‘Listen, mate, my boss was recruited direct from Manchester. She’s untouched by the Met, just like me. I trust her one hundred percent and she’s a very good lateral thinker. We can sort this; come and see her.’

‘I can’t, Buster. Not until I’ve sorted this out properly. Taylor could have others working for him, too much has happened for me to not rule that out. I’m sorry, mate. I gotta run. Don’t bother with the surveillance team, I’d only embarrass them.’ Tom stood, clapped Buster on the shoulder and walked out of the coffee shop.

He felt bad leaving his friend like that, but he wasn’t ready to come in just yet. So many bad things had occurred, and he couldn’t assess the impact, the potential risks. Could they try to pin the murder of Ivan on him? Who knew what else was at stake?

25

Simon Taylor sat in his office, wondering what he should do with the information he’d just received.

He’d managed to elicit some information from Novak’s file by convincing the clerk he needed it for safety reasons, given that Tom was absent without leave.

Every method he’d employed to try and trace Novak had failed. His bank accounts were silent, his phone switched off, and the CCTV camera which a contact at Camden Council had trained on Novak’s apartment had come up with nothing. Not a single sighting had been reported, and the Serbs were getting more and more impatient.

Adebayo had also been on the phone trying to sweeten the deal by offering him more money to make it all go away. Probably hoping to cut the Brankos out of the deal. He was an oily bastard, Adebayo, but Taylor had said he’d look into it. He’d managed to get the update on the rape from his contact at Ilford; it seemed the girl had left the shelter and hadn’t been seen since. So without the undercover recording and without the girl, the case was dead. That just left the immigration and trafficking case that, as he understood it, wasn’t solid either. All they needed was the SD card, and then the whole problem would go away, and it wouldn’t hurt if Novak disappeared off the face of the Earth either.

In a flash of resolution, he decided he had to use the information he’d just received. He picked up his burner phone and composed a text message, his fingers tapping out an address into the message field.

‘Cameron and Shona Ferguson, Cregganmore Farm Cottage, Duthill Burn, Near Carrbridge.’

Taylor hesitated for just a second. By sending the message to Branko, he would be an accessory to whatever befell Novak’s foster parents. Could he live with that?