That was a thing he wouldn’t stand for, being disrespected and made fun of. He had just linked in with an East End outfit, and was doing some profitable robbing and the like. He had to get out, though, after knifing one of the younger blokes in the crew for mimicking his Irish accent – the Irish accent, it should be said, that he hadn’t known he had, until then.

He was handy with a knife, and with shooters – he’d been in the army, after all – and was pretty nifty with his fists, too, when the need arose, even if he was a bantamweight. One of the Kray twins, Ronnie, it was, took him on for a while as an enforcer, but his low stature was against him. That was why he liked Burma, despite the heat and the fever and all the rest of it – the fellows he’d been sent to kill down there were his own size or smaller.

It wasn’t easy making a living on Civvy Street, and he was getting desperate, he didn’t mind admitting it, when Percy Antrobus came sashaying into his life.

Percy was – well, it was hard to say what Percy was, exactly. Heavy, pasty-faced, with a woman’s hips, and bruise- coloured pouches under his eyes and a fat lower lip that sagged and turned a glistening shade of dark purple when he’d had a few. Brandy-and-port was his tipple, though he started the day with what he called a coupe, which as Terry discovered was just the French word for a glass of champagne. Percy took his champers ice-cold. He had a swizzle stick that was made of real gold. When Terry asked him what it was for, Percy looked at him in that way he did when he was pretending to be shocked, his eyes big and round as pennies and his mouth pursed into a crimped little circle that looked less like a mouth than a you-know-what, and said, ‘Dear boy, surely you wouldn’t think of drinking champagne before noon with bubbles in it ?’

That was Percy.

And you had to give it to him, he it was who saw Terry’s potential, and introduced him to his true vocation.

Funny, the way it turned out, that his first paid-for target should be, of all people, Percy’s old Ma. She had a few bob in the bank, quite a few, in fact, and was threatening to cut Percy out of her will, on account of something he’d done or hadn’t done. Percy, at his wits’ end, had decided the only thing for it was to have her done over before she had time to ring up her solicitor – a ‘complete stinker’, who had it in for Percy, according to the man himself – and order him to bring her the aforementioned document so she could strike from it the name of her only son, the said Percival.