‘He must have planned the attack on Gready for at least several days. He would have known it would have blown out his reduced tariff – and given him a much longer sentence. What triggered him to do that?’ Grace was pensive for some moments. ‘In my view, he must have suspected Gready was behind his brother’s murder. Perhaps, as was mooted earlier, Gready had ordered Stuie to be beaten up, as a warning to Starr to keep schtum. And the beating went too far?’

‘What about if there was an ulterior motive?’

Grace frowned. ‘Such as?’

Branson smiled. ‘Bear with me. That shit, Conor Drewett – who the Mercedes was registered to and who we nicked yesterday morning – squealed pretty quickly on his accomplice when we offered to tell the judge he’d been a good boy. The accomplice was totally wasted when we picked him up. Derren Skinner. Before he was even interviewed, in the car on the way to the custody centre, he’d told the arresting officers who’d hired him and Drewett. Probably because he was shitfaced on something.’

‘Grassed him up?’

Branson nodded. ‘Perhaps ratted on him would be a better word for Skinner – horrible little creep.’

‘So, who was behind it – tell me?’

Glenn Branson spun the chair in front of Grace’s desk, sitting down on it the wrong way round, placed his arms over the backrest and leaned forward, a big grin pushing across his face. ‘I think you are going to like this. I mean, really like it! You’ve told me before that we can do all the planning in the world, be as professional as all our training has taught us, but that one elusive thing we can’t count on is luck. I think we just got lucky.’ He smiled. ‘Like, very seriously lucky!’

110

Saturday 1 June

Nick Fox was feeling very seriously lucky.

He was sitting at his desk in the deserted Hoxton offices of his law practice, shortly after 7.30 a.m. He liked to be in well before the rest of the team, whenever he wasn’t attending a trial or client meeting out of town. And while the Gready trial had been in progress, he’d barely been in the office at all, which meant he had a mountain of catching-up to do. But that was fine. Today, everything was fine!

And it wasn’t going to be for much longer that he had to put up with the never-ending criminal scumbags he had to deal with. Truth was, much though he put on a smiling, positive facade, he mostly despised his clients. Whining lowlifes, protesting their innocence, swearing blind they’d been fitted up by the police – or as many of them called them, the filth.