Hicks slid the omelette out of the pan and onto a plate and brought it over to the desk. Milton followed. Ziggy turned one of the laptops around so that they could both see the screen.

“I just downloaded this from the police,” he said. “Watch.”

He pressed play. It was a video recording. The camera was up high, looking down on a table with four people sat around it. Anthony Jackson was in shot with a middle-aged woman sat alongside him. Two men Milton hadn’t seen before faced them. The room was bland and spare, with no furniture visible apart from the table and chairs. A caption at the bottom-left of the shot read MANCHESTER CONSTABULARY, and to the right was the date—this afternoon—and a running clock.

One of the men facing Jackson spoke first.

“Mr. Jackson, my name is Detective Inspector Richard Wright. I work for Manchester CID.”

“I know who you are,” Jackson said.

“I’d like to talk to you about what we found in the back of your car.”

“Mr. Jackson is not prepared to discuss that,” the woman—evidently Jackson’s solicitor—said.

“I think he’ll want to answer the allegations that we’re going to make against him,” the detective said. “In particular, I’d like him to explain why there was a kilogram of cocaine in his car.”

The solicitor started to reply, but Jackson spoke over her. “I’ve never seen that before,” he said. “I swear on my kid’s life, I have no idea how that got in there.”

Ziggy pressed pause. “Look at his face,” he said. “Just look at it. He knows he’s fucked.”

Milton gestured for him to be quiet and pressed play again.

“I’m sorry, Anthony,” the detective said. “‘I’ve never seen that before’ isn’t going to be good enough here. You’re going to have to do much better than that.”

“It was a fit-up,” Jackson spat. “Isn’t it obvious? The whole thing was staged. The crash. The bloke who got out of the car—fuck, the old woman, too. Why not? It was all to distract me while someone else planted that shit.”

“He’s no fool,” Hicks opined.

“Sounds very elaborate,” the detective went on. “Sounds like the sort of thing that would require a lot of planning.”

“So?”

“Who would do something like that, Anthony?”

Jackson started to speak, then stopped.

“What about the gun you were carrying?”

“I got no comment on that.”

“You know what you’re looking at just for the gun, right?”

“No comment.”

Ziggy pressed stop.

“Minimum sentence is five years,” Ziggy said. “You’ve seen his file. He’s been a target for customs and the police for years, but he’s been too shrewd to give them anything. Not now. They’ve got him with a gun and a kilo of coke in the back of his car. Game over.”