‘That’s not so many,’ Krasic objected. ‘We can supply many more.’

‘Maybe so, but that’s all I need. If this goes as well as I expect, it’s entirely possible that I will expand my operation. A lot depends on my source for the paperwork. I’m getting top-class documentation, and I don’t want to risk that by taking the pitcher to the well too often. So, for now, it’s twenty bodies a month. Take it or leave it, Mr Krasic’ Carol had no difficulty in sounding tough. She’d spent enough hours in interview rooms with hard cases to have honed her skills in that area. She accompanied her words with a level gaze and unsmiling expression.

‘Those numbers will be fine,’ Tadeusz said. Thirty in the first shipment followed by twenty a month. Yes, we could use an outlet for more than that, but frankly I’d rather ship twenty knowing it wasn’t going to backfire than send sixty with no certainties. ‘Now all we have to settle is the financial arrangements.’

Carol smiled. She’d done it. And in record time. She wished she could see Morgan’s face when he got her next e-mail. Everything was in place. This weekend in Rotterdam they would finally nab Tadeusz Radecki and bring his empire crashing down around his ears. ‘Yes,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Let’s talk money.’

Tony had encountered plenty of clinical psychologists – and cops too – who had built walls between themselves and the distressing experiences their work exposed them to. He couldn’t find it in his heart to blame them for imposing that distance. No sane person would seek out the sights they had to see, the verbal torrents of pain and anger they had to hear, the fractured remnants of human beings they had to deal with. However he had promised himself at the start of his clinical career that he would never shy away from empathy, whatever the cost. If the price became too high, he could always do something else for a living. But to lose the capacity to comprehend the pain of others, perpetrators as well as victims, was a kind of dishonesty, he believed.

The sheaf of papers he had brought back from Schloss Hochenstein stretched that credo almost to breaking point. The dispassionate lists of names, diagnoses and so-called treatments conjured up such a vision of hell that he found himself wishing he could assimilate the material with calm scientific objectivity. Instead, he felt harrowed to his very core. Simply being in possession of this information was enough to steal sleep from his nights for a long time to come, he knew only too well.