“NELIA MELNIC worked for a man called Trevor Hawkins. Old-style NCA, if you can imagine the organization being old enough to have such a thing. He ran a department out of Cambridge Circus dealing with sex trafficking in all its ugliness. But you probably know that already. Last weekend, Trevor Hawkins was killed in a house fire. Investigators say it was a chip-pan fire, though no one figured Hawkins for a chip eater, unless they were triple-fried in goose fat. Anyway, the body was too badly burned to reveal any signs of drugs, and there were no indications of physical violence on the bits that remained. There’s no forensic evidence of criminal activity, but the investigating team knows that fires can easily be made to look like accidents. That said, there are no signs of a break-in, and nobody saw anyone visiting the house that evening. Not that that means anything. Most of them were either out or watching telly behind closed curtains. His immediate neighbors were away. His wife was visiting her parents in Bath for the weekend. No one even noticed the fire until it was too late.”

“So you think—”

“I don’t think anything, Banksy. I haven’t finished yet. We were concerned about outside interference. And quite rightly. It’s an international matter. But you’ve just given me a bit of information I didn’t have; the NCA doesn’t have. That Nelia Melnic saw a photograph of Keane with a Croatian trafficker. No doubt Hawkins saw it, too. And then Hawkins dies in a mysterious fire. What would you think?”

“I wouldn’t jump to conclusions,” said Banks. “I’m sure that Hawkins and Zelda saw pictures of lots of traffickers in the course of their work. But I agree it might be more than a mere coincidence. Zelda didn’t tell me his name, but she did say that he’s evil and he likes to hurt the girls.”

“Would she have identified Keane for them, too?”

“Probably not. She didn’t know who he was until Annie showed her the photograph of Keane we have. It was the other man she recognized.”

“Tadić? That makes sense. The NCA team are very interested in him now he seems to be spending a lot of his time over here organizing transport and destinations for the trafficked girls. But the point is that this Zelda woman walked by Hawkins’s burned-out house earlier this week. One of our men was photographing everyone who passed by, just in case.”

“I suppose she was curious,” said Banks. “He was her boss, after all.”

“That’s exactly what she said. But would you go to the trouble of taking the Tube to walk past your boss’s house if it burned down?”

“Surely you can’t think Zelda had anything to do with the fire?”