The Wo Shing Wo are by far the largest Triad gang operating in the country, although traditionally their power base is in Manchester, while London’s Chinatown has been run for fifty years by the 14K Triads.

I stood up as Keith Li passed our table. There was nothing remarkable about his appearance. He was shorter than average but looked fit and hard. He resembled countless other men in Chinatown who have spent a hard lifetime working with their hands and their back. His expression was somewhere between placid and blank. If you had seen him on Gerrard Street, you would have stared straight through him. But he was the king of these crowded streets. Two goons instinctively came towards me but the nondescript old man made an almost imperceptible gesture with his right hand, and they fell back.

I saw the recognition in his eyes.

‘Detective Wolfe,’ he said. ‘You were very polite to me when I was helping the police with enquiries.’ He still sounded like an announcer on the BBC World Service in the Fifties. ‘As I recall, you were the only one who demonstrated any of that famous English civility.’

‘I thought you were a teacher in China,’ I said.

‘I taught Wing Chun,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t conjugating verbs.’

Wing Chun is the form of Kung Fu that most closely resembles Western boxing.

‘You told me you were nothing here,’ I said. ‘But that’s not true, is it?’

I watched him stiffen with pride. Face, they would have called it in Chinatown.

‘Your colleagues made me feel that way.’

He looked at Ginger and nodded politely.

‘This is my friend,’ I said.

‘We’ve met,’ he said.

Nobody ran a business in Chinatown without the nod from the Triads, although they tended to keep their business among the Chinese community.

‘Very nice to see you,’ the old man said, and went to move on.

‘I don’t believe you,’ I told him, and I felt Ginger flinch. ‘I don’t believe you just happened to be passing and found that lorry. I think you got an early morning call from someone. I think someone else found the lorry and you received a call asking, “What do we do, Mr Li?” Either that, or it was your cargo.’

He stared at me calmly.

‘I was told there was a problem. I believed it was best if I dealt with the authorities personally. Do you seriously think I had something to do with those young women being smuggled into this country?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

‘But you know Chinatown. You see my people every day. And sometimes you see people who are perhaps not completely legal. Shadow people, we call them. Waiters. Cooks. The girls who push the dim sum trolleys. The women who stand in the doorway of the Chinese Medicine places offering a massage. You see the shadow people, don’t you?’

‘What’s your point, Mr Li?’