Boysie looked at the man opposite him with a cold glare. He uncrossed his arms slowly. His voice low and even, he said, ‘Why don’t you get me a nice cup of tea, Mr Limmington, and then why don’t you piss off? You’re getting on my nerves now. Me and my brother and my uncle were nowhere near that flat and you know it. You’re trying to fit us up. Well, you picked on the wrong people this time.’

Limmington opened his eyes wide as he said nastily, ‘You trying to threaten me, Boysie?’

He looked around the empty room, his face showing an expression Limmington had not seen before. It was almost feral.

‘What do you think? You don’t scare me, mate, you don’t even enter my thoughts. You’re nothing, a tiny speck on the arsehole of the world. Don’t sit there with your poxy newspaper advert suit and your good brown brogues and try and get one over on me or mine. You’re just an Old Bill. You’re dirt on the bottom of my shoes. You’re nothing. Get that? Nothing. I could see you off the face of this earth if the fancy took me, so don’t push me, mate. Just don’t push me. Now call in your little friend and let’s forget this conversation ever took place.’

Despite himself Limmington felt afraid. Boysie Cavanagh had just told him in no uncertain terms that his life could be in danger. That he was ready to extinguish him as he would a cockroach or a beetle. Harry Limmington saw for a brief second his wife Violet mourning him as she had her only son.

It was only then, in the small interview room, face to face with the least fearsome of the Cavanagh twins, that he realised, really understood, just what he had taken on.

PC Dillinger was a rather skinny man with large, obtrusive ears. He was thirty-six years old, unmarried, and had been a policeman for over ten years, never aspiring to be anything more than plain PC. He was at this moment in possession of the blood-stained pickaxe handle that was the main evidence against the Cavanaghs. It had been removed from the locked cupboard in the evidence lab by another policeman, a DC called Rushton, and had been given to him in the car park of The Oaks in Ilford half an hour earlier. He was now sitting in his black Zephyr on the London Road at The Chequers, Dagenham, waiting for someone to pick it up and dispose of it. He would be five hundred pounds better off afterwards and he had already planned exactly how he was going to spend the money.

His first stop would be Berwick Manor, where he would pick up a nice girl and play roulette. Then he would put a bit aside for his mother, and fifty pounds towards his sister’s wedding.