‘That everything happens for a reason. It’s not true. Some things are totally without reason. Some things – the things that hurt the most – are totally meaningless. Some things make no sense and will never make sense.’

I felt like she was talking about herself and her son as much as Andrej Wozniak and his fiancée. I was silent, hearing her breathe in the darkness. Then she adjusted her glasses and went on with her story.

‘Wozniak came home to their flat one night and Priti had hanged herself. He was on compassionate leave for six months. He came back to work at the start of the summer, just before they picked up and hanged Mahmud Irani. Did you know that Irani had a daughter?’

I didn’t have to think about it.

‘Wozniak’s fiancée,’ I said. ‘Priti.’

Whitestone nodded. ‘And nobody was ever punished for the acid attack on Priti. At least, not until Wozniak came back from compassionate leave. I suppose someone has been punished now. But where did he find the rest of them?’

I thought about it.

‘He found them among the ranks of people who were just like him,’ I said. ‘Let down by the system. Humiliated by slick lawyers. Sickened by watching evil bastards get away with murder.’

The lights were coming closer.

They were white and blinding and you could feel their heat.

We saw the sweating, haunted faces of the men and women who carried their terrible cargo in a collection of body bags.

‘He found them at the Old Bailey,’ I said.

34

I watched Tara Jones cross MIR-1. I watched her every step of the way. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I thought she might have said something about my new suit. I thought she might give me some secret smile. But she just placed a thick file on my desk.

‘You might need this,’ she said.

It was the original voice biometric analysis of the interviews with Paul Warboys and Barry Wilder. She returned to her desk with her shoulders slumped and her hair hanging in her face, as if something precious had already been lost. But I couldn’t work out what.

‘Check it out, Max,’ Edie said.

She was running the kidnap of Abu Din for Dr Joe up on the big HD TV screen. The black-and-white CCTV footage showed scores of men kneeling in the drab Wembley street as Abu Din faced them in his long grey robes, flanked by a couple of heavies, his index fingers pointing to the heavens, as if predicting rain.

‘Do you want me to fast-forward to the van, Dr Joe?’ Edie said.

‘Just let it run at normal speed, please,’ said the forensic psychologist. We were all looking now. Edie and Billy Greene. DCI Whitestone and me. And Tara, her chin lifted as her eyes flitted from the screen to Dr Joe’s lips.

‘What exactly are we looking for, Dr Joe?’ Whitestone said.