Jaime Raven - The Rebel - The new crime thriller that will have you gripped in 2018

In time that wouldn’t matter, but he didn’t want to give the Old Bill the satisfaction of seeing his empire fall apart too early in the game.

Danny Carver played his part in reassuring the others that the firm would be able to weather the storm that was coming. He put on an act that was worthy of an Oscar, inspired in part by the £500k that had been transferred earlier into his offshore bank account, and the promise that another £500k would be sent in a week’s time.

Danny was a realist, after all. He could see that events had conspired to bring about the end of an era.

Slack had filled him in on the conversation he’d had last night with Carlos Cruz and the information he had subsequently gleaned through Google about the Mexican contract killer nicknamed ‘The Slayer’.

‘Seems like she’s the stuff of legend, Danny,’ he’d said. ‘The media are not even sure she really exists.’

Slack had spent an hour on his laptop and had learned that The Slayer was one of a number of notorious female assassins who were working or had worked for the Mexican cartels.

And from the sound of it they were a right bunch of bloodthirsty crazies. Dubbed Las Flacas (The Skinny Ones), they were now commonplace in the major cartels. They were considered ideal sicarias (hired killers) because they were young, beautiful, reckless, and attracted less attention than their male counterparts.

One glamorous hit-woman known as Juana made headlines in 2016 when, after being arrested, she confessed to having sex with the beheaded corpses of her victims and to drinking their blood.

Others included La Güera Loca , or ‘The Crazy Blonde’ who had appeared in a video posted online in which she’d beheaded a man with a machete. She was currently one of the most wanted women in Mexico.

And then there was the infamous Maria Lopez, or La Tosca – ‘The Tough One’ – who was caught in 2011 and went on to own up to twenty murders.

‘Our girl has more than twice that number of kills to her credit,’ Slack had told Danny. ‘She calls herself Rosa Lopez, but Cruz says it’s not her real name. He says she’s the best in the business but he wouldn’t tell me anything else about her.’

‘I don’t think there’s anything more you need to know, boss,’ Danny had said. ‘For the job you want her to do she sounds fucking perfect.’

While Slack was holding court in Rotherhithe, Rosa Lopez was just over halfway through her flight to London.

She’d managed a few hours’ sleep, disturbed as usual by the same recurring dream that took her back to that morning twenty-two years ago when she walked into her parents’ bedroom and found them lying on their blood-covered sheets.

She tried to wake them and when she couldn’t she just lay on the bed between them, crying and screaming until Mr Torres from next door broke in and discovered the carnage.

The dream was always so chillingly vivid and it served as a constant reminder of the event that changed the course of her life.

She was told later that her mother and father had each been shot twice from close range by an assassin or assassins who almost certainly used a silenced pistol. It was never established how they’d got into the house in the dead of night, but she did find out why.

Her father had been a drugs dealer for a local gang and had been targeted by his own people who accused him of stealing money from them. In order to make an example of him they decided to kill his wife at the same time.

Rosa was adopted by her father’s sister Teresa and her husband Enrique. But she hardly knew her aunt and had never met Enrique before the day they came to collect her.

For a while they were kind and considerate and made an effort to make her feel comfortable. But it didn’t last long. Teresa had three other older children and Rosa soon got the impression that the family regretted taking her in.

Enrique first came to her bedroom two nights after her seventh birthday. He kissed her on the mouth and touched her between the legs, making her promise not to tell anyone.

The next time, a week later, he made her touch his penis and told her what to do with it.

Soon he was raping her on a regular basis and when she cried he slapped her and pinched her cheeks and threatened to strangle her if she didn’t act like she enjoyed it.

It was obvious that her aunt knew about it and chose to turn a blind eye. But then she was also afraid of Enrique because he was a violent, controlling man with a fierce temper.

The abuse carried on for four years, during which time she was farmed out on occasion to Enrique’s perverted friends.

Then, just three days before her eleventh birthday, Rosa decided she’d had enough.

They were sitting around the kitchen table eating dinner – Rosa, Enrique, Teresa and their youngest son Pedro.

When Rosa was handed the bread knife and told to slice the loaf, she was gripped by a sudden rage so fierce that it propelled her out of her chair. A second later she was lunging at Enrique and thrusting the knife into his chest.

He fell back on his chair and she went down with him. Before Teresa and Pedro could pull her off she managed to stab him twice more – in the mouth and in the right eye socket.

Enrique died before the ambulance arrived and Rosa spent the next seven years in juvenile prison where she learned that life is cheap and you have to be strong to survive.

She cultivated friendships with seasoned criminals, especially those with ties to the cartels. And through them she eventually learned the identity of the man who had murdered her parents.

His name was Antonio Garcia and she swore that one day she would get her revenge.

That day came shortly after she was released at the age of eighteen. She tracked Garcia down to a house in Durango and stalked him for several days. He was arriving home late one evening when she decided to strike. She rushed up behind him just as he was opening his front door. She shoved the muzzle of a gun into his back and ordered him to go inside where she quickly rendered him unconscious with a blow to the head.

When he woke up five minutes later he was handcuffed to a chair and that was where he stayed throughout the night while Rosa systematically tortured him.

She forced him to tell her the name of the man who had got him to kill her parents and before he died she cut off his penis and both his ears.

A week later Rosa walked into a bar in Camargo and put three bullets into the head of the gang boss who had ordered the hit on her parents.

After that she was snapped up by the Sinaloa cartel. She helped move drugs, committed robberies and got involved in kidnappings. But it was soon obvious that her real forte lie in killing people. She had a natural aptitude for it, and over time they started calling her The Slayer.

But she didn’t mind. In fact she found it rather flattering. And neither did she mind that behind her back she was also described as a psychopath.

It was true, after all. And it was no doubt why she enjoyed doing what she did.

And why she was so looking forward to what lay ahead in London.

The air of enthusiasm that had prevailed at the start of the day quickly evaporated. In its place there grew a stifling sense of foreboding.

The thoughts of everyone on the task force were dominated by the anonymous text message and its chilling warning.

As hard as I tried I just couldn’t get it out of my mind. The job we did was often a test of sanity, but I felt that we were now being tested to the limit.

At lunchtime word came back from the experts in the cyber-crime unit that they were unable to trace the source of the message, which was what we’d expected.