A uniformed officer held a box of Weetabix upside down and shook out red rolls of fifty-pound notes bound tight with elastic bands. There were more bundles of fifties in the tea, the sugar, in every corner we looked. A Specialist Search Team would do a search of the property that would take up floorboards, look in the ceiling and punch holes in the walls. But it felt like we hardly needed them.

Everywhere we looked, we found those neat rolls of fifties, and the smiling face of the Queen.

As they dragged Paul Warboys away I felt the weight of the sap in my hand, enjoying the slap of it on my palm, and I watched the sun rise above the river where his father had worked on the docks.

They called me when he was out of the hospital and tucked up in the holding cell.

Paul Warboys sat on the washable plastic bed in that cream-coloured room as if it was familiar territory. But he looked beyond tired, and it was more than waiting up all night for us to kick down his door, it was more than going a few rounds with coppers who were half a lifetime younger than him, and it was more than the concussion he got from the butt of the AFO’s assault rifle.

The old gangster looked as though he was at the end of everything.

‘I thought you were above living on immoral earnings, Paul. You know how much cash we found in your little flat?’

‘It’s not what you think. It’s not from Theresa.’

I waited.

‘It’s from London property, Max. The reserve currency of the world. Better than gold. The money you found is rent money. Cash in hand, saves on the paperwork. That’s where my dosh comes from – my tenants. Everyone wants to live here but there are only so many houses, only so many flats. I’ve been buying property all over town for donkey’s years.’

Donkey’s years. There was another one that would die with him and his generation.

‘How did it work?’ I said. ‘Who recruits the women you brought in?’

He exhaled with frustration.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Did you approach Imagine or did they come to you?’

‘What’s Imagine when it’s at home?’

‘Imagine are a bunch of British anarchists in the refugee camps of northern France. They don’t believe in borders. They’ve been facilitating the people smuggling out of Dunkirk.’

He shook his head.

‘Nothing to do with me. I could never stand hippies.’

I leaned across the desk. ‘Your old flame was getting through twenty girls a week up at the Hopewell Centre. What happened to the women who went missing?’

He stared at me with his pale blue eyes.

‘I don’t know what they’re doing up there in the penthouse,’ he said.