It was just possible that her fellow Paulinas feared to mention Phoebe. Was she the one who supplied the drugs?

I looked at Guleed, who was obviously thinking the same thing.

So we called up Bromley and sent them Phoebe’s picture to show to Aiden Burghley.

Less than an hour of paperwork later, Bromley called back and said that it was just possible that Phoebe might be the young woman he’d sold the drugs to – maybe. We passed Phoebe’s details on, but asked Bromley to let us know before they took any action.

‘Follow-up?’ asked Guleed, meaning let’s go find Phoebe and put the frighteners on her, on the off-chance she might cough right there and then. It’s always a good tactic – turn up like a horrible surprise. But since she was seventeen we’d have to faff about getting her a responsible adult and everything, and that would take the edge off.

‘What do you think?’ I asked.

Guleed bit her lip.

‘Let’s see if we can’t lean on Olivia a bit more first,’ she said. ‘If Phoebe was supplying the drugs, I wish we knew why Olivia is covering for her.’

‘Perhaps she doesn’t think there will be consequences,’ I said. ‘Maybe she thinks her mum’s going to get it sorted.’

Guleed sighed.

‘She’s a fool if she relies on that,’ she said.

‘Her mum seems to be doing quite a good job at the moment,’ I said.

‘When I was a little girl,’ said Guleed, ‘I lived in a great big house with marble floors and servants to clean them. I remember the marble floors because you could get a rug, do a run up and slide all the way down the hall and into the dining room. There was a garage with five cars including a beautiful bright green Mercedes and every morning my father would climb into the back of that Mercedes and be driven to work.’

Guleed tugged at her hijab, adjusting the fit slightly.

‘Then one morning my mother woke all us children up and bundled us into the back of that green Mercedes and my father drove us to the airport. The next day I woke up in a B&B off the Euston Road. There were seven of us in two rooms and the toilets smelled.’ She made a note in her daybook. ‘My father was somebody important right up to the day he was nobody at all,’ she said. ‘Power in the material world is fleeting.’

‘And yet you became a police officer,’ I said.

‘I said it was fleeting,’ said Guleed. ‘Not that it wasn’t important.’

‘So what did your dad do that was so important?’ I asked.

Guleed snapped her daybook shut. ‘Are we going to lean on Olivia or not?’

‘Just waiting on a location,’ I said, which was sort of true. ‘Where’s David?’