‘Bose, pull up the records from two years ago. I want to see his phone and internet activity from the moment the surveillance team left him.’

Two years ago, it had taken two days to piece together his escape route using CCTV. The surveillance team trailing Abu Mujahid had been called off at noon and it had taken him less than forty-five minutes to become aware that he was no longer being tailed as he walked around the centre of Basingstoke. At 1pm, he decided to test his hunch by flaunting his bail conditions and walking to the station to buy a single rail ticket to London. He knew that if the police were watching, that was the moment they would have swooped. But they did not. Abu Mujahid waited at the ticket booth for five minutes before turning around and walking back into the centre of town. First stop was a phone shop where he bought a cheap mobile and pay-as-you-go SIM card and made a call. Soon after that, he was picked up by a white van which took him to Winchester, down the M3. There he was met by the driver of a red Mazda who handed over the car. Abu Mujahid took over the wheel and drove to Portsmouth where he was stopped in a random check and where he shot Isobel Harris.

In the days after he vanished, every step in his journey had been forensically examined. The phone shop provided the SIM card details and, after a day, SO15 had his phone and internet records. And it was these that Gabriel was now frantically searching.

She pulled up the report into his phone activity. There it was on the screen in front of her. Why the hell had it taken her so long? She’d bragged to Bose earlier that she carried every detail of his life in her head, and yet here she’d missed a glaring possibility.

Two years ago, while he waited in Basingstoke to be picked up by the white van, he had searched the Eurostar timetable. He had even opened the booking page for an evening train to Brussels before abandoning the attempt. It was clearly his backup plan in case the van could not get him out of the town.

‘He’s going to St Pancras, Eva, he’s getting the Eurostar,’ said Gabriel. This time, there was no uncertainty, just the euphoria of knowing she was right. It made perfect sense. He could be out of the country within the hour on a fake passport.

She called for the map on the main screen. If he had abandoned his moped near Regent’s Park, then St Pancras was a mile and a half away. If he had set off five minutes ago, he would be there within twenty-five minutes.

‘Eva, get two surveillance teams to the station now,’ she said. ‘Prioritise them – the closest non-urgent operations. And get a DI down there to brief them.’