‘It’s evidence that he was there, Glenn,’ Roy Grace corrected him. ‘But not absolute proof. Someone else could have dropped them. You – everyone -’ he paused to look around his team – ‘we all need to be aware that if you say that something confirms or proves something, there is a big danger that in court you could be picked to pieces by a smart brief, who’ll accuse you of misdirecting the jury. The word to use is evidence, OK? Never say proved or proof. It’s the fast-track way to lose a case.’

Almost everyone nodded.

‘So what else do you have on him, Glenn?’

‘We know he’s a Person of Interest to Europol and Interpol, in several inquiries they have running into human trafficking and money laundering.’

‘But no charges, and no convictions against him, on record?’

‘No, Roy.’

‘The Channel’s not turning out to be a very good hiding place, is it?’ Bella Moy commented. ‘If you want to hide a body or an engine, you’d do better to plonk it in the middle of Churchill Square. At least someone might nick it for you!’

‘I’d like to pull him in for questioning, get a search warrant, go through his residence, get his phone details,’ Branson went on.

‘Because of a couple of dog-ends at Shoreham Harbour and an abandoned outboard motor?’ Grace quizzed.

‘Because he was watching the Scoob-Eee through binoculars. Why was he doing that? It’s an old fishing boat, what was so special about it – before the dead teenagers were hauled up on to it? I have a hunch about this man, Roy.’

‘Is the boat salvageable?’ Grace asked.

‘Yes, but it would be a big operation, and extremely expensive. I went through it with Tania Whitlock. I think you’d have a hard time selling the cost to ACC Vosper.’

‘If your hunches are right, you’re going to need evidence he was on that boat – someone who saw him, or something forensic, or something belonging to him.’

Branson looked pensive. ‘Perhaps they could dive on it again and do a thorough search.’

Grace thought for some moments. ‘Do you have any ideas on what his involvement might be, Glenn?’

‘No, chief, but I’m certain he has a connection. And I think we should move on him quickly.’

‘OK,’ Grace agreed. ‘Get a search warrant, but you’ll need to beef up the application a bit. Then see if he’ll talk voluntarily – you might get more out of him that way than if you arrest him and he gets silenced by a brief. Take someone interview-trained. Bella.’ He looked at DI Mantle. ‘OK with you, Lizzie?’

The Detective Inspector nodded.

Grace glanced at his watch, doing a quick calculation. By the time Branson had filled in the search warrant paperwork, then found a magistrate to sign the warrant, it would be at least ten, if they were lucky. Thinking back again to his own sighting of Cosmescu’s Mercedes sports car, he said, ‘The man’s a night owl – you might have a long wait for him.’

‘Then we’ll just have to make ourselves comfy in his pad in the meantime!’ Branson said.

‘God help his CD collection,’ Grace replied.

Branson had the decency to look embarrassed.

‘When you do catch up with him,’ Grace said, ‘I think you’ll find him hard work. He’s been around in the vice world of this city for a decade without being nicked once. You don’t do that unless you know how to play the game.’

Then he glanced back at the agenda.

‘Yesterday we established a Mrs Lynn Beckett, whose phone number I was given by our German police contacts, has a daughter suffering from liver failure.’ He tapped the photocopied wodge. ‘These are phone call logs from the German company I went to see today, Transplantation-Zentrale. I’m not meant to have them, officially, so we’ll have to handle them a bit delicately, but that won’t hinder us.’

He sipped his coffee, then went on.

‘I’ve found nine outgoing calls to Lynn Beckett’s landline number, and four incoming calls received from it, in the past three days, and a further two outgoing calls to her mobile phone.’

‘Do you have any recordings of the calls, Roy?’ Guy Batchelor asked.

‘Unfortunately not. They have similar privacy laws to us. But they’re working on authorization, which should come through any time now.’

‘Probably different in Adolf’s day,’ mumbled Potting.

Grace shot him daggers, then said, ‘I met with a woman called Marlene Hartmann, head of the German organ broking firm, Transplantation-Zentrale, in Munich this morning. They’re doing business in England right under our noses! We need to find very urgently where they are operating here. This flurry of activity with Mrs Beckett indicates something’s brewing and-’

Potting’s mobile phone suddenly rang, playing the Indiana Jones theme tune. Blushing, he glanced at the display, then stood up, muttered, ‘This might be relevant – Romania!’ and stepped out of the room.

‘And we probably have very little time to find where they are doing this,’ Grace continued. ‘I’ve been making some calls around the medical world, trying to understand exactly what would be needed for an organ transplant facility, whether temporary or permanent.’

‘A large team, Roy,’ Guy Batchelor said. ‘When we were interviewing Sir Roger Sirius, he said -’ he paused to flip a couple of pages back through his notebook – ‘you’d need a minimum of three surgeons, two anaesthetists, a bare minimum of three scrub nurses, and a 24/7 intensive care team including several trained in transplant aftercare.’

‘Yes, in total fifteen to twenty people,’ Grace said. ‘And they need a minimum of one fully equipped operating theatre and a full intensive care unit.’

‘So we have to be looking at a hospital,’ Nick Nicholl said. ‘Either a National Health or a private one.’

‘We can rule out the National Health. It would be virtually impossible to get an illegal organ like a liver through the system,’ said DI Mantle.

‘How sure are we of that?’ Glenn Branson asked.

‘Very sure,’ Lizzie Mantle said. ‘The system is pretty watertight. To slip an organ through the system, an awful lot of people would have to know about it. If it was just one person, that might be different.’

Branson nodded pensively.

‘I think we’re looking at a private hospital or clinic,’ Grace said. ‘There must be drugs specific to human organ transplants – we need to identify what those are, who makes them and supplies them, and then take a look at the private hospitals and clinics they’re sold to.’

‘That’s going to take time, Roy,’ DI Mantle said.

‘There can’t be that many drugs, or suppliers of them, and not that many end users,’ Grace said. He turned to the researcher, Jacqui Phillips. ‘Can you make a start on that right away? I’ll get you some more helpers, if you need it.’

Norman Potting came back into the room. ‘Apologies,’ he said. ‘That was a colleague of my contact in Bucharest, Ian Tilling.’

Grace signalled for him to continue.

‘He is attempting to tail a young Romanian woman – a teenager called Simona Irimia – who, he believes, is in the process of being trafficked, imminently, possibly tonight or tomorrow, to the UK. His colleague has emailed me a set of police photographs of the person he believes to be her – taken when she was arrested for a shoplifting offence two years ago – when she gave her age as twelve. I’m just printing them out now. Can you give me a couple of minutes?’

‘Go ahead.’

Potting went out of the room again.

‘If DS Batchelor and DC Boutwood are right in their suspicions of Sir Roger Sirius, we should consider surveillance on him. If we follow him he might lead us to the hospital or clinic,’ DI Mantle said.

Grace nodded. ‘Yes, excellent point. Do we know what manpower the DIU have available?’

‘They have a major op on,’ Mantle replied. ‘So it might be tricky.’

The Divisional Intelligence Unit was the covert surveillance arm of the CID. They focused mainly on drugs, but increasingly their work involved human trafficking as well.