Tom reached for his grab-bag and took a closer look at the items liberated from Martin Green. He first checked the Sig, handling it with practised ease as he ejected the magazine and worked the action, expelling the round in the chamber. The weapon was clean, well-oiled and, tellingly, had a machined gouge where the serial number would have once been. The suppressor was of a professional grade and not one of the home-made varieties he often encountered. He examined one of the 9mm rounds and made an educated guess that they were subsonic hollow points. It was an ideal assassin’s weapon: light and easily concealed, quiet but with enough stopping power for the task. Not readily available in the UK, and very few were encountered on the black market.

Tom rifled through the wallet but found nothing of any further interest, taking out the banknotes totalling £350, and adding them to his own stash. He took another look at the warrant card, the image of ‘Green’ glowering out at him. Tom was sure it was genuine. The warrant number was a little older than Tom’s: no more than a year though, he estimated. It could be the key to unlocking who was helping Adebayo from the inside, so he needed to know more about it.

On an impulse, he picked up the burner phone and dialled a London number.

‘CID Office Kilburn, how may I help you?’ boomed Stan’s familiar voice.

‘Stan, it’s Tom. Don’t say my name out loud. Just talk some crap for a second and call me back on this number when you can talk,’ said Tom. The office at Kilburn was small and anyone could have been listening.

‘I’m sorry, my dear. I don’t think DC Yeung is working today. Can I leave a message for him? I can call you back in five minutes if I can find out exactly when he’s back?’

‘Five minutes. This number, Stan: it’s important. You trust me, right?’

‘Of course, my dear. I will speak to you as soon as I have more information for you.’ The phone went dead.

Stan was a first-class liar and wonderful at placating irate victims, witnesses, and suspects.

Exactly five minutes later, Tom’s phone vibrated.

‘What the fuck’s going on, Royal?

‘What have you heard?’

‘Something about you going rogue, some shit about a death threat, and you’ve run off with the evidence. Glenda’s been going on at me, asking if I’ve heard from you.’

Stan couldn’t stand DCI Simon Taylor, hence the ‘old woman’ nickname: Glenda. They had often clashed but the DCI was fearful about Stan’s influence wrecking his career, so those clashes had been fewer of late.