‘The place this Asuman worked was out on the M25. Then she did a bunk and found Ginger in London. She’s still here. You and I will pay her a visit. But it’s huge now, Edie. Human trafficking. It’s bigger than drugs. It’s the biggest criminal racket in the world.’

Edie nodded, pausing to take a deep breath. A wave of nausea seemed to pass. I touched her lightly on the sleeve.

‘You all right?’

‘Bad night.’ She exhaled hard, in control again. ‘Do you know what we do with the bodies that nobody knows and nobody wants?’

‘The official policy with the unclaimed dead? I didn’t know there was one.’

‘There’s not,’ Edie said. ‘There’s no policy with the unclaimed. In this country we get around one hundred and fifty unidentified bodies every year, everything from dead newborn babies to bodies with their heads chopped off. Once the law has had a think, and scratched our heads, and come up blank, then it’s the coroner’s call if the unclaimed are stored at the morgue or buried in unmarked graves.’

‘And you think those dead women in Chinatown are going to remain unclaimed? We only found them yesterday morning, Edie.’

‘But how can anyone claim them if we don’t know who they were? We’re investigating multiple unlawful deaths where eleven of the twelve victims are unidentified – and likely to stay that way because they had fake travel documents. I’ve been talking to the embassies, Max. They don’t want to know. None of them. They don’t want to hear about a bunch of fake passports. It’s not their problem because they don’t even know if it’s really one of their nationals. The only luck I’ve had is with the genuine passport.’

‘Hana Novak,’ I said.

‘The Serbs have found a next of kin in Belgrade. They’re flying him in from Belgrade tomorrow to formally identify Hana.’

‘Parent?’

‘No, both the mother and father are long gone,’ she said. ‘But Hana Novak had a kid brother.’

‘This is how you freeze to death,’ said Elsa Olsen, forensic pathologist, deep inside the Iain West Forensic Suite at the Westminster Public Mortuary. ‘Breathing slows then stops. Blood slows then stops. The heart rate slows then stops. The metabolism shuts down. And that’s what happened here.’

The twelve bodies of the young women lay on stainless steel tables, two rows of six, pushed close together. I shivered in the near-freezing temperature, those carefully maintained single digits of centigrade that make it possible to examine and inspect the dead.

My eyes drifted to Hana Novak, at the far end of one of the lines.

She did not look at peace.