DAC Folsom, to nobody’s surprise, suggested that since there was no indication that Christina Chorley had been coerced into taking the pills and that Olivia Thames-MacAllister had retracted her statement, not to mention the complete lack of corroboration that she or her friend Phoebe had been involved, it was probably best to close down Operation Marigold and pass the file to the CPS.

‘Especially given the number of other pressing concerns that have come to light,’ said Folsom.

For a second, I thought Seawoll was going to fight it just on general principles, but then he shrugged. You don’t get to DCI without knowing a losing proposition when you see one, and Folsom was right – there were more important things to worry about.

‘La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain,’ said Nightingale later when we were preparing our case notes. Which is French for ‘Them that has, gets.’

So, goodbye Operation Marigold.

Which left Operation Carthorse, the hunt for Lesley May, Operation Wentworth, which was the fraud investigation surrounding the illegal demolition of Skygarden Tower and Operation Tinker, which was the still open murder inquiry into the unpleasant death of George Trenchard. Bromley MIT, which owned Tinker, was notably absent from the meeting, having dumped their files on us on Sunday afternoon and scarpered. The SIO had given up her Sunday just to get them off her hands.

And then there were the Americans.

It took the Fire Brigade a day and a half to secure the remains of the house enough to recover Crew Cut’s body, which was described by Dr Jennifer Vaughan as ‘suffering from crush trauma’ and by Dr Walid as ‘mostly flat’. Fortunately no other bodies were recovered and the neighbouring houses, while damaged, were declared safe. The neighbours themselves were spooked in a way that only watching three million quids’ worth of equity sink into a hole in the ground can do, and it was only a matter of time before they tried to blame us for it. Even as we met at the Empress State Building, a crack team of police lawyers were figuring out how to blame it on the contractor who’d built the basement.

Crew Cut’s compadres refused to talk when interviewed, and even refused the routine offer to contact the American embassy. None of them had been carrying ID and those who’d joined me in the twenty metre underwater dash hadn’t been carrying weapons when they were fished out. I was pretty confident that when the weapons were recovered they would be the same scrubbed and anonymous Glocks that Teddy and the driver had been caught with.

‘Have we contacted the American Embassy ourselves?’ asked Folsom.

The woman from the National Crime Agency said they’d asked Belgravia not to do that just yet.