‘So far, things have checked out. My associates are still asking around, but I’m someone who sets great store by gut reactions. And I have a good reaction to you, Caroline. You’re clearly smart, you’re cautious but you can be bold when that is what will get results.’

Carol made a mock salute with her glass. ‘Thank you, kind sir. I’m glad to see we operate in the same way. Because, in spite of all the good things I’d heard about you, if I hadn’t taken to you on that first meeting, I’d have disappeared into the night and you’d never have seen me again.’

He draped his arm along the stern rail, not quite touching her, but making a statement of physical closeness nevertheless. ‘That would have been a pity.’

‘It would have cost you a lot of hassle that I can save you,’ she said, firmly bringing the conversation back to the purely professional. It didn’t hurt her campaign if Radecki started to fall for her, but she had to play hard to get, to keep him at arm’s length. She couldn’t afford to let romance blossom to a point where it would start to seem odd that she wasn’t sleeping with him. Even if she wanted to, which she reminded herself forcibly she did not, it would destroy her mission, devaluing everything she had found out about him and his business. If Radecki could demonstrate that they’d been to bed together, it would be a gift to a defence lawyer, turning her testimony from the reliable evidence of a respected police officer into the bitter revenge of a woman scorned. Besides, it would be utterly unprofessional. And Carol didn’t do unprofessional.

‘You think so?’

‘I know so. You were delivering between twenty and thirty illegal immigrants a month to Colin Osborne. The only trouble was that Colin bullshitted you about what he could actually supply. He didn’t have access to the kind of paperwork your customers were paying for. That’s why he had to double-cross them before they realized he was bluffing.’

‘I didn’t know about this,’ Tadeusz said.

‘I don’t suppose you did. This isn’t a business where dissatisfied customers turn up at the Customer Services desk asking for their money back,’ Carol said acidly. ‘Once they were in the hands of the immigration people, they were either deported or stuck in detention centres. There was no way for them to contact whoever they’d paid their money to in the first place. And Colin was always clever enough to make sure the businesses they were working in couldn’t be tracked back to his door. He used fake names to rent the premises, he always made sure any stock was cleared out before the raids happened. He didn’t even lose the sewing machines. It was a shitty way of doing business.’