Morgan sat up straight again and indicated to Carol she should move forward in the file. The next photograph showed a railway marshalling yard. The doors of a freight container stood open, revealing half a dozen bodies sprawled in a heap. ‘Remember that?’ he asked.

Carol nodded. ‘Eight Iraqi Kurds found dead in a container at Felixstowe. Last summer, was it?’

‘That’s right. There had been a hold-up loading the ferry on the other side of the Channel, and the poor sods had basically fried alive as their air supply gave out. They were the victims of Tadeusz Radecki’s latest business venture. It’s questionable what adds more to the total of human misery, his drug running or his people smuggling. But we’re not interested in how many addicts he’s created for our German colleagues to deal with; what matters to us is putting a stop to his involvement in bringing illegals into this country in numbers we can only guess at.’

Carol started to turn to the next picture in the file. ‘Hang on,’ Morgan said. It wasn’t a tone to argue with. She dropped her hand. ‘He’s a big player, then?’ she asked.

‘One of the biggest. He had the capital to get in on the ground floor. And he already had the infrastructure set up. If you’re bribing bureaucrats to move your drugs around with impunity, it doesn’t take a lot more to get them to turn a blind eye to truck-loads of human flotsam. He’s bringing them in from China, from the Middle East, from the Balkans, from Afghanistan. As long as they’ve got the cash or the drugs to pay their way, he’ll take them where they want to go. And where most of them want to go is here.’

‘What happens to them when they get here? Does he link in to some organized network? Or are they just dumped and left to get on with it?’

Morgan smiled. ‘Good question. We think it depends on how much money they can come up with. For a price, they get papers and some even get a job. But if they don’t have enough money to pay for that, they get dumped somewhere that’s already overloaded with asylum seekers and they just join the rest of the crowd.’

‘I suppose it would be naive to ask why the German police haven’t arrested Radecki?’