It was said that Clarence Haddock had once cut a man’s throat with such force that he’d decapitated him with a single pull of the knife, and looking at him now I could picture him feeding on the still-twitching corpse afterwards. I knew all about him, of course, but even so, standing a few feet away from him in a claustrophobic room reminded me of the first time I’d seen a great white shark in real life while on a cage-diving trip off Gansbaii in South Africa. A mixture of primeval fear and sheer awe.

I held both their gazes, ignoring the drop of sweat running down my temple. ‘Yeah, I could be. What have you got?’

Wolfe turned to the third man in the room, a big middle-aged guy with long, greying blond hair and a face with more lines than the Bible, who was leaning against the wall. This was Tommy Allen, another of Wolfe’s close associates, and the man I’d spent the last three months getting to know. He was the one who’d brought me to this nightclub at ten thirty in the morning to make the introductions.

‘Yeah, he’s clean,’ said Tommy confidently, his voice a cockney, cigarette-fuelled growl. ‘I had the RF detector on in the car and it didn’t pick up anything. I’ve searched him too.’ He winked at me. ‘I think he enjoyed that part.’

Wolfe didn’t smile. ‘Watch?’

‘I’ve taken his watch, his mobile, everything. Even his shoes. It’s all outside.’

These guys were very thorough, and totally surveillance aware, knowing all the tricks of the trade. Never using the same phones for too long, regularly sweeping their meeting places for bugs, always checking for tails. I’d been hoping to record this meeting using the microscopic recording device in my watch, but now they’d scuppered that, which was going to make my job even harder than it was already. But then, when you were armed robbers turned drug smugglers, running nightclubs staffed by illegal immigrants who were little more than sex slaves, it paid to be careful, which was why I was here.