Tom wondered how the girl was doing. The Met had vastly improved its handling of sexual offences over recent years, and he assumed it would be one of the Sapphire Teams that would investigate. Jeta would hopefully be at one of the rape suites: so-called havens, where she’d be forensically examined and emotionally supported. Tom had found that the quality of the investigators varied widely on Sapphire Teams, but there were some good cops who specialised in dealing with the victims.

He couldn’t help but feel sorry for Jeta. She’d seemed so naïve and vulnerable, and the process of a rape investigation was intrusive, to say the least, with a medical examination as well as her having to re-live the incident in detail as her statement was taken.

Tom found Liam again, still nursing a tea in the canteen that was now a little busier, being close to the end of late-turn.

He handed his notebook over and said, ‘It’s all in there, Liam. Hopefully, with the recording, that’s more than enough.’

Liam briefly looked through the book without comment. It was fully accepted that, after a stressful incident, an undercover officer’s notes may suffer a little and a second pair of eyes were always valuable.

Liam seemed satisfied, however. ‘That’s fine, Tom. I’ll get these over to the team at Ilford. You may as well go home. I doubt much will happen with the prisoners at this time of the night; not until they’ve done the first recall with the victim and she’s been examined. I’ll call you tomorrow. Leave the liaison with the team to me: you’re a bit too close to this job. It would have been nice to distance you before the team struck.’

Tom had to agree on that point. On other deployments he had been able to muddy the waters a little and create some distance from the informant. It wasn’t so troubling in this particular case as Ivan had only introduced Tom to Luka as a potential sparring partner, and that was quite a few months ago. It had been Luka himself who had made the offer of participation in crime, so the informant had a big outer on that front. Ivan just needed to say that he didn’t know that Tom was working with the brothers: he just thought they were fighting partners.

‘Hey-ho,’ said the Irishman. ‘Not much we can do about it now. Good job, Tom. Now get yourself home: you look tired.’

Tom did feel a little jaded. It had been an unusual and tiring deployment; the brothers had been stressful company and he would be glad to be away from them. One thing he was sure of, though, was that Adebayo would be moving heaven and earth—whether in prison or not—to find out how an undercover officer had ended up in his office.

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