‘Get positive visual ID on Rabia Demir and call it in for immediate response. The heavy mob will kick the doors down and come in with guns. If Rabia is in there – and she’s working – then it’s a trafficking case, enough to bust everyone up there. Human Trafficking, Smuggling and Slavery, the CPS will call it. Enough to put someone away for fourteen years.’

I saw a look of real concern in his eyes.

‘Better get your call in quick. There will be some serious muscle up there behind all the canapés and small talk.’

‘They’re trying to get Edie Wren in there as back-up. Undercover. A new girl on her first night on the job.’

He raised his eyebrows.

‘Edie can take care of herself,’ I said, with slightly more conviction than I felt. ‘And we’re going to be in and out.’ I realised how much I valued his call. ‘What’s wrong, John? Do you think this sounds like a suicide mission?’

‘Edie will be fine,’ he said. ‘She knows enough not to take anything, right? A lot of these places have got the women on flunitrazepam – you know, Rohypnol, the date rape drug. Roofies. No odour, no taste, no chance. Keeps them quiet, keeps them pliant – the poor little cows. Because I bet not every man who pays for sex at Madam Theresa’s is a movie star. Not back then and not now.’

I thought about Edie up there alone and pushed the thought aside.

‘You think this Madam Theresa is fronting for someone?’ I said.

‘Trafficking doesn’t sound like her style. But who knows? Maybe she moved with the times. Maybe she lived longer than her money lasted. It happens with these old villains all the time.’

‘She never got busted?’

‘Not until now.’

I tried the number again.

But it just kept on ringing.

I stood outside Broadcasting House, where the BBC staff and their guests wait for their cabs, the perfect place to loiter as I watched the Langham Hotel on the other side of Portland Place.

A black cab pulled up and two young women got out. The taller of the two, a brunette in glasses, looked like a London businesswoman with her pink FT and iPad tucked under her arm.

Ginger Gonzalez.

And the other a woman was a slightly built redhead with make-up that made her face almost ghostly in the lights of the hotel. When her winter coat fell open you could see legs beneath a short skirt and leather boots that came up to the knee.

My mouth went dry.

Edie, I thought.