From his position near the door, the superintendent cast an eye across the hall, then spoke to Maurice Repton, his DCI.

Repton smiled and checked his watch. 'All right, gentlemen,' he said. 'And ladies. Let's nail the bastard.'

Outside, the light was just beginning to clear.

Maddy found herself sitting across from Draper inside the Transit, their knees almost touching. To her right sat an officer from S019, ginger moustache curling round his reddish mouth; whenever she looked away, Maddy could feel his eyes following her. When the van went too fast over a speed bump and he jolted against her, his hand, for an instant, rested on her thigh. 'Sorry,' he said and grinned.

Maddy stared straight ahead and for several minutes closed her eyes, willing the image of their target to reappear as it had on the screen. James William Grant. Born Hainault, Essex, October twentieth, 1952. A week then, Maddy thought, off his fifty-second birthday. Birthdays were on her mind.

Armed robbery, money laundering, drug dealing, extortion, conspiracy to murder, more than a dozen arrests and only one conviction: Grant had been a target for years. Phone taps, surveillance, the meticulous unravelling of his financial dealings, here and abroad. The closer they got, the more likely it was that Grant would catch wind and flee somewhere the extradition laws rendered him virtually untouchable.

'It's time we took this one down,' Mallory had said at the end of his briefing. 'Way past time.'

Five years before, an associate of Grant's, ambitious enough to try and freelance some Colombian cocaine conveniently mislaid between Amsterdam and the Sussex coast, had been shot dead at the traffic lights midway along Pentonville Road, smack in the middle of the London rush hour. After a trial lasting seven weeks and costing three-quarters of a million pounds, one of Grant's lieutenants had eventually been convicted of the killing, while Grant himself had slipped away scot-free.