And that’s where Spyros entered the picture. He was in charge of getting the cars to their destinations without anyone realising they were stolen. He worked out the routes, manipulated the paperwork and conducted the necessary liaisons with crooked customs officials.

It was largely thanks to him that the operation was so successful, netting the gang tens of millions of pounds a year. But Interpol had been tracking him for a while, suspecting his involvement in the movement of stolen cars. And so it was that, following a joint surveillance operation with the UK National Crime Agency, they finally pounced on him. On his laptop, they found material that incontrovertibly linked him to the theft of a large number of vehicles in the UK. To save himself a heavy jail sentence, he turned informant and agreed to help the authorities infiltrate the gang’s operation so they could gather enough hard evidence to nail the ringleaders. With his help, a sequence of undercover police officers were inserted into the organisation, each one vouching for the next. Bailey was fourth in the chain, infiltrated as a secretary into their modern, airy west London offices.

The place was clean, slick, open-plan. It resembled the offices of any successful mid-sized business. On the surface, the people there were operating a bona fide business focused on the sale and export of prestige cars. They talked in terms of revenue projections and market penetration, pricing strategy and supply chain, lead generation and sales pipelines. They took it seriously. It almost sounded legitimate.

Her job was mundane – answering the phone, taking minutes of meetings, making travel arrangements – routine administrative tasks that she diligently performed whilst carefully fostering a meek and obedient demeanour.

But beneath the boring clerical work, she was quietly gathering evidence against them: secretly recording their conversations, copying computer files onto a memory stick, taking down details of names, places, dates and transactions – constructing a picture of how they operated and who did what, with the aim of reaching that critical point where the police could swoop in and arrest them all.

Despite the run-of-the-mill, almost anodyne, nature of the office, she didn’t let herself get complacent for one second. She was under no illusions as to what would happen to her if the gang sussed her out. She was aware of just how ruthless they were and knew that for them murder was a necessary tool of the business when circumstances dictated.

The day it all went wrong had started out just like any other day there – typing up agendas and sorting out air tickets, followed by a meeting with a prospective client from South Africa. The meeting was supposed to be held in the lobby of an upmarket central London hotel. Meetings were often held there because it impressed clients and promoted the image of the gang as trustworthy, respectable businessmen, which is how they liked to see themselves.

It was whilst she was in the back of the car, on the way to the meeting, sandwiched between two particularly brawny members of the gang, their muscles bursting out of their Savile Row suits, that she realised that something was amiss.