“I’d like to talk to you about the Witheys. If you don’t mind.”

Tony’s face softened just marginally and he scraped his chair under the table; he was staying after all. He grinned, showing his short, worn, yellowed teeth with blackened lines round the gums.

“I’ll talk to you about Shirl. I’ll talk to you about her all day long. She was proper tasty and fancied me something rotten. Great tits that just fit into the palm of your hand. Big blue eyes with zero brain behind them. Perfect woman in my books. She was a model, ya know. Pretended to be prim and proper but she was just a council slag underneath all that make-up and fancy hairdo. I reckon she saw me as her ticket out of there and to something better. I owned half of Soho back in the day.”

Jack pandered to Tony’s ego again by revealing everything he knew all about the Fisher brothers’ social standing back in the eighties. It had been comparatively impressive; they were very well respected in the criminal hierarchy and they normally stayed one step ahead of the police, so Tony actually had a lot to be proud of.

“The rest of the family? Greg was a twat,” he suddenly blurted out, so he’d obviously been thinking about the rest of the Withey family while Jack was talking. “Drugs and all that crap. Made him thicker than Shirl. And Audrey . . . Jesus Christ! She was an ugly cow. How she produced a stunner like Shirl, I’ll never know.”

“Did you know Mike Withey?”

“Not for long. He was a bugger when he was a kid, then he went into the army, which turned him into a pussy. People think the army turns boys into men, but it don’t. It makes pussies who can follow orders, but who can’t think for themselves. That ain’t got nothing to do with being a man in the real world—that’s institutionalization, that is. And there’s no fucking point in being able to kill a man with your bare hands if you’re not allowed to actually do it. Nah, the only thing Mike could have been when he came back from the army was a copper—from one bunch of sheep to another. No offense,” he added with a grin. Oddly, Jack agreed. “My path never crossed with Mike’s in a professional capacity, you understand. He came to the club a couple times, Shirl told me bits about him, then there was gossip from people he was into for a couple of grand. Mike Withey had one foot in your world and one foot in mine. He never quite had the balls to be bent, but he was definitely flexible, if you know what I mean.”

Once Jack had asked all the questions he needed to about the Witheys, he moved on to his own investigation.

“I spoke to a bloke the other day who suggested that you might have known Jimmy Nunn.”

Tony immediately wanted to know who had mentioned his name, and Jack thought there would be no harm in revealing that it was Kenneth Moore. He explained that Ken knew the Fisher brothers by reputation and had “great things to say.” This seemed to placate Tony enough for him to answer.