Elton smiled easily, his sweet face belying the steel trap of a mind that it hid from the people around him. Elton already had two bodies under his belt. One was personal: the man who had hammered the fuck out of his mother for years and then mysteriously disappeared one night, to the amazement of everyone. He was buried on the Essex marshes, beaten to death with a crowbar. The second body was an honest-to-goodness job. Elton had been paid handsomely – in fact, he had bought a house for his mum with the proceeds – to remove a gang member who had fallen foul of the boss he had been involved with. Like Elton’s stepfather, the gang member had never been found. Elton believed – rightly – that if there was no body, how the fuck could there be a crime? He was a very cool, calm and collected young man. He had the handsome face of an angel and the mind of a demon.

Ray was already keen to make him his protégé. Elton was a good kid and, at nineteen, he understood more than men three times his age did. Like Ray Donovan, he had no conscience whatsoever – it was just work to him. Ray was painfully aware that people like them were few and far between. Oh, there were the lunatics who made a splash by being vicious and vindictive, but real violence wasn’t personal. It was something that needed to be done quietly, unobtrusively and with the maximum of secrecy. You did not advertise serious lunacy; the person involved was astute enough to guess that their particular forte would eventually be discovered by the relevant parties.

But those cunts who told all and sundry the ins and outs of their vicious dealings were no more than cunts to themselves. They were inevitably caught and banged up within a few years, when even their contemporaries breathed a sigh of relief. No one around them could ever trust them – they were the original loose cannons and they always shat on their own doorsteps. They would attack a local boy they thought looked at them sideways, or batter the mother of their children. They always fucked up big time – it was the nature of the beast. They went away for years, stuck in the nick on temazepam or Dolmatil or, worst-case scenario, they were drugged up until they couldn’t string a sentence together. Not that they were that great at it before their capture.

No, young Elton Mills was a find, and Ray understood that, and that was why he had sent him on this job. It was Elton’s trial and no one knew that better than Elton himself.