“I know.” Meaning—and understood—that he’d take it seriously nonetheless.

Alison’s grey cat, Simms, sauntered out of the bedroom and gave them an unimpressed stare, eerily similar to Josie’s expression on his exit earlier that evening. Alison tried to make a fuss of him, but Simms was in one of his standoffish moods and instead desultorily mauled the desk leg.

Julian was going for the dregs of the wine, but he knew instantly when Alison’s body language changed. A moment later she was off the sofa and staring at her screens, as Simms scooted off to hide under a chair.

“Fuck,” she said. “Spiker, just been messaged by my source. Says White’s on the move, means business.”

“Your message-board source. Who you’re not supposed to be liaising with directly because that’s not your job.”

She grimaced back at him. “Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty.”

You don’t, Julian thought, but said nothing as Alison stood back from the screen, biting her lip.

“Word came down from on high, my source says. Then White just grabbed him and they’re on the move. Going to sort out K.”

Julian stood stock still for two seconds, digesting this. It was all unverified sources. He couldn’t ask Royce to go in mob-handed on nothing more than this. Not with an analyst liaising direct with someone else’s suspect source. The whole thing stank of White trying to smoke out some half-sensed enemies, and Royce wouldn’t thank him for throwing that at him. Julian needed something concrete.

“Where from and when?”

Alison was already ahead of him, calling up online maps, London streets on one screen, the messenger window on another. Where are you?

Left club all2gether 6ofus 2herplace now

“Club” meant the snooker hall where Billy White held court, Julian guessed. Alison was already drawing best-fit road routes between there and Khan’s Camden flat. Julian was calling Naia Osmaili.

After a chance involvement in an operation three years back, Julian had cultivated Osmaili carefully, making sure any help she gave was generously rewarded with flowers and those chocolates she liked. She wasn’t in the security services and she only had the haziest idea of what Julian actually did. But from her position as a technical administrator for Transport For London, she could call up footage from every traffic camera in the city’s network, and so much more quickly than going via the police. Not exactly what she should be doing, but Osmaili was a serial voyeur of other people’s lives. Her night shifts were spent illegally recording accidents, crazy pedestrians bolting through moving traffic and, in one case, someone who turned out to have planted a car bomb. Julian’s team had looked into her after the bomb squad had been and gone, and she’d been on his contacts list ever since.