Operation Norway was broken apart before the head could be trafficked on and the police had arrested two people: the hooded man, who was local, and an illegal African immigrant, who’d been teaching him the customs, helping him to open up a network of customers for his merchandise. The African was in custody now, still trying to convince the police that his name was Johnny Brown and that he held a British passport. They’d searched him and found he was carrying a key fob with the Tanzanian national flag on it and that the T-shirt he was wearing was by a Tanzanian manufacturer, so MCIU was combing records from Dar Es Salaam to get a hit on him.

‘What’s all this?’ Superintendent Rolf Powers, the head of MCIU, opened the door at ten past nine. ‘No lights? It’s like my teenage son’s bedroom in here.’ He switched on the fluorescents. ‘Where were you? I’ve just done a whole press conference on the Kitson case without you.’

Caffery froze the DVD and rotated the monitor to face the superintendent. ‘Look at this.’

Powers did so. Frowned. ‘That’s Operation Norway. We’ve finished with that. The files should be with the prosecution service by the end of the month.’

‘Watch this.’ Caffery tapped the screen. ‘It’s important.’

Powers closed the door and came in. He was tall, wide and well dressed, and must have been athletic once. The lifestyle had taken its toll, though, and his body was spreading around the middle, the neck. He put the wallet he was holding on the desk and pulled the chair up to the screen.

The freeze frame of Dundas alone in the room before the attack showed another shape, standing close to Dundas ’s head, its back to the camera. It was bent over, concentrating on doing something. After the arrests, when they’d got Dundas ’s head to the morgue and examined it, they’d discovered that clumps of his hair were missing. In the same place on which the figure in the video was concentrating now.