The past three weeks had enabled Tom to gather more than enough evidence of the family’s trafficking and prostitution business, much of which he had captured on covert recording equipment, both video and audio. For a week or so, he’d performed a security role at a brothel in Hackney, where Mira had rented a first-floor, three-bedroom maisonette and installed three Bosnian girls in the bedrooms, all of them sad and tragic individuals. The girls were worked pretty much full-on and Mira didn’t like them talking to Tom, so his conversations with them had been brief at most. They were all terrified of Mira and the brothers, a climate of fear keeping them very much in check. One of the girls, Ana, would often come out between clients to smoke a cigarette by where he sat. She was a funny girl, probably only eighteen but looking younger, full of life and with a great sense of humour. Tom always thought that with a change in life circumstances she could have made something of herself, but it seemed that the lure of drugs had put paid to all that. He couldn’t help but feel sorry for her but forced himself to keep his mind on the wider job and maintain a respectful distance between them. She would often flirt with Tom but only jokingly; Tom reckoned the last thing she actually wanted was more sex, given she was at it almost constantly with the punters.

‘Come on, Tomo. You know you want to; I’d be the best you ever have,’ she joked with a happy smile that almost, but not quite, masked the hidden sadness that her grey eyes betrayed.

‘Ana, you are on the go with men all day and night. You wouldn’t want extra, you must be exhausted.’

‘You’d be special, though. I will only charge half-price, as it’s you,’ she teased.

Tom laughed. ‘What would Mira think of that, Ana?’

‘She’d go crazy, the nasty bitch. But she has promised to get my passport back soon so I can go home.’ Again she smiled, but the smile failed to touch her eyes.

The girls seemed to be high on drugs half the time: probably the only way they could get through the days and the constant stream of clients. His brief conversations with Ana established that they had been working girls in Sarajevo who had jumped at the opportunity to earn more money in London. They had come over together, driven from Sarajevo by the brothers and crossing over on the ferry; a similar route to the one he’d taken himself with his mama all those years ago.