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up, Merve,’ she said, to Stanley’s husky laughter.
    ‘One thing is for sure, Natasha: he knows what
he’s
doing and he’ll know what
we’re
doing.’
    ‘Just get the best compromise you can, Merve,’ said Radcliffe. ‘Remembering that this Charles Boxer as consultant is the non-negotiable bit.’
    ‘That’s going to be tricky.’
    ‘Will you call the Commissioner now, please, Mervin?’
    Stanley saw that it was 3.30 a.m. and Svetlana was snoring quietly at the foot of the bed. He shrugged.
    ‘This
is
my favourite time to call him, Natasha. You’ve just made my night.’
     
    Boxer didn’t watch Chaves’ final struggle. He went into the living room, decided to leave the music playing and the light on. He checked the logic of the scene: the empty glass fallen on the floor, the man hanging in the hallway above the money spoke of a depressed drunk’s realisation that he wasn’t going to be able to put right what he’d done wrong and that suicide was the only solution.
    When Chaves was finally still, Boxer couldn’t help but feel pity; not for the dead man, only for a young woman’s ruined life. He brushed past the body, pressed his ear to the front door of the apartment, heard nothing, opened it and left.
    The night was silent, the river black.
    He made his way back to the casino, feeling solid again, the hole in his centre collapsed to a pinpoint.
     
    Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Makepeace, the head of Specialist Crime Directorate 7, which contained the Met’s Kidnap Unit, sat at the top of the stairs, listening to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and becoming more unimpressed by the moment.
    ‘So what you’re telling me, sir, is that, despite being the Met’s best performing department with a 99.5% recovery record, we’ve got to let the highest profile case we’ve had in the last five years go private,’ said Makepeace, quietly savage with fury. ‘All these years we’ve been handling ugly little crimes with Yardies, Albanians, Chinese and the like, and now, when the big number comes along, we’ve got to hand it over to some tosser with a fancy office in Mayfair.’
    ‘I know,’ said the Commissioner, sympathising, ‘all they have is a single client from whom they’re trying to make a buck, while we have the safety of eight million people to consider. It’s just politics, Peter.’
    ‘And that’s another point, isn’t it, sir? What if they’re terrorists, these kidnappers? We have defined procedures; what do Pavis Risk Management have? Probably just a bonus structure.’
    ‘They won’t be performing without supervision,’ said the Commissioner. ‘We’re not giving them free rein.’
    ‘And what’s their experience in running a London-based kidnap?’
    ‘That I don’t know.’
    ‘All these guys are experts in Colombia and Pakistan, but what do they know about London? We’ve got all the informers—’
    ‘The kidnap consultant they want to use, like most of these private security company guys, is ex-army. He fought in the first Gulf War with the Staffords,’ said the Commissioner, glancing down his notes, cutting through the fury, edging towards the compromise now, ‘but afterwards he joined the Met as a homicide detective.’
    ‘Name?’
    ‘Charles Boxer.’
    ‘I know him.’
    ‘You
do
?’
    ‘I didn’t know the PSC he freelanced for was called Pavis,’ said Makepeace. ‘His ex-partner works for me in SCD7. Her name is Mercy Danquah. She’s Ghanaian. They had a daughter together but split up straight away.’
    ‘Badly?’
    ‘No, no, very well. They’re still good friends,’ said Makepeace. ‘He left his salaried job with GRM the year before last because he was out of the country all the time. The daughter was becoming a bit of a problem, you know, like all teenagers. Mercy was taking the brunt, so he quit.’
    ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’
    ‘It’s possible. I could live with Mercy being a co-consultant,’ said Makepeace. ‘I’d