The Ferrari was a fake, a copy, but an expensive copy and still worth big money in the hands of a dealer turning a blind eye to the more questionable areas of its history. And there was one particular dealer that had shifted plenty of his high-end classic cars, all with seemingly squeaky-clean provenance. He had also brokered a number of the cars built by LH Classics over the last sixteen years.

Now the car had been seized under the Proceeds of Crime Act, and his one meagre crumb of comfort was the knowledge that, with the damage that had been done to it, as well as it being exposed as a fake, neither Customs and Excise nor the police were going to be able to sell it.

Since the early days of his career as a legal aid solicitor, Terence Gready had been living behind an elaborate and scrupulously maintained facade. The seeds of the idea for his empire had been planted after listening to the stories – and aspirations – of an old lag called Jimmy Pearson whom he’d defended early on in his career.

The world of drugs offered riches beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, but most of the people who chased those dreams, like Jimmy Pearson, were ultimately losers who played the blame game the way so many cons and ex-cons did – I was fitted up . . . it was a bent copper . . . my brief was on the take . . . Few were ever smart enough to avoid, finally, getting caught. And what often nailed so many offenders were their sudden, uncharacteristic spending sprees. The flash new car, clothes, holidays, boats, homes. The law-enforcement agencies had one dictum in their eternal hunt for the major players: Follow the money.

But Terence Gready was smart enough – and going very nicely, thank you, twenty-five years on – thanks to his entirely fortuitous career choice. Being a solicitor practising legal aid, criminal law had presented him with both the perfect opportunity – and the perfect cover.

He’d realized that every day in his work he would be encountering criminals, and occasionally some with wide networks of connections. From talking to the brighter ones, it hadn’t taken him long to build up a picture of how the drug supply chains in England operated, the ports where drugs entered the country, the areas for distribution that were carved up between the crime families and the hotspots where there were gaps in law enforcement.