For fifteen minutes the cabbie was a damn good trier. There were three Arabs in the car, and they were beginning to panic. They kept looking behind them, and every time they looked they saw the same view: the nose of the Austin taxi. We were heading towards Wembley, on a very erratic course, with the Fiat doing a fast U-turn at every red light it came to, and slowly making its way over towards the M40, where they knew they would be able to outrun us. Suddenly, one Arab in the back thrust his hand out of the window and fired two shots at us. One missed, the other punched a neat hole in the left side of the windscreen.

‘Oh no, mate, this is where you get off,’ said the driver, slamming on the brakes. ‘Ar’m not gettin’ shot at for a bleedin’ tenner. Ar’m not getting shot at for a bleeding monkey. Out!’ He turned to face me and found himself staring down the wrong end of my Beretta.

‘Either get this crate going or get out.’

He gave a weak grin, his face twitched, then broke into an exaggerated nervous grin. ‘If it’s all right with you, I’ll get out – weak heart, got a pacemaker.’ He jumped out the door. ‘Tank’s full. I’m not a coward, like, it’s just I—’

I wasn’t interested. I clambered into the driving seat, crashed the gear-lever forward and did the nearest thing to a wheelie that any London cab is ever going to do. The Arabs were stuck at the back of a queue at a red light, all peering around. There was an island in the middle of the road which prevented them from doing a U-turn. They backed up several feet and then drove onto the pavement, and Ghengis Khan in the back loosed off two more shots at me. There were too many other cars and people around for me to risk firing back. They stopped at the end of the pavement as a giant articulated lorry thundered across their bows, followed closely by another. I carried on with the accelerator pressed flat on the floor and hit them full in the back. I stopped dead, but on the pavement greasy with the drizzle, they cannoned forward, neatly into the gap between the front and the rear wheels of the second artic’s heavily laden trailer. Above the roar of the lorry was a swift metallic crunch, a sound like a foot crushing a metal biscuit-tin, as the little Fiat was blotted, for a fraction of a second, from view by the huge wheels of the lorry, then the lorry was past and the Fiat reappeared, alone in the road, the boot and bonnet reasonably intact, but the entire passenger compartment no higher than ten centimetres off the road at its highest point.