His hand was inside his jacket pocket. He came out with an envelope folded to the size of a twenty-pound note, thick as a London A-Z. Their hands were low, his body blocking them from any curious eyes. Carol passed him the drugs and took the money. ‘Nice doing business,’ she said wryly, then pushed past him. She looked around for the ladies’ toilet, made her way through the throng and dived into a cubicle. She sat on the toilet, head in her hands, shaking. What the hell sort of assignment did they have lined up for her if this was their idea of an exercise?

Gradually, she got her breathing and her heart rate under control. She stood up and wondered if there was any point in trying to change her look again. She pulled off the leggings and replaced them with the skirt, then jammed the baseball cap down over her hair. She might as well give it a try. Now all she had to do was get back to Stoke Newington in one piece. That shouldn’t be beyond her, she thought grimly.

Out on the street, there was no sign of pursuit. She made her way by a circuitous route to the Tottenham Court Road underground station and tried not to think about what could still go wrong. At least now she didn’t have any drugs on her. Money was always explicable. The only dodgy thing in her possession was the CS gas canister. When nobody was looking, she pushed it into the gap between the seat and the bulkhead of the tube. Not the most responsible thing she’d ever done, but she wasn’t thinking like Carol Jordan any longer. She was thinking like Janine Jerrold, one hundred per cent.

Three-quarters of an hour later, she turned back into the street where the day’s mission had begun. There was no sign of anything out of place. It was funny how, in just a few hours, normal could seem so rife with potential threat. But at least now the end was in sight. She took a deep breath and marched up to the front door.

It wasn’t Gary who answered the door this time. The man on the doorstep had the bulky upper torso of a weightlifter. His reddish hair was cropped close to his head and the glare from his prominent pale blue eyes was unnerving. ‘Yeah? What do you want?’ he asked belligerently.

‘I’m looking for Gary,’ she said. Her nerves were buzzing again. He didn’t look like a cop, but what if this was another trap?

He pursed his lips then shouted over his shoulder. ‘Gary, you expecting some bird?’

A muffled, ‘Yeah, let her in,’ came from the room she’d been in earlier.