‘I didn’t want to strong-arm you back there in the meeting, Steven, but it needed saying. This was an almighty cock-up.’

‘I can’t agree, Home Secretary,’ said Tennant, sliding one arm away from Thomas and into his navy woollen coat. ‘You’ll recall the Treasury didn’t accept all of our submissions in the last spending round. And that was after we made clear we had gaps in our capacity to deal with the unprecedented Islamist threat, the risk of returners and the new accelerating extreme right-wing threats.’

The Home Secretary gazed at Tennant silently before moving closer. His forehead was a couple of inches away and the smile had dissolved into a waft of stale coffee breath and aftershave.

‘I don’t care about fucking budgets.’ His voice was soft. ‘We need results. We need the perpetrators of this attack rounded up urgently. We need you and your team working all the fucking hours God has given you to find these missing men and deal with them.’

He smiled with dead eyes and walked out with Hogarth.

#

CTOC, St Pancras, London

Bose sat across the table, her laptop open.

‘Two nights ago, Sussex Police pulled over a van near Gatwick just after 1am,’ she said. ‘In the back were six people, barely a word of English between them, and very cold, very dirty and very sick. The driver’s story was nonsense, so he and his passengers were held overnight at Crawley, and interviewed yesterday.

‘It was the usual story. They’d been trafficked on the promise of a job and house and were heading for a farm in Lincolnshire. They’d come over in a refrigerated lorry to Newhaven, taken to an industrial park in the middle of the night and transferred to the van. The driver of the lorry is a Vicki Braithwaite, conveniently away on holiday. So far, so run of the mill. What makes it interesting to us is that there was a seventh passenger on the trip over from France, described by one of the group, and these are his words, as “very, very scary”. He was white, in his thirties or forties, red-haired and bearded, and said nothing the entire time.’

The hairs on Gabriel’s neck were prickling.

‘Go on.’

‘Sussex grabbed CCTV of the handover at the industrial park. It’s poor quality but…’ Gabriel snatched the laptop from Bose and pulled it over. Bose was right, the quality was terrible and the lighting poor. The CCTV camera was looking down at the rear end of an articulated lorry with its open doors swinging in the wind. The occupants dropped out of the lorry one by one. Four came out on their own, two more were helped, probably suffering mild hypothermia, thought Gabriel. There was a pause, then a seventh figure slid out and walked in the opposite direction. Gabriel froze the video. It was a man in dark clothes with a baseball cap. She rewound and watched again. She’d spent hours scrutinising footage of Abu Mujahid two years ago and she knew his walk. Was that him? She rewound again, and again.