The jobs Percy came up with for Terry to carry out weren’t hard. Mostly they just called for a bit of muscle, to put the wind up one of the chap-at-the-club’s debtors, or discouraging the usually crowded raft of Percy’s creditors – Terry was a past master at the menacing smile. The real, serious stuff was rarely necessary. Once in a way he had to bring out his well-worn army knife, or the dandy little pocket-sized Colt .38 Detective Special he had got from a Yankee sailor who had jumped ship at Tilbury Docks one rainy night and was broke, and who let him have it in return for a handjob. But he was sparing with the use of force, if for no other reason than that it took a lot of effort.

So far he had done only half a dozen terminations. Each one he remembered as if it was the first. The moment he squeezed the trigger he felt like he did when he came into Percy’s slobbery cakehole, only more so. One of his targets was a sixteen-year-old kid who had knocked up a rich man’s daughter. How he squealed when he saw the gun in Terry’s hand. ‘Please, don’t, I’ll do anything—’ and then bang! right into the left ear. The poor fellow’s left eye had popped out of its socket, all the way out, and hung down on his cheek at the end of a bloodied string.

Terry worried sometimes about the gun. He knew he’d have to get rid of it sooner or later – by now the police were bound to have traced it back through all of the six jobs he had so far done with it, though they had no way of knowing it was his, since they didn’t even know of his existence. But he loved the gleaming little weapon, loved the way the butt with the cross-hatched wooden sides nestled into the palm of his hand, while the trigger, as delicate as a fish hook, pressed itself with pent-up eagerness against the soft inner side of his crooked index finger. He couldn’t bear the thought of it lying amid the slops in the bottom of a dustbin, or rusting in the purplish-grey mud of the Thames. When the time came and it had to go, he would take it home with him to Ireland and give it a decent burial, under a rock in a sunny place, or in a hole between the roots of a gorse bush on some unfrequented hillside high up in the Dublin mountains. That was his intention, anyway.