‘We shoot tomorrow, but the day after we don’t come up here until sunset,’ Silva said. ‘We’ll take a couple of torches over to the targets to illuminate the area and shoot once it’s fully dark. We need to simulate the conditions.’

‘You’re right. Different atmospherics and temperature at night. We’ll have to account for the variation in humidity at the coast too.’ Itchy reached for the spotting scope and began to detach it from the tripod. ‘I didn’t factor that in. Stupid.’

Silva watched as Itchy packed away the kit. She wondered what else they hadn’t factored in.

The Border Force didn’t hang around and the next morning an email with several attachments dropped into Holm’s inbox. Javed stood by his shoulder as he opened one of the spreadsheets.

‘Jesus,’ Holm said as myriad lines of data scrolled on his screen. ‘Cornish was spot on. Needle in a haystack. I don’t see how we can find anything.’

‘Three months’ worth of container movements,’ Javed said. ‘Ten thousand containers a day, so that’s close to a million separate entries across all the spreadsheets.’

‘This is a nightmare.’ Holm took in the top few rows. Toys from China. Car parts from Hungary. Textiles from Vietnam. ‘We’ll be here until my retirement before we can make sense of this.’

‘Not at all. We’ll pull all the records into one file. Remove the ones unrelated to SeaPak and use a bit of programming to identify any anomalies. Write a formula or a macro or something.’

‘Hey?’

‘Do you mind, sir?’ Javed gestured at Holm’s seat. ‘If I could sit down and have a look. Perhaps this time you could get the coffees?’

For a moment Holm thought about saying he wasn’t anyone’s dogsbody, but then he looked at the rows and rows of figures on the screen. Clicking a mouse button was at the top end of his technical ability; formulas and macros were a foreign language. A coffee and a cake might be just the thing.

He went to the canteen where he bought two coffees and a couple of pastries and returned to his office to find Javed leaning back in the chair, working on his nails with his clippers.

‘We’ve hit gold, sir,’ Javed said, looking overly smug with himself as he gestured at the screen. ‘Took me all of five minutes.’

Holm sighed. He didn’t know if he was pleased or disappointed. ‘Show me.’

‘First, I extracted the SeaPak data. Then I de-duped the port destinations and the ship names, then—’

‘You what?’

‘Removed duplicates so there were only unique port and ship names as the end points and carriers for the containers.’

‘Right.’