She looked round at him. Maybe she was his team’s intelligence analyst, a civilian, but what they’d been through together had brought them as close as Quill had ever felt to any fellow officer. He owed her the life of his child. There was something about the paleness of Ross’ left eye compared to her right, about the broken angle of her nose, that made it always look as if she’d just been in a fight. Her hair was cut short to the point where sometimes it looked as if she’d just taken a razor to it. She was biting her bottom lip in that skewed smile of hers, which only appeared once in a blue moon, and which Quill had started to associate with the game, as they say, being afoot. ‘Maybe just the op we’ve been looking for,’ she said.

Quill had caught up with the Spatley case before he’d left the house. The headline on the first edition of the Herald had read, ‘Murdered by the Mob’. Michael Spatley, chief secretary to the Treasury, had been cornered in his car by anti-government protestors, who had forced their way in and eviscerated him. The story had been the lead on the BBC ten o’clock bulletin last night, but Quill had gone to bed thinking, ironically, that he was glad that it wasn’t his problem.

‘Why is it one of ours?’

Ross led him towards the doors of the nick. ‘I have search strings set up in the Crime Reporting Information System, and I check them four times a day. A locked report came through on my page of results late last night, with the heading directing me to the extension of one DCI Jason Forrest. I couldn’t read it, but if it set off my searches it must contain some extreme words, like “impossible”. Around 2 a.m. it showed up on the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System too, so it’s a murder. I checked where this bloke Forrest works, and it’s this nick, which is also the obvious one for a suspect in the Spatley case to be brought back to. I got excited and called you.’

Quill wanted to slap her on the shoulder or fist-bump her or something, but the very urge was against his copper nature. His was a squad created within the budget of a detective superintendent, its objectives hidden from the mainstream of the Metropolitan Police while cut after cut reduced the operational capacity of every other Met department, and the riots and the protests and the outbursts of dissent in the force’s own ranks were pushing the system to breaking point. His team needed a new target nominal – a new operation – before people in senior positions started asking questions about why they existed.

‘And you were awake at 2 a.m. because…?’