“Right, you both need to hold her down. The squaddies in Afghanistan were doped up with Morphine and they still kicked.”

Lavender took Dee’s head and shoulders, and Johnny took her legs. When he was happy she was restrained, Dave made the one inch cut. The new blade parted the skin with alarming ease. Dee moaned but didn’t struggle.

Dave laid down the knife and picked a pair of alloy pliers with a pointed nose. He had to use non-magnetic pliers when making or disarming bombs, as lots of wires and bomb components would become magnetised during assembly and the last thing you wanted to do was to attract the wrong wire to your pliers.

After dousing the pliers with alcohol and cleaning them thoroughly, he told his helpers to brace themselves. Dave put the closed pliers into the middle of the cut and opened the jaws. The bloody bullet stared out at him. Dee started yelling and trying to move her leg but Johnny held on tight. Realising he didn’t have much time, Dave prayed that his first effort would succeed and fixed the jaws of the pliers around the bullet, then retracted them slowly.

He dropped the bullet on the table and examined it closely. It appeared to be complete. The bleeding was minimal and so, wrapping the jaws of the pliers in a hygienic wipe, he cleaned the wound inside and out. Dee was back to moaning.

Dave would have stitched both wounds if he’d had some means of doing so, but he didn’t have anything close to a needle and thread. Improvising, he securely taped a cotton bud to each side of the wound and had Johnny pinch the sides of the wound together. This caused Dee yet more agony, whilst he taped two more cotton buds across the first two. Satisfied that the framework of plastic cotton bud shafts was holding the wound closed, he reinforced the structure with more medical tape before applying sterile dressings front and back. The task was completed by wrapping a bandage around the leg and tying it off.

Dee was in shock, but there was little they could do about that.

“Will she die?” Lavender asked, her voice trembling.

“No, but she’ll be in bad shape for a few hours. You’ll have to nurse her through it. And make her sip some water. Don’t let her gulp it down, though.” Dave closed the door.

“Johnny, what have we got ourselves into here? We took that girl. We’re responsible her safety.”

“I know, Dave. I felt bad about this from the off, do you remember me saying?” Dave nodded. “Dave, at least one of us stays with the girls at all times, right? When we hand them over tomorrow I want them in good order. I don’t want some mad boyfriend chasing me because we killed his girl.”

“All right, Johnny. Kidnapping’s is one thing, murder is something else entirely. We need to agree to protect these girls, whatever it takes!”

“Whatever it takes,” Johnny repeated, as they closed their fists and touched knuckles.

Chapter 7 3

398 High Rd, Tottenham, North London. Sunday 1:30pm.

Don Fisher and I had been ushered into a marginally more pleasant meeting room, its walls adorned with posters about the collection and disposal of used needles, child abuse and a particularly gruesome one picturing a victim of domestic abuse. Her face was so distorted with bruises, stitches and swelling that she did not look human. It struck me as a little tactless to sit us under that particular poster when Dee and Lavender were in the hands of brutal criminals.

DS Scott joined us in the room.

“Right, gents, we should be moving into position in five minutes or so, but let me update you on where we are.”

DS Scott looked down at a clipboard that had around half a dozen sheets clipped to it. The clip on the top was blue, the corporate blue of the Metropolitan police. The sheets it held were a mix of printed and handwritten, but all carried the police logo.

“At noon Europol launched simultaneous armed raids in The Hague, Amsterdam, Brussels and Strasbourg. Local police forces were also scheduled to hit targets in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania but they won’t report back any time soon.

In The Netherlands there was some armed resistance and five suspects are being treated for injuries. Van Aart instructed his people to stand down, preferring to fight with lawyers rather than guns. In all over one hundred and fifty arrests were made and sixty two young East European girls were freed from a holding camp in The Hague.

France and Belgium reported little resistance, and were equally successful but in smaller numbers.

Here the Metropolitan Police Armed response units hit Pops Holloway’s known haunts and his house. They have arrested eight people on suspicion of drugs, firearms and human trafficking offences. Pops Holloway is under police guard at the hospital, where he is reported as suffering from the symptoms of a stroke, or else he’s faking it. They’re doing tests to find out. We couldn’t find Sonny Holloway, but guess what? His Range Rover is parked half on the pavement outside a sandwich shop on Commercial Road, less than a hundred yards from Tottenham Press. Any questions?”

Don Fisher beat me to the punch.

“Can we go in, then?”

“Yes, as soon as we’re ready. Listen, this is off the record, you didn’t hear it from me. I just think you have a right to know what’s going on, that’s all.” DS Scott leaned over the table towards us and lowered his voice.

“An hour or so ago one of our observers at the scene heard something that could have been a gunshot, he wasn’t too sure. But there has been no activity as far as they could see, and so we’re assuming that everyone in there is still OK.”

I looked at Don Fisher and wondered whether my face had turned as pale as his. We would have been angry if all emotion hadn’t already been drained out of us.

***

Thanks to the Police psychologist, who said that the girls would need to see their loved ones as soon as possible after being freed, to reduce the post-traumatic stress, we were allowed to watch events unfold from close by. We sat in an unmarked white van in a parking space reserved for deliveries to the sandwich shop, which had closed for the day. We could see the Tottenham Press building through the front windscreen. One of the two plain clothes policemen sitting in the cab of the van was wearing headphones with a microphone curling around in front of his face. He was listening, and occasionally contributing to the radio chatter. The headphones were operated by Bluetooth and were wireless, but they were connected to a secure closed network radio with encryption. Just in case anyone in the area had a police scanner.

Commercial Road was sealed off by a sign that read “Road Closed: Gas Leak” and which was manned by a uniformed officer. There were very few people around the industrial area on a Sunday afternoon, but those that were around were inside the building, which was being observed closely.

The officer with the headphones repeated to us what he had heard.

“Armed response has arrived. Their adrenaline is up after a good result with the Holloway raid. They’re moving into position. The plan is a go. The electrician is kicking us off any time now.”

I had to admit, I felt somewhat useless as a spectator. The police were trained to handle such situations, and in that respect I was happy to leave it to them, but I couldn’t help feeling that I had let Dee down. I hadn’t been able to do anything to help her, and I felt frustrated and perhaps a little bit weak. I was also afraid to think of what might happen if all of this went wrong. I had known Dee for a matter of days, yet suddenly the prospect of life without her seemed inconceivable. I had no idea what I would do if anything happened to her, but I knew that if – when – she did get out of there, I would make damned sure I took better care of her in future.