‘We need you to make another run to Dunkirk,’ DCI Whitestone said.

The lorry driver exploded.

‘That wasn’t the deal! The deal was I fingered the driver with the messed-up face! That was the deal we had!’

‘What you do is you drive to Dunkirk and make contact with Troy of Imagine,’ Whitestone said calmly, completely ignoring his protests. ‘Your old radical comrade with the tattooed mug. Then you bring another load into the country. And then you tell us where the drop zone is and then you’re done.’

‘But last time I was down there I told them I was too scared to try another run,’ he said, sloshing tea on to his jeans. ‘Oh bugger.’

‘Tell them you changed your mind,’ I said. ‘Tell them you need the money.’

‘Tell them whatever works,’ Whitestone said. ‘Tell them whatever you like. But – look at me, Lee – you are doing another run.’

‘In your dreams, copper. That was never the deal.’

Whitestone looked at me. I knew she was thinking that we should have had this conversation in an interview room or a holding cell instead of MIR-1. Somewhere with locks and a metal grille on the door. Somewhere with not even the possibility of a chocolate digestive biscuit.

Doing it in a room that wasn’t locked had lulled our bent lorry driver into a false sense of security.

‘There was never any deal, Lee,’ I said. ‘You agreed to help with our enquiries instead of facing charges for facilitating the entry of illegal immigrants. Remember?’

‘What do I get out of it?’

‘Freedom,’ Edie said.

He snorted with derision.

‘You call this freedom?’

Whitestone nodded at Billy. He hit his keyboard and the YouTube footage from the road by the Dunkirk camp began to play on the big screen.

We all watched it in silence.

The men throwing their branches on to the busy motorway. The brief glimpse of the man with the tattooed face standing by the side of the road, the dark phone pressed to his ear almost invisible against his inked features, staring towards the oncoming traffic.

Troy.

And Zlatko Draganov in the last seconds of his life before the oncoming truck annihilated him.

‘They killed him,’ Whitestone said. ‘Troy and those caring revolutionaries from Imagine. All those humanitarians with rings in the noses and bells on their toes. They knew we had ID’d the driver of the lorry in Chinatown. So they took him out. He was going to be given a tug, so they murdered him. Or they did it on the bidding of their masters.’

‘Nothing to do with me,’ Lee Hill said.

‘Everything to do with you,’ Whitestone insisted. ‘Those dead women in Chinatown could have been in your ride.’

He shook his head furiously.