Carol turned her head and met his eyes. ‘You take a lot of convincing. I like that in a colleague. People who trust too easily tend to talk too openly, which isn’t clever in our line of business. Look, why don’t you give me a call tomorrow? We can meet and discuss matters of mutual interest.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘I don’t think we have a mutual interest. At least, not in terms of business. But I think I might like to meet you again.’

Carol shook her head. ‘This is a business trip for me. I don’t have time to waste on social engagements.’

‘That’s a shame,’ he said, his face guarded now.

The applause began to die away and she reached down for her evening bag. ‘Look, Colin had problems with his end of your joint operation. He was good at promising but he couldn’t always deliver. That’s probably why he’s dead now. The people you sent to him, they expected him to supply them with documentation. That’s what they’d paid through the nose for, after all. But he didn’t have a proper source. That’s why he was always setting them up to get caught.’

Tadeusz’s eyebrows rose slightly. ‘Is this supposed to mean something to me?’

‘I don’t know. I have no idea if you were aware of what he did with the illegals after you passed them on, but he was skating on thin ice. Eventually the immigration service was bound to cotton on to his connection with all these little sweatshops that kept getting raided.’ Carol gave him a questioning look. ‘Especially since the raids were engineered by Colin himself, whatever he may have said to the contrary.’

She could see she had him now. He might still have a condescending smile on his face, a look of puzzlement in his eyes, but he didn’t want her to stop.

‘I’m different,’ she continued. ‘I never promise what I can’t deliver.’ She opened her evening bag as the opera house lights came up, and took out what she thought of as the ace up her sleeve. It was an Italian passport. When she’d asked Morgan whether it was a fake or the real thing, he’d simply smiled and said, ‘It’s not going to get you into trouble. Whatever checks Radecki makes, it’ll come up clean.’

She held it out to him. ‘An act of good faith. I can get hold of as many of these as I need, within reason. You bring me people who can pay the price, and I’ll make sure I keep my end of the bargain.’