Then he was running down the road, the police in hot pursuit. As he approached the end of it, he saw the road block. They had come prepared.

He swerved away and ran down a neighbour’s drive. She watched in fascination as he scaled her side entrance. He ran the hundred and fifty feet of her back garden, stepping through her ornamental pond, his trousers heavy now with water and dirt. He launched himself at her back fence, repeating the run through the garden backing on to it. He burst from this over a large wooden back gate and out into the street parallel to his own. As he ran full pelt down the street, he bounded out on to the main road, the men behind him shouting and hollering for him to stop.

Laughing once more, he catapulted himself on to the main road, where he was hit full on by a police car.

Boysie was seen by the policeman following him to rise about fifteen feet into the air before landing with a sickening thud on the pavement on the other side of the road. His head was bent to the right in a grotesquely unnatural position.

As the police all surrounded him he looked up at them. He opened his mouth to speak and a trickle of blood slid slowly down from his nose and into his open mouth.

He mouthed the word ‘Bastards’ before a shuddering passed through his body and he died. A young PC watched his legs twitching in the final throes of death and put his hand over his mouth to swallow the sickness engulfing him.

The DI pushed his way through the men and, smiling to himself, kicked Boysie Cavanagh as hard as he could in the stomach, lifting him off the pavement with the force of the blow.

The young PC watched his superior, silent and nauseated.

‘That’s one piece of shite removed from the face of the earth. Timpkins, get an ambulance.’

With that, the man walked back to the squad car and lit himself a cigarette.

Boysie Cavanagh lay on the cold pavement, dead but with a twisted smile on his face. It seemed even in death the Cavanaghs had got one over on them.

Daniel had not said a word since he had been told the news of his brother’s death.

Limmington, against all his instincts, actually felt sorry for him. Knowing how close they were, how they were together continually and had stuck by each other through thick and thin, he couldn’t help but feel sympathy for the large man before him.

‘Drink your tea, son ... Come on. It’ll do you good.’