The traffic zoomed by. It was very cold and I was very tired. I wanted to be under the same roof as my daughter and my dog. I wanted to be away from the liars and the desperate. I wanted to be home.

‘OK, bruv,’ the driver said.

‘And one more thing,’ I said.

His fat face waited patiently for my instructions.

‘Stop calling me your brother,’ I said.

11

When I got to West End Central the next morning, Dejan Jovanović of the Serbian embassy was waiting for me alone.

‘Where’s the boy?’

He looked at me apologetically.

‘What’s the expression? Our young Mr Novak has done a runner.’

I could not believe it. It’s a ten-minute walk from the Embassy of the Republic of Serbia at 28 Belgrave Square to 27 Savile Row. It should have been simple.

‘How can he have done a runner, Dejan? Your embassy is only a mile away.’

‘We were having breakfast in a coffee shop on Piccadilly. He went to the bathroom. Or at least I thought he went to the bathroom.’

I looked at the cheap telephone in my hand. Nenad Novak’s phone. And I was angry. I didn’t have any great expectation that the boy would be able to tell me anything more about the night his sister climbed into the back of that lorry in Belgrade. But it felt like the kid had condemned himself to a life on the streets of London. The dumb little bastard.

‘Did he say anything else about his sister? Anything about the driver of the lorry?’

‘He again made the point that his sister was coming to London to be a nurse. And then he went to the bathroom. And then he was gone.’

I shook my head.

‘What does he think is going to happen to him here?’ I said. ‘In London – in the middle of winter – no money, no friends, no family. Nowhere to go. What exactly does he think is going to happen to him here?’

Jovanović sighed as though he had seen all this before.

‘Something better than if he stayed home,’ he said.

‘I find that hard to believe,’ I said.

‘But it’s why they all come. You have had peace and prosperity here for so long that you think it is the normal state of affairs. And it’s not. You know, I was a soldier once,’ he said, smiling gently at how unlikely that seemed, his dark eyes twinkling behind his spectacles. ‘No – I was a soldier twice. In two of the wars that were fought after the old Yugoslavia came apart. In Bosnia and later in Kosovo. I didn’t have to shoot anyone. I was supposed to save them.’

‘You were a medic?’

He nodded.