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a complaint against Christos Malamatos.’
    Mo was getting into the swing of it. ‘I mean, it was huge! Down to his knees!’ He made a gesture with his hands like he’d caught the biggest fish of his life. Angus’s smile was broadening. She heard a snigger from over her shoulder and Preston entered. Preston had a perma-tan and a suit that was a lot too shiny for Georgie’s taste. ‘You don’t see one that size every day—’
    ‘I do,’ said Preston, and laughed at his own joke.
    ‘It’s not a problem, really, let’s just forget it,’ Georgie said. Fat chance. She felt her cheeks begin to flame again. The story of how she’d had an eyeful would be round the force like food poisoning round cousin Gary’s wedding. They would rib her about this for years to come, undermining her struggles to be taken seriously and left to do her job. At that moment she hated Christos Malamatos.
    There was a long pause as they waited for Preston to pick up a pile of paper from a chair and put it on the floor, wipe the seat with his hand and sit down, unbuttoning his jacket carefully as he did so.
    ‘So, impressions?’ Angus asked.
    Mo took the lead. ‘The flat’s unbelievable, like a fancy Fort Knox. You can see the whole of London from up there. There’re video cameras everywhere. You can’t get out of the flat without typing in a code and you can’t let anybody in without doing the same. You can’t get in or out of the flat unless the person who programmes it wants you to.’
    ‘Are the offices the same, Preston?’ asked Angus. Preston had led the team that had gone to the Malamatos shipping offices.
    He kept them waiting a good while as he thought about an answer. ‘No. They have standard office security, that’s all.’ He paused, a sly grin widening across his tanned cheeks. ‘Ooh. What’s he hiding?’
    Georgie spoke up. ‘The office at the house was locked, but there was only standard security on the laptop we took.’
    Angus thumped his paper baton on the desk. ‘OK, so what have we got? An anonymous phone tip-off about illegally harvested Brazilian rosewood which is shipped to London using fake export licences. We’ve got a whole can of it impounded here that came off the ship mentioned by the source. We’re looking for patterns, we need to know how much we’re dealing with and what the scale of his operation is. Now, before you think this is only wood, it’s not girls or guns or drugs—’
    Preston let out a sarcastic cheer and Georgie wished that Angus hadn’t smiled. His flashes of childish inconsistency punctured her fantasies of him. She didn’t think he’d like to know that behind his back they called him Anguish. Preston added insult to injury by looking across at her and winking.
    ‘The margin on illegal tropical hardwood is better than drugs – think about that,’ Georgie added, giving Preston her best dagger stare.
    ‘Indeed,’ added Angus. ‘This guy’s not a pusher on a street corner, but he could well be making more money than one.’
    ‘Jungle hardwood is called green gold, I heard,’ Georgie added. ‘For all we know we might have ourselves a rosewood kingpin.’
    ‘We know the rep this guy’s got, right?’ said Preston. ‘He’s a proper wrong’un.’ He exchanged a look with Mo. ‘There was that allegation about GBH that was made by someone working here last year, but then the guy dropped the charges and left the docks. Word was that he had been leaned on.’
    ‘You think that’s bad?’ Mo began. ‘About three years ago, there was that potentially huge case involving the Ecuadorian government, wasn’t it? And the whistleblower ended up drowned at Gallion’s Reach?’ The men in the room nodded as they remembered. ‘An open verdict was recorded, but you know the bar talk—’
    ‘Well, you don’t,’ interrupted Preston with a grin.
    ‘No, I don’t personally, since I never go in pubs, but you get my drift. We’re dealing with a right fucker here, pardon my