He couldn’t believe how sloppy the bastard had been.

‘All out in the open,’ he murmured, to the unhearing Shishani, as he went through the kitchen cupboards. ‘Too fucking comfortable, mate, and now look at you.’ He shook his head. ‘Let that be a lesson, you soft twat.’

Next he searched the dead man, and removed his wallet.

It contained cash, credit cards and receipts.

‘Excellent,’ said Carr.

He took a small vial from his pocket, and opened it. The cap had an integral swab-stick, which he used to collect a decent amount of Shishani’s blood, for DNA analysis.

He screwed the lid back on and chucked the vial into the daysack.

Then he took out the device Nicholls had given him and placed the Chechen’s fingers onto the screen, scanning them in turn.

Finally, Carr picked up Shishani’s iPhone.

It was locked, so he knelt down next to the dead man and pressed the lifeless, still-warm thumb of his left hand onto the unlock button.

It was a long-shot, but any man stupid – or arrogant – enough to eat in the same place every Friday night thought that he was bulletproof, metaphorically-speaking, so…

Nothing.

Carr did the same with the right thumb.

The phone woke up.

Carr chuckled and shook his head.

‘Seriously?’ he said, under his breath.

He checked the iPhone’s battery – 92%, more than enough that it wouldn’t die on the journey ahead of him – and went into Settings, where he switched the ‘Auto lock’ setting to ‘Never’, and pocketed it.

Carr took a final look around, his eyes sweeping everywhere, in every room.

Nothing.

It was a while since he’d performed an SSE, but he was confident he’d got everything there was to get.

Satisfied, he zipped up the bag, picked it up and walked to the flat door.

The spyhole told him that the hallway was empty, so he pulled on the motorcycle helmet, hefted the daysack onto his back, and left, unhurriedly, pulling his bike gloves on over the latex ones as he went.

In the street below, the warm night air on his face, he smiled.

‘We have your man with the dark eyes at an address in Tuscany,’ Nicholls had told him, twenty-four hours earlier. ‘Do you fancy it?’

There was only one answer to that question.

Carr was in deep now, deeper than he’d ever though he’d be.

But bringing men like Argun Shishani before the courts, so that expensive lawyers could argue about his punishment before the British taxpayer paid for a bed and three square meals a day for the rest of his life – the time for messing around with shit like that was over.