‘Tell him where you’re from,’ Warboys told the women. The girls hesitated, anxious not to do anything wrong, unsure of the rules to this parlour game, not understanding that he was trying to prove to me that they were all here legally.

He shouted in the face of a tall, doe-eyed woman in some kind of cheap satin shift.

‘Tell him where you’re from!’

‘Italy!’

‘That’s the idea. You!’

‘France.’

‘Latvia.’

The women were forming an orderly queue now. They nervously told me their country and then stepped aside, tugging self-consciously at their hair or their pants or the hem of their nightdress.

‘Russia. Student visa.’

‘China. Student visa.’

‘See?’ Steve Warboys said, and he laughed at last. ‘Do you understand? It’s a new century, Detective! And a different business model.’

And then Bianca was standing there, and Warboys roughly shoved her towards me.

‘Romania,’ she said shyly.

And as she turned away, self-consciously adjusting her pants, I saw Steve Warboys’ blood-smeared handprint on her bare back, the bones beneath her skin as fragile as a wishbone.

10

The motorway unfurled into the night, the flat fields of Essex stretching off out into the blackness, TDC Billy Greene silent and sheepish by my side, the lipstick traces on his face looking like a tropical disease.

‘Your fly’s undone,’ I said.

He quickly adjusted himself, and started to stutter out an apology.

‘Don’t be sorry – be more careful,’ I said. ‘They’re all nice girls but they all follow orders. They don’t have the luxury of doing anything else.’

I was thinking about Bianca.

‘Nothing happened,’ he said.

‘I know you’re not that dumb,’ I said.

Just young, I thought. And green behind the lugholes.

I had called in the assault to Essex police but it wouldn’t mean a thing if the bearded man had no desire to press charges when he woke up in that hospital bed.

There was a knot of shame in my gut that I had been unable to stop a pair of career thugs handing out a beating but I could not worry about that now. And I wasn’t worried about Warboys’ hamfisted threats to smear us with snaps of Billy buried under a scrum of lap dancers. The law is not so easily blackmailed. What worried me – what scared me to death – was that TDC Billy Greene was clearly as raw as sushi.

And that was dangerous.

For him. For me. And for anyone he worked with.

‘I wanted to do well tonight,’ he said. ‘In the field, I mean.’ His scarred hands rubbed together, as if he were washing them. ‘I never planned to be a canteen cowboy.’

Just as the Eskimos have fifty different words for snow, so policemen have many names for cops who never leave their desk. Station cat. Clothes hanger. Shiny arse. Olympic torch (never goes out). Bongo (Books On, Never Goes Out). Flub (Fat, Lazy, Useless Bastard).