She passed him a photo wordlessly. It was black and white, showing a man he recognized instantly: broad-faced, weak-chinned, with deep-set eyes. The beard was heavier, but then it was an old photo. “Elsinore Mallory’s accomplice.” The man who’d likely killed Billy White and his cohorts.

“Except it’s not,” Alison said tiredly. “Because this is a photo of a corpse. This was taken during Hertzelectric, ten years back. It involved an attempt to physically abstract data from DST Portsdown by parties linked to the Russians, though that was never proven. It went wrong, needless to say. There was some shooting. One of the infiltration team got killed, two of ours hurt, and after the smoke blew over, our friend here turned up dead on the grounds.” She passed over another photo, and Julian sucked air in through his teeth.

“Christ,” he said. “Glad he’s dead.” This was the man stripped naked in the morgue. He looked appallingly muscled, not like a bodybuilder but a man born to strength: barrel-chested, pot-bellied, broad shoulders and massive arms and legs. And so hairy it looked like he was wearing a vest. The photo was also taken from a peculiar angle, which made no bones about the man being intimidatingly endowed.

“Coroner’s report?” he asked.

“Those two photos are the sole surviving evidence of this man’s existence,” Alison said. “And we have that one only because the coroner’s assistant was, frankly, a pervert who liked taking photos of dead guys with their tackle out. The body went missing afterwards. There was no ID anywhere within the man’s possessions either, which also vanished, along with his fingerprints. Nobody could connect our dead guy there with Hertzelectric, or work out why he’d been there to catch a stray bullet.” She thumbed through the file and brought out another photo, heavily dented and rust-stained where a paperclip had sat. This was in colour, grainy, showing someone’s shoulder, someone else mostly turned away—Julian could only really see an unshaven jowl, an ear and tufts of red hair. And framed between them, a woman caught mid-laugh. She could have been the dead man’s sister, although the hilarity made her look friendlier, like someone’s eccentric but favourite aunt. Even with the poor quality picture, he could see the woman’s huge square teeth. Her eyes were in shadow, sunk deep under her brow.

“This was an op that turned out to be money laundering, smuggling, that kind of thing. She was a Belgian, supposedly: importer, peripherally involved and never important enough to hunt down after she—wait for it—mysteriously vanished.” Alison shrugged and plucked the photo back from Julian’s fingers.

“They look so similar. Are we dealing with a criminal family here?”