Paul Warboys was a bull of a man in a long black coat, the remains of his hair dyed an unbelievable blond, his face made golden by the years of Spanish sun he had soaked up after coming out of prison for the last time.

Even in his old age he still had enough of an aura to make grown men smile weakly, trying to catch his eye.

Paul Warboys ignored them all.

The old gangster took a seat in the front row across the aisle from his son, and the two men never once looked at each other.

They cremated Steve Warboys on that shifting border where London meets Essex. The sparse crowd stood in silence as the curtain came back and the coffin of Steve Warboys rolled into the flames.

Steve’s mother and father had the stunned look of parents who were living the ultimate nightmare of burying their child. They stared unblinking at the flames as their heat crept into that freezing room.

But it was only the grandfather who wept.

17

I sat at the wheel of the BMW X5, the big car still caked with the mud of northern France because people are cheaper than machines, and I watched the man walk through the burned-out ruins of what had been the Champagne Room.

Now Barry Warboys was ready to show his grief.

Now he looked like a man who had lost everything.

Now – unlike the previous afternoon at the crematorium, surrounded by people who believed him to be a far weaker man than his famous father – he allowed himself to weep.

He staggered across the black sodden ruins of the roadside bar, still oozing smoke three days after the fire that burned it to the ground, and his step was so uncertain that it seemed he must surely fall under the weight of his pain. He stood in the ruin, absent-mindedly puffing on a cigar the size of a Cornetto.

There was still a squad car on the scene to keep back the curious and the ghouls but the two uniformed officers inside sat chatting because nobody came, nobody cared, only the man with a sorrow that seemed to buckle his knees.

But I was not the only one watching him.

A uniformed chauffeur stood by the open door of a Bentley and kept a protective eye on Barry Warboys as he stood in the ruins of the burned-out bar. Both of our cars had the engines running, as if we might have to make a quick getaway from this place of death.

My phone vibrated. WHITESTONE CALLING, it said.

‘How can we have had a major Triad in an interview room and nobody noticed?’ she said.

‘Because we had twelve dead women that morning,’ I said. ‘And because for thirty years the Met have kept an eye on the 14K and assumed the Wo Shing Wo never come further south than Manchester. But things have changed.’

And because mistakes happen, I thought.