The woman pointed to a silver bin which the man opened while she pulled down the window blind. It was empty, the black bin liner inside unused. He shook his head and then pulled open the fridge door. The rectangle of light dazzled their eyes. Inside was an unopened carton of long-life orange juice and a sealed block of supermarket cheese. No fresh food, no signs that anyone was living here. The owner hadn’t left in a hurry either. This place had been tidied up and cleaned. There were no abandoned cups, no dirty plates.

The pair crept into the hallway. The woman’s torch cast a narrow beam across the floor and onto a scattering of junk mail addressed to Rodney J. Houghton. They stood in silence, ears straining for any noise upstairs. But there was nothing. The woman opened the door to the tiny cloakroom by the front door and lifted the lavatory seat. She smelt the pine before her eyes registered that the water was green from a squirt of lavatory cleaner around the rim. The house had been abandoned by someone who knew that they would be away for a few days. Someone meticulous who didn’t like loose ends. She removed a sealed plastic bag from her pocket and began to take swabs from the toilet seat, toothbrush and towels.

#

CTOC, St Pancras, London

The woman from the Home Office was insistent.

‘I’m sorry, Detective Superintendent, but we need the briefing note urgently. The Home Secretary has asked for it personally.’

Gabriel forced herself to be calm. The woman’s sing-song voice was intensely grating. ‘And as I explained, I don’t have the resources right now to prepare a briefing note.’

‘And what do I tell the Home Secretary?’

‘To be honest, I don’t actually care. I’m too busy chasing down real terrorists today to do your paperwork.’ She slammed down the phone and clicked open the transcript of the interviews with the two migrants smuggled into the UK in the refrigerated lorry.

The first interview, with a Sudanese young man probably no older than eighteen, was hopeless. He had clammed up and said nothing of value. The second, with an Iranian journalist, was more promising. He had paid traffickers to get him to the UK, where he had cousins, on a convoluted route through Turkey, across the Black Sea through Ukraine and across Europe. He had been picked up by the lorry near Lille, and spent a miserable fourteen hours in the back. Gabriel read through his descriptions of his fellow passengers, stopping at the description of the ‘hard white man’. Tanned, possibly American or Australian or, when pressed by the interviewer, possibly English. He was quiet, red-headed and wore ‘a long, old man’s beard’, the Iranian had said. Some of the other passengers had talked about families in broken French, but the white man had been silent throughout.

Gabriel read the description again with a growing excitement and emailed the interviewing team. ‘Get an e-fit.’