His gloved hands danced lightly above the passports. The dark red of Iran. The deep blue of Syria. The green of Pakistan. The burgundy and gold of Serbia. And two Turkish passports – one in maroon and one in green.

‘There are a thousand ways for a passport to be forged,’ he said. ‘Passports that are genuine but have had the photograph changed on the ID page. Passports that are real but have had bogus stamps inserted. The VSC40 sees through them all.’

Ken’s profession explained his mole-like appearance. I imagined that most of his working day would have been spent in a darkened room at Arrivals at Heathrow Airport. And I had no doubt that he would not have been brought to West End Central unless he was the best in the business.

‘How we doing so far?’ I said.

‘These passports are all as fake as a nine-euro note,’ Ken said, allowing himself a smile of professional pride. ‘We see the best forged passports in the world at Heathrow. But this bunch is not the best in the world. This is amateur hour. Apart from this one. This one is real.’

It was the passport that Whitestone had tapped. Ken held up a burgundy-coloured passport with two inscriptions in gold Cyrillic script either side of a gold coat of arms. I pulled on a pair of blue nitrile gloves and took the Serbian passport. Hana Novak’s solemn young face stared out at me from the identity page.

She had long, straight brown hair that looked as though it had been curled up at the end by some kind of heating tongs. It was a curiously moving attempt to look attractive from a young woman who was already beautiful, even if she did not know it yet.

Ken ran his fingers over the stack of fakes.

‘I wouldn’t expect these passports to be decent forgeries,’ Ken said. ‘The back of a lorry is the budget option for sneaking into the UK. At Heathrow we see people – professionals from Damascus and Baghdad – who have paid fifteen grand and more for bogus travel docs that have been made by a master.’

‘These people smugglers,’ I said. ‘Are they more likely to fly someone in than put them in the back of a lorry?’