The driver pressed the switch to open the boot as Crazy Boy and Two Knives climbed out of the car. Crazy Boy sneered as he looked up and down the road. The houses were small and uncared for, the brickwork stained and crumbling, the paint peeling from the doors and window frames, the windows unwashed. The pavements were covered with litter and there were cubes of broken glass in the gutters, relics of smashed car windows. Three Indian women waddled by in brightly coloured saris, each pushing a stroller, gossiping away in Hindi. One of them glared at Crazy Boy and said something to her companions and they all laughed.

Crazy Boy knew that the Indians of Southall hated the Somalis. There had been dozens of cases of Somali teenagers being assaulted by groups of Asians and Somali shopkeepers were always having their windows smashed. He glared at the women and shook his fist at them. ‘Never seen a black man with a big car?’ he shouted in English. ‘Think we all live in the jungle, do you?’

The women averted their eyes as they hurried away.

‘Back to your foul-smelling hovels, you Indian cows!’ he screamed.

The women began to run, their pushchairs bouncing along the uneven pavement.

Crazy Boy mimed firing a gun at them. ‘Bastard Indians,’ he said. ‘They hate us, you know that? They came here to do Whitey’s work and then they bring in their cousins with arranged marriages and look down their noses at us. We fought to get into this country. We killed. They crawled in on their bellies and they think they’re superior to us?’

‘Bitches,’ agreed Two Knives, pulling a suitcase out of the boot. He looked around and then slammed the boot shut. The case was heavy and he had to use both hands to carry it to the front door.

Crazy Boy pressed the doorbell and heard a faint buzzing sound from the back of the house. A few seconds later he heard shuffling feet and a woman in full burka opened the door. She scrutinised them through the slit in her headdress and then opened the door wide to allow them in.

Crazy Boy went first, heading straight down the hallway to the kitchen at the back of the house. Two Knives followed him with the suitcase as the woman shut the door and disappeared into the front room.

The man sitting at the kitchen table was in his sixties with a straggly beard that was streaked with grey and white. He was wearing a Fair Isle sweater over a long grey Jubba jacket and baggy grey trousers. In his right hand he held a misbaha, a string of Islamic prayer beads. There were ninety-nine beads on the string, corresponding to the ninety-nine names of Allah. He tended to use them as worry beads rather than as a means of religious devotion. The man’s name was Muhammad al-Faiz but everyone who did business with him called him the Arab. He had been in England for nine years and already had eleven children with his three wives in the country. The wives lived in separate houses paid for by housing benefit, and all were claiming invalidity payments as the Arab knew a Bangladeshi doctor who was happy to sign them off as epileptics for five hundred pounds a time.