Whitestone called. I was expecting to be told to bring Dasher over immediately, but it was nothing to do with the dog.

‘I’ve sent you a link,’ she said. ‘Watch it and call me back.’

The link took me to YouTube footage that was filmed by the side of a busy road. Above the noise of a constant stream of heavy lorries, I could hear the voices of excited men in French and English and sub-Saharan languages that I didn’t know.

The camera panned briefly to a sign above the road.

GRAND PORT MARITIME DE DUNKERQUE

There was a date stamp in the corner of the screen. It took me a moment to realise that it was the same day that Edie and I went to the camp in Dunkirk and this was the road to the port from the direction of Grand-Synthe. The camera bounced between the faces of the men – mostly African faces, all young and male, all wrapped up for a bitter north European winter – as they merrily threw large branches of trees into the busy road. They were laughing and I could tell that it was not the first time they had attempted to slow down a lorry for long enough to clamber into the back.

They were not having much luck. The giant lorries barrelled over the scraps of trees they tossed into their paths. Sometimes I heard a lorry driver cursing the men as he tore past, and the men by the side of the road cursing the mothers of the lorry drivers.

And then, as the men paused in their efforts, the camera’s eye settled with mild curiosity on a man standing alone further down the road, just above the hard shoulder, on the slope of the dead grass that led up from the motorway.

The man’s face was stained with multiple tattoos, and he pressed a phone to his ear as he looked towards the oncoming traffic.

Troy.

And fifty metres beyond Troy, there was another dark figure, also alone, but standing much closer to the roaring traffic.

And I saw that it was Zlatko Draganov standing on the hard shoulder, staring across the road at something.

Staring across the road at me.

Then Troy abruptly stepped back.

And the men who had thrown their branches into the road were screaming, and scrambling away from the road, running for their lives, and the camera swung wildly, veering to the sky and the ground and swerving somewhere between, and when it finally regained control of itself it followed the path of a lorry that had roared past on the hard shoulder and narrowly missed the men throwing branches into the road.

The vehicle seemed to accelerate as it closed the short distance to Zlatko Draganov. It was on him in a broken fragment of a second, smashing into him with a force that hurled him into the air and into the thick of the traffic.