill him,’ I said.

‘They will never know he’s a cop.’

‘They’ll know it the moment they look at him! Jesus Christ, doesn’t that matter to you?’

‘You want to know what matters to me?’ We were shouting at each other now. ‘Those twelve dead women in the back of a lorry in Chinatown. How many more women have to die, Max? Because if we don’t nail these bastards, then I promise you it will happen again.’

My phone began to vibrate.

EDIE WREN CALLING, it said.

‘We’ve got another lorryload of girls,’ Edie said.

I felt my stomach fall away.

I remembered the touch of Hana Novak’s icy hands as she reached out and touched my wrist, too cold to be of this world. I remembered the terrible stillness we had found in the back of the truck in Chinatown.

‘And this time they’re alive,’ Edie said.

24

There was a small but growing crowd outside West End Central, kept back from the entrance by two uniformed officers, their placards bobbing in the grey light of Savile Row.

REFUGEES WELCOME HERE said some. NO MORE BORDERS said others. IMAGINE said one, and I expected to see that it was being held by a young man in dreadlocks with his face blackened by tattoos. But it was not Troy. The IMAGINE placard was held by an elderly gentleman with a wispy white beard and a sensible corduroy jacket and a lifetime of polite activism behind him.

I eased my way through the crowd, nodding at the two young uniforms, a young female PC – the Met no longer calls them WPCs – and an even younger black officer. It didn’t seem like much in the way of crowd control but the protest seemed peaceful enough.