With a renewed burst of energy he logged on to the online warrant service, a national out-of-hours service which allows a duty magistrate somewhere in the country to examine and approve requests for arrests and searches. It certainly beat the old system where they had to wake up a local magistrate, almost always male, and often travel to his home to convince him face-to-face that a warrant was required.

A miserable, rainswept Thursday morning, 5.45 a.m., found Gillard sitting in his Vauxhall, once again outside the block of flats where Harry Roy and Zayan Lal lived. If this was luxury living they could stuff it. Eleven floors, three columns of steel balconies on each side, except for the penthouse floor where Harry lived, which had a single, somewhat wider terrace over the middle column. He was drinking the last dregs of a coffee he bought at an all-night petrol station and munching a cereal bar while he waited for the two carloads of uniforms with door rams to arrive and tackle the two targeted flats. Simultaneously, another carload would go in to Morag Fairburn’s house. The detective was almost delirious with lack of sleep, and the magistrate who had questioned him over the phone had remarked that he sounded tired. But he had, in the end, granted search and arrest warrants that covered all three individuals, and the information held on their phones, computers and other devices. Additionally he had been granted a search warrant for all premises of Empire of Spice Plc, just in case.

He yawned extravagantly, and felt a wave of sleep wash over him. He reckoned he had about another hour or two of energy left in him before he passed out, and was willing the plods to hurry up.

The sound of the phone awoke him. He hadn’t realised he had dozed off. Control was notifying him of the arrival of the uniforms, and sure enough an unmarked people carrier and a bloody riot van of all things hoved into view. Gillard levered himself out of the car, and the Transit slewed noisily to a halt. The driver leaned out of the window and explained: ‘It’s all we had available.’

A dozen largely beefy officers with stab vests and police-issue baseball caps piled out of the vehicles, looking like a particularly disreputable rugby team. The detective briefed them about the location of the flats, and emphasised that this was not some drugs raid, they should not expect violence, and the men they were there to arrest would probably not put up much resistance.

‘When we get up there, we’ll start by ringing the doorbell,’ he said to smirks of amusement. The officer carrying the ram, a huge, bearded fellow called Tunnicliffe, looked crestfallen. Gillard led his army down the carefully landscaped footpath, past the pretty shrubs and towards the glass doors at reception, unstaffed at this hour.

‘Which one of you is the locksmith?’ he asked the men behind him. No one replied.

The sergeant in charge, a thickset, bullet-headed officer called Platt, said: ‘No one told us we needed one.’ Gillard could hear chuckling in the ranks. Tunnicliffe elbowed his way forward, with the ram on his shoulder and a huge grin on his face.