Shepherd squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and walked towards the hotel entrance. A dozen men in black tie, laughing and smoking cigarettes, were standing outside. Shepherd was wearing black tie, too, an Armani suit that had cost the best part of three thousand pounds. Willoughby-Brown had balked at that but Shepherd had explained there was no way he could turn up in a rented tux. The Rolex Daytona on his wrist was real and his shoes had cost close to five hundred pounds. Men like Tommy and Marty O’Neill could spot a fake from a hundred yards and that went for people as much as clothes and watches.

To the left of reception a sprawling bar area was packed with another couple of hundred men in dinner jackets. There were lots of shaved heads and gold chains. They turned to check Shepherd as he walked by, nothing aggressive, just alpha males wanting to know who the competition was.

Shepherd scanned the room and spotted Paul Evans almost immediately. Evans had been his introduction to the O’Neill family. He was an enforcer, one of the guys who were sent around to collect bad debts. Some debt-collectors used guns, others blunt instruments, but Evans was a big hard man whose intimidating presence and dead-fish stare were often enough to persuade people to pay up. When he wasn’t working, Evans was affable and good company, and had a plethora of funny stories about his childhood, usually ending with his Welsh miner father taking off his belt and giving him a good thrashing. Like a lot of villains, Evans could turn on the hard stare at will, switching from laughing bon viveur to menacing thug in a fraction of a second. Most of the men in the room had that quality, and while there was lots of laughter and good-natured back-slapping, there was an underlying tension, a sense that violence could kick off at any moment, leaving blood on the highly polished parquet floor.

Evans spotted Shepherd and waved him over. A chunky gold bracelet glinted on his right wrist with two large sovereign rings on his fingers – they functioned as an efficient knuckleduster when needed. Evans had close-cropped bullet-grey hair and a nose that had clearly been hit a few times. The slightly swollen left ear testified to his years as an amateur boxer, before he’d discovered that he could be paid handsomely for hitting people out of the ring.

‘Terry, good to see you, mate.’ Evans hugged Shepherd. ‘It’s going to be a fun night. What do you want?’

‘Gin and tonic,’ said Shepherd.

‘Double?’

‘At least.’

Evans headed for the bar. Shepherd knew the two men he was drinking with. The bigger of them was Jon Cooper, a second-hand-car dealer with a chunky diamond in his left ear. The other was a drug-trafficker, who split his time between a large detached house in Croydon and a villa with a pool outside Marbella. His name was Ricky Carter and Shepherd knew that the police had been after him for years, but as he never did any business when he was in the UK, he had never been caught. Cooper and Carter often hung out with Evans, and Shepherd always found them good company. He was pretty sure that would change if they ever found out he was an undercover MI5 officer.