He called Liam, who wasn’t best pleased, as it meant a load of work for him to try and preserve what little remained of Tom’s cover. Liam promised to call Neil Wilkinson and fully appraise him of what had happened, and they agreed to meet at Forest Gate nick, only fifteen minutes away, to plan the next move.

Tom sat in his car, the tension rising as he thought the whole thing through. The potential for everything to blow up was huge. He had just violently attacked a solicitor and his brother in their office and deposited a vulnerable rape victim into the hands of unknown officers. He was very reliant on the actions of his colleagues, and his general mistrust of others began to rise to the surface.

The realisation of how easily he had just used serious violence in despatching two criminals also flashed across his mind. He knew he had been justified in the circumstances but how was it that he, as always, felt nothing? No excitement, no fear, no satisfaction: in fact, no emotion at all. He forced those thoughts back down. Now was not the time.

He needed to see what the recording held before handing it over. That was not totally in line with the rules: the evidence should have been duplicated immediately on an official police copier, then the original bagged in a tamper-proof bag. But if he did that, he might not get to see it for ages, and he wanted a view before he wrote his statement. Adebayo was a rich man who would no doubt be employing high-priced defence teams to pick over every bit of what had happened. Knowledge was power in cases like that.

Tom went to the boot of the BMW and retrieved his messenger bag which contained, among other things, a camera case which held an SD card reader that would enable him to view the footage on his iPhone via the lightning port.

He extracted the SD card from the hard drive in its holster at the small of his back, slotted it into the cable port and opened the photos app on his phone. He then clicked ‘import’ and watched as the familiar egg-timer ticked through the transfer of the footage to his phone. Once complete, he pulled out the SD card, tucked it in his shirt pocket, and packed the cable back into his camera bag before tapping the icon on his phone to view the recording.

He watched himself walk into the solicitor’s office and was happy with the quality of the recording: the audio was clear through the tinny iPhone speaker and the footage of the Adebayo brothers was, in general, pretty good. The look on Adebayo’s face when Tom had burst through the door was priceless and there was more than enough evidence to sort the job out, once and for all.