New Covent Garden is where old Covent Garden went when it switched from being London’s major fruit, vegetable and flower market to being a refurbished tourist trap with a rather good opera house attached. It’s across the river at Nine Elms so I took the Chelsea Bridge as the lesser of two evils – nobody goes across Vauxhall Bridge in the morning unless they’re new in town or working for MI6.

The river was grey under the snow clouds and as we crossed I could see where the portacabins were beginning to accrete around the solid brick mass of Battersea Power Station. The whole area, including the market, was due to suffer obliteration by urban regeneration in the coming years. I suspected the stacked-Tupperware school of architecture, whose work already lined much of the Thames, would predominate.

I turned off Nine Elms into the access road and stopped at the toll gate. I forked over the entry fee rather than show my warrant card in order to forestall any advance word of my coming. That useful bit of advice had come with the ‘pool report’ from the Inside Inquiry Team who’d managed a pretty exhaustive check on Nolan and Sons in the hour it took me to drive there. The access road dipped under the railway tracks and I followed the signs round into the market proper. The market buildings had been built in the 1960s as a scaled-up replica of the arcade in the original Covent Garden, only this time making sure it was dingily utilitarian in concrete and breezeblock. Two rows of arcades with shop-sized units that allowed display at one end and easy lorry access at their backs. When it’s busy I imagine it’s really impressive, but being a fresh fruit and vegetable market the working day was over by seven in the morning. By the time I drove into the complex the shutters were down and the new snow was already thick around the entrances to the loading bay. Fortunately, Nolan and Sons didn’t run to a place in the main market. They operated out of one of a line of railway arches nearby. Their shutters were up and an aging Transit van was parked outside – Nolan and Sons was written upon a sign at the front of the arch and repeated in flaking paint on the van.

‘Tight bastards,’ muttered Zach. ‘Their dad’s been dead for twenty years and they can’t be arsed to change the signs.’

I’d parked the Asbo under the overhang of the elevated railway tracks three arches down from Nolan and Sons so I could observe for a bit without the windscreen getting covered in snow.

I asked Zach why he hadn’t wanted to come down to the market.

‘I got into a bit of trouble last year – my face is banned from the market,’ he said.