Terry had come across Percy for the first time one foggy November night in the King’s Head in Putney. Afterwards it occurred to him that it hadn’t been a chance encounter at all, and that Percy had picked him out deliberately, as a lad likely to help him in the matter of his inheritance. When, coming up to closing time, Percy started telling him about his problem with ‘the Mater’ – he really did talk like that – and how he intended to go about solving it, Terry thought he was joking.

But it was no joke.

When they were saying goodnight outside the pub, their breath rising up in big dense puffs through the already dense pea-souper fog, Percy stuck two tenners into Terry’s breast pocket and suggested they meet in the same place at the same time the next night. Terry was in two minds whether to go, but go he did. When Percy saw him coming in the door he gave him a big smile, and treated him to a pint of pale and a dish of jellied eels, and whispered in his ear that he’d pay him a hundred pounds sterling to put a bullet in the old girl’s noggin.

A hundred quid! Terry had never expected to see that much money all in the one fist.

Two days later he shot Mrs Antrobus in Kensington High Street, in broad daylight, grabbing her bag to make it look like a common or garden snatch job done by some panicky kid. Percy had supplied the pistol – ‘Absolutely untraceable, laddie, I assure you’ – and arranged for it to be got rid of afterwards. This was how Terry discovered just how well connected the fat old poofter was. Untraceable heaters didn’t grow on trees.

Next morning the papers ran a big story on the old girl’s death, accompanied by ‘an artist’s impression’ of ‘the brutal killer’. Terrible likeness.

A few days after the funeral, Terry was treated by his new friend to a slap-up lunch at the Ritz. Terry was uneasy about them being seen together in such a public place, especially after the sudden demise of ‘the Mater’, but Percy gave him a slow wink and said it was all right, that he often came here with ‘handsome young chaps such as yourself’.