The dust was clearing and I looked back at the house and saw it wasn’t there anymore. The whole front had collapsed into the basement, leaving the floors open and exposed like a vandalised doll’s house. It looked like something from the Blitz, with broken floorboards and haphazard piles of brick. One room near the top had cheerful yellow wallpaper – a cot teetered precariously on the edge of what was left of the floor.

The weight of the initial collapse must have caused the pressure wave in the water which blew out the hole I’d being trying to magic in the skylight. A second collapse had squirted me out.

Barring a miracle, Crew Cut was probably under that lot.

Uniform was pulling back to be replaced by the Fire Brigade. They’d have the dogs and thermal sensors out as soon it was safe.

‘Oh, shit,’ I said.

Guleed looked at me, at the remains of the house, and then back at me.

‘Not one word,’ I said. ‘Not one.’

The Custody Sergeant sighed when she saw the remains of Crew Cut’s crew.

‘I should have known when I was well off,’ she said.

The Americans all maintained a stoic silence, which bothered the Custody Sergeant not all. She just wrote ‘refused’ in every box, made sure they were all DNA’d and live scanned and banged them up. To avoid confusion they were marked up on the electronic white board as Male: anon – ‘Teddy’;Male: anon – blond ;Male: anon – eyebrow scar .

The Americans were all adults, foreigners, and had been caught red-handed – so they could wait. Phoebe Beaumont-Jones being seventeen and – since we didn’t have direct evidence of her drug dealing yet – a witness rather than a suspect, had to be interviewed immediately. So, after I’d pulled some dry clothes from the emergency bag I keep under the shared desk in the Outside Inquiry room, I joined Guleed in the Achieving Best Evidence suite to do just that. Anyone looking for a place to kip tonight was going to have to snooze at their desk like everybody else.

Phoebe had refused her stepmum as her responsible adult.

‘Frankly I’d rather go to prison,’ she’d said. And her dad was still abroad, so we ended up with a young solicitor from the local criminal law specialist. The solicitor was white, presentable and spoke with an affected South London accent that didn’t fool anyone, except maybe Phoebe.

After caution plus two we could have gone straight to the business with the drugs. But our priority – as determined by the senior officers even now monitoring us from the video suite – was to find out what the fuck the Americans had wanted.

Phoebe said she had no idea.

‘I was downstairs by the pool,’ she said. ‘And they just appeared.’

‘They’ being Crew Cut, who finally identified himself as Dean, and his merry men.

They’d asked her about her eBay activities.