‘That’s a new one. It’s usually models, actresses and dancers.’

‘We don’t think Rabia Demir is working as a nurse.’

‘We don’t actually need any more working girls here, Max. The competition is fierce enough already.’

‘And yet still they keep coming,’ I said. ‘And some of them come to you, Ginger. Don’t they?’

‘What do you want to do, Max? Save her or arrest her?’

‘I want to know how she found her way into that lorry. I want to find out who put those other twelve young women in the back and then let them freeze to death at the other end of this street.’

I pushed the dandan noodles away. I wasn’t hungry any more.

‘I want to find the men who put those women in that lorry, Ginger, and then I want to lock them up so they can never do it again. But I need your help. Where should I start looking?’

Ginger put down her chopsticks and picked up her beer.

‘You should check the language schools,’ she said. ‘If she’s here, she’ll be trying to improve her English.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘A lot of these girls are into self-improvement. The smarter ones know that nobody gets very far in this country if they don’t speak good English. If she dropped the driver after getting here, then she sounds like the aspirational sort.’ Ginger smiled at me. ‘You know, I was hurt that you came to me with that hard little woman.’

‘No choice, Ginger. Twelve dead women at the end of your street. We have to pursue every lead we can find.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I’m still allowed to be hurt.’

The waitress took away our bowls and Ginger fanned out the seven photographs.

‘Just to be clear. My girls – they’re not trafficked, Max.’

‘I know.’

She stared at the images without speaking.

‘Some of them like this life. They like the money. They like the freedom. They kid themselves they’re in some branch of show business. Or they are at that point in their life when they’re lost. And then they give it up and go back to studying or working in an office or they get married and nobody ever knows.’

I said nothing.

‘The point is – they don’t all have knives held to their throat, Max,’ she said. ‘Though some of them do.’

There was a sudden flurry of activity at the back of the restaurant. The manager was fussing over the departure of the Chinese man I had almost recognised. His entourage had fallen into step behind him. And now I knew where I had seen him before.

Keith Li, the man who had found the lorry parked in Chinatown.

‘Please don’t stare,’ Ginger said.

‘Why not?’

She lowered her voice to somewhere below a whisper.

‘Because that’s Keith Li and he is the head of the Wo Shing Wo.’