‘Yes,’ Niall said. ‘They paid me a lot. And they told me not to worry, because their organisation would keep on paying me. They said they really were going to be friends to me. I was going to get right out of debt, they said.’ He glanced up at Jonah, and then added, tightly, ‘I wish I could give you their real names, or some way of contacting them, but I can’t. They became just the collection people, and the numbers they gave me were never answered by them. Always by someone else.’

‘Another team here will need to ask you about all of that,’ Jonah replied, not without a little sympathy. Jonah knew that the National Crime Agency would have a lot of questions for Niall about his contacts, but Jonah’s interest was a lot narrower. ‘What we need to know about now is Friday. Is Dina involved in all this somehow?’

‘Of course she is,’ Niall said, his mouth twisting. ‘I’d stupidly let slip in those early conversations about my fiancée who worked in pharma too. They didn’t touch her while we were together, but then I turned up at a drop-off and it was Dina instead of the couple. She became … They used her to recruit reps. She’s risen up the ranks crazy fast. I guess she was in an ideal position to manage a whole group of runners. And she’s ruthless enough to help dig dirt on her employees and then force them into it. The part that got to me the most was that she was suddenly above me in this scheme. I’ve spent the last four and a half years being answerable to my ex-wife, and having to walk this constant line. Avoiding sleeping with her but keeping her sweet.’

‘But you kept doing it,’ Jonah said.

‘What choice did I have?’ Niall asked. ‘They had the video, and I had money troubles. They seemed to know exactly how to keep me tied in. There was never enough money to get me totally out of debt, and a lot of their deals meant going to expensive hotels or bars, which made it worse.’

Jonah nodded. ‘So tell us what happened on Friday.’

Niall’s mouth twisted into a slight smile. ‘That was a massive balls-up. But it wasn’t actually mine. One of Dina’s reps in Zurich was supposed to take a shipment and got himself arrested.’ He shook his head, his hand coming up to rub his face as he thought about it. ‘I don’t even know who he was, but you could probably find out. He got picked up in a bar for sniffing coke in the middle of the effing afternoon. He rang one of our group, who told me they were extracting his stuff from his hotel room, but I needed to get my ass over there, or their buyer was going to be seriously pissed off.’