We run for the alley. I’m terrified and out of breath, but the rhythm of my pounding legs focuses my thoughts. The image in my mind is not of Deyna, or the lorry, or even Breitner. It’s of a big steel safe sitting in a glass-walled newsroom.

If you are Breitner and you want to pay off a man like Deyna, you don’t just have the accounts department raise a purchase order. That would create a paper trail. Auditors might ask questions. But as luck would have it, he has within his empire a tried-and-tested system for paying out large sums of cash, with no record of where the money ends up. His journalists employ it every day to pay off snitches, celebrities, bent cops and PR people. It’s not money laundering, it’s just ex gratia payment for services and information rendered, so routine that the accountants classify it as generic journalistic expenses. When a nark needs a reward, the cash is withdrawn from the newsroom safe, placed neatly into an envelope and handed over, with thanks. There is a single control over what happens to the money. The journalist making the withdrawal has to write their name and the amount in an innocent-looking ledger. I need that book – and there is a man who can get it for me.

Chapter 25

Chapter 25

THE PICCADILLY LINE TRAIN RATTLES along the tracks, swaying and juddering, sporadically illuminated by the blue light of electricity sparking on the fourth rail and bouncing off the black tunnel wall. The carriage we’re in is almost empty: it is that mid-point between the rush to go out and the plod home. I’m relieved: it means I can spot anyone whose intentions might not be friendly.

Jess is sitting on the worn multicoloured fabric of the bench opposite. She’s taken a ballpoint out of her handbag and is clicking it repeatedly and nervously.

‘If you’re not going to say it, I will,’ she says at last. ‘We’re out of our depth.’

There’s no reassurance I can offer. Whatever false comfort I took from telling myself that I was in the grip of irrational paranoia vanished when I saw the envelope.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asks.

‘Not completely sure. We haven’t quite got all we need to file that undeniable story. Yet.’

Click click click. She hates my ‘yet’. ‘Gil, I’m not sure this is just a story any longer. Shouldn’t we alert the police? We are talking about serious criminality, possibly murder.’