I stared at the photo on the cheap little phone, desperate for more. But there was no more. Until Nesha Novak spoke. He had stopped crying now.

‘One thing I can tell you,’ he said, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. ‘The driver – he did this.’

And the boy clicked his fingers.

8

Click-click.

I placed my right thumb against the pad of my middle finger and pressed twice as I looked up at the wall of MIR-1 where the photograph of Hana and Nenad Novak was blown up to life-size. The driver hovered in the background. Enlarged to life-size it was clear that the scarring on his face was a jagged, asymmetrical mess.

‘What did they attack him with?’ Edie said. ‘A cheese grater?’

She saw me smiling and it encouraged her.

‘He’s no oil painting,’ she grinned. ‘Unless it’s – what’s that one? – The Scream!’

Edie placed her hands on her cheeks, opened her eyes and mouth, and we laughed together.

‘All right, settle down,’ DCI Whitestone murmured, immediately restoring order.

‘The Serbian embassy is flying Hana Novak’s brother back to Belgrade tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I’ll talk to him again, but I don’t think there’s a lot more he can give us.’

I held Nesha’s cheap little plastic phone in my fist. I had promised to give it back to him before he left.

‘And the boy has no idea of the route they were taking?’ Whitestone asked. ‘No idea what the plan was at this end?’

‘Hana was coming here to work as a nurse,’ I said. ‘That’s what his sister told him. And that’s what he still believes.’

Whitestone stared at the blown-up selfie, looking beyond the smiling brother and sister at the scarred man in the shadows.

‘The good thing about villains,’ she said, ‘is that they’re too stupid to stop before they get caught. This guy – Mr Click-Click – he is out there right now. And he’s taking the same chances with lives. I know it. I can feel it. We just have to find the bastard.’

TDC Billy Greene was placing hard copies of the photograph in front of us and I saw the old burns scarring the palms of his hands where he had rescued a woman from a basement fire when he was still in uniform. There was a little stiffness in both his hands from the injury that had not been severe enough to stop him becoming a detective. But it meant that most of Billy’s duties were behind a computer in West End Central and not out in the field. Which always struck me as ironic, as Billy Greene was probably the bravest cop in 27 Savile Row.

‘This image is already with the border force agencies across the south coast,’ he said. ‘If the unsub comes in or out of a major port, Customs and Immigration will be watching.’

Whitestone nodded.