‘What do you notice about the shadow people of Chinatown, Detective?’

‘They’re all Chinese.’

He nodded.

‘We stay with our own. We deal with our own. We do business with our own. We take care of our own.’

‘It still doesn’t mean that lorry had nothing to do with you.’

‘When you find the men responsible, you know as well as I do what they will be,’ he said.

‘And what’s that?’ I said.

‘They will be some kind of white man,’ he said.

And then Keith Li, head of the Wo Shing Wo, nodded courteously to Ginger and me before stepping out into the red-and-gold lights of Chinatown, his two bodyguards always one respectful step behind him.

I walked into the darkness of the crematorium and looked around for somewhere to sit.

There was plenty of choice.

The thin crowd was a reminder that Steve Warboys had never made it out of the minor leagues.

Some arson for the insurance money. Some Southend shoeshines. A bit of dealing on the side, in drugs, stolen goods and whatever else they peddled in the vast car park of the Champagne Room after dark …

It was a lifetime of criminality.

But it was not the stuff of legend.

They make films and they write books about Ronnie and Reggie, Charlie and Eddie, Paul and Danny. But nobody was ever going to make a movie about Steve Warboys, the late proprietor of the Champagne Room.

Not fifty years from now.

Not five minutes from now.

Steve Warboys was a minor Essex wide boy, all swagger and wind, whose major claim to fame was that his grandfather had strutted through London when gangsters were rock stars.

But that was a long time ago.

I took a seat at the back of that cold dark room and watched them file in. The heavy-set, crop-haired men and their gym-thin wives with their sunbed tans. And then, heralded by a whiff of cigar smoke, the parents of Steve Warboys, their faces tight with shock.

Barry Warboys was an expensively tailored sixty-year-old who had the fair complexion of all the Warboys, but that was where the family resemblance stopped.

Barry was every inch the prosperous businessman, expensively out of shape after decades of the good life, taking a drag on his cigar as he entered the crematorium, the tip flaming red in the half-light before he stubbed it out underfoot. His wife, Steve’s mother, was in a wheelchair.

She was painfully thin and dressed in chic designer black, hunched up as if she were in some kind of shell. One of her hands reached up to touch her husband’s fingers as he gently eased her chair into the front row.

And then finally in came Steve’s famous grandfather.