The lorry did not stop. The driver – whoever he was – did not even touch his brakes.

And then the traffic stopped and the riot began.

At first the camera dangled forgotten in the hand of the anonymous cameraman, until his colleagues began climbing into the back of a stopped lorry and he recorded this historic moment, the happy grins of men who looked as though they had just won the lottery.

When the cameraman was safely tucked up in the back of a lorry, his friends chuckling contentedly all around him, the view switched to three CRS men giving a beating to a man on the ground between the back of one massive truck and the front of another. The man holding the camera screamed at them in his schoolboy French.

The screen went black.

I watched it all again, feeling sick.

The men happily throwing branches in the road.

Troy standing alone with a phone in his hand.

The sudden appearance of the rogue lorry on the hard shoulder.

I paused the YouTube film here, and saw that the lorry’s registration plates were smeared with the mud of northern France, a simple but effective way to hide a vehicle’s identity.

And finally the brutal death of Zlatko Draganov.

It no longer looked like a road accident.

It looked like an execution.

Then I called Whitestone. The cold Sunday afternoon seemed far away, the cheese-and-onion crisps in a back garden in Islington, the sandwiches and teacakes, the dogs running after the tennis ball. Now there was only the work.

‘They took him out,’ I told Whitestone. ‘Troy and whoever he works for. They used a lorry instead of a gun, but someone knew that Zlatko Draganov was about to be lifted by the law. They knew that we had identified Draganov as the driver of the Chinatown lorry and they knew that, sooner or later, he was going to be in a cell and telling us what he knew.’

‘What happened to the driver of that lorry?’

‘The driver’s in the wind,’ I said. ‘Maybe he got on board a ferry. More likely he kept going. He would have been in Belgium or Holland by the time the French cops got the alert out. Did you see what they did to the registration plates?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘So just to be clear – the death of Zlatko Draganov was no road accident, was it?’

I could hear DCI Whitestone breathing at the other end of the line. She was waiting for me to confirm what she already knew.

‘His death was a hit,’ I said.

20

Early next morning Lee Hill sat in MIR-1, surrounded by our team. He was happy and relaxed, sipping the mug of builder’s tea Billy Greene had made for him. If there had been any chocolate digestive biscuits, we would have offered him one. We made sure he was sitting comfortably. Then we began.