After I had kissed her forehead, tucked her in and turned out the lights, I left Mrs Murphy and Stan on the sofa and I went to pick up Billy Greene from the small house where he still lived with his mother in Tottenham.

And then we drove out to the Champagne Room.

9

‘Members only.’

He was a big man in a black coat and he stood with his legs far apart and his hands behind his back in front of the dinky red rope that guarded the entrance to the Champagne Room. Mixed race, hair in tight man braids, south London drawl in every vowel. I felt like I had seen him somewhere, perhaps fighting halfway down the undercard at York Hall.

He had certainly been a boxer.

He looked like a light heavyweight who had turned out to be too slow to go far in the pro game, but was vain enough to stay in shape. He wore no hat, despite the bitter temperature of the Essex midnight. Behind us there was the buzz of the boy racers on the motorway, and beyond the doorman I could see the pulsing twilight of the club. The bassline of some golden oldie from the Nineties was so loud I could feel it in my back teeth.

The Champagne Room looked like the lap-dancing club at the end of the universe – a squat, ugly concrete building surrounded by a car park the size of a football pitch and, beyond that, the endless blackness of all those flat Essex fields. The front of the building was illuminated by a pair of red neon female lips wetly wrapping around the harsh yellow neon of a champagne flute.

‘We’ll join,’ I said.

The big man flinched as if I had insulted his mother.

‘Two-fifty,’ he said.

‘Fine.’

He looked over my shoulder at the lanky figure of young Billy Greene. We had both put on suits and wore shirts with no ties, anxious not to look too formal, but buttoned up to the neck, because it was below freezing.

We looked like junior members of the Iranian Government.

‘Each,’ the doorman said.

‘No problem,’ I said, reaching for the thick wad of petty cash that I had inside my jacket. The bouncer took a step closer to me and I could see the spiteful streak in him. He looked in my eyes and not at my money.

‘Membership’s closed,’ he said, waiting for me to contradict him.

A Range Rover swung into the crowded car park that separated the Champagne Room from the howling motorway. It parked next to my BMW X5, casually, couldn’t-give-a-monkey’s sideways, as if the driver owned the place.

Which he did.

Steve Warboys got out of the Range Rover, a good couple of years older and five kilos heavier than the image that Edie had pulled up, and quickly made his way to the club.