As they pulled into the car park that surrounded the monstrous block of flats, a crowd of youths with motorbikes and long straggly hair watched them. A white Rolls-Royce was not par for the Plaistow flats. Not by a long chalk.

Boysie and Daniel looked at them scathingly, disgusted at their clothes and their attitude. A tall boy with long blond hair and watery blue eyes looked back.

‘What you looking at then?’ Daniel’s voice was hard. In the dim lights from the streetlamps he saw the boy flinch in recognition.

‘Nothing. Nothing, Mr Cavanagh.’ All his bravado gone now he knew who they were.

‘You just shut your trap and watch my motor. One little dent in it and I’ll personally have each and every one of your hearts. Get that?’

They all nodded in wide-eyed fear.

The three men walked into the entrance to the flats. Both lifts were open on the ground floor and they stepped gingerly into the one that took them to the even-numbered flats. Boysie wrinkled his nose at the smell of urine, human and canine, and the stench of unwashed aluminium.

‘Lovely place this, ain’t it? No wonder Delia never let no one visit her here.’

Boysie pressed the button for the tenth floor and the doors shut clumsily, the machinery’s cranking and groaning the only other sound in the lift itself. All three men were silent with a combined anger and lust for revenge. The lift clanged to a halt, dropping a couple of inches down as it hit the tenth floor. The doors opened and they all walked out, simultaneously letting out breath held while the lift rose through the dirty tower block. They stood in the small lobby, glancing to either side for the number of Delia’s flat. Looking in at a door to the left of them, they were surprised to see a small black child of about eight playing five stones on the concrete floor. The sounds of Janis Joplin blared out of the flat opposite, where Delia had lived, and a blasting reggae number came from an open front door which was obviously the black child’s home.

The little girl watched them with dark sombre eyes. No fear there, nothing except childlike curiosity.

Picking up her five jacks and a stone, she stood up and went into the hallway of her house. Crouching down on her hunkers, she watched the three men.

Daniel banged on the front door of Delia’s flat.

There was no answer.

He banged on the door again, this time harder.

A young white woman of about twenty-five came out of the flat opposite. Seeing the men, she pulled the little girl into the flat and shut and bolted the front door.

Boysie moved back and then gave the door an almighty kick. It sprang open immediately.

Holding up his arms as if for applause, he led the way into the foul-smelling hallway.