The only people he could find were a couple of guys with industrial face masks re-spraying some car wheels in a lock-up down the street, one stripped to the waist with a Union Jack tattoo on his back. At first they had paid no attention to his polite enquiry about the former KwikFit, but he persisted.

‘Do you know any of them – the guys who’ve got that place?’

The man shook his head and turned away.

‘Only I’m trying to find my brother. I think he may be working round here.’

That got them going. The tattooed man took off his mask. ‘Too many of your fuckin’ brothers over here, mate. You know what you lot should do? Fuck off home, back where you came from.’

Rafiq nodded, as if he would indeed give it some thought. ‘So they looked like me, the guys who worked there?’

‘Yeah, like you couldn’t tell them apart.’

Rafiq gave them a big smile and thanked them.

He had found forty-five garages in or near Hatfield. First he eliminated the franchised dealers and service stations, which brought the figure down to twenty-two. Then he visited each one, armed with enough innocent enquiries to get him into the back offices and have a cursory look round. Of the last three, one was a burnedout shell, the second was occupied by very pale squatters and an alarming canine menagerie – and the third was this one.

On the face of it, it appeared that no one had been there in months. There was an overflowing wheelie-bin outside and the letterbox had junk mail oozing out of it. But to Rafiq’s trained eye, it was evident that the locks had recently been turned, and there was some tell-tale condensation on a small, high window. He slipped the probe of a Borescope inspection camera under the roller door, which revealed a black people-carrier with a current tax disc.

He retreated to the Transit, reciting the registration to himself to keep the letters and numbers in sequence, and called up Cindy in the hangar for a plate check. It was with a company based in Sheffield. Fifteen minutes later she was back on the phone. ‘Interesting. The address for Expo’s in Sheffield, but the company’s been dissolved and the property in Sheffield has been re-let. I got on to the agent for the landlord, who said it was some kind of medical-aid charity. He told me it was wound up very suddenly a few weeks ago. The woman he’d been dealing with, a Leanne Grove, vanished, owing them three months’ rent. He was about to get a bailiff onto it when out of the blue all the money was wired to him from an overseas account. I persuaded him to go through his records and he found it had come from a bank in St Croix.’

‘Where the fuck’s that?’

‘Virgin Islands.’

‘Not famous for their terror cells.’