It was one of the receptionists who suggested notices with the lettering in larger print should be supplied and affixed to the mahogany doors. Jonny had very little faith in this. He was certain it would make no difference to Tudorlap who, he was sure by this time, was doing it purposely and from a fiendish motive of revenge. And another four days remained before the man was due to leave and go back to Chicago. However, Jonny took the newly prepared notices he could barely read and hung them on the doors himself. He was due to take the notice for the fifth floor up to the top and he tried to summon the lift. Of course, it failed to come. Tudorlap had gone up five minutes before and left the inner door open. Jonny climbed the stairs, carrying the notice, a paper bag containing tacks and a small hammer.

He fixed the notice to the door. Instead of going all the way down in the lift he descended only one level, got out, shut the inner door and, using the stairs, returned to the fifth floor, where he concealed himself behind the half-open door of a bathroom. Tudorlap came out of his bedroom, tiptoed across the landing floor and summoned the lift, unable to keep a smile from spreading across his face. The lift came, he opened the mahogany door and then the inner door. He was turning away, was facing the bathroom, when Jonny came out of it, hammer in hand.

If Jonny had been a few inches taller, he’d probably have killed Tudorlap. As it was, he managed one blow to the side of the American’s head (rendering him permanently deaf in one ear) and two to his chest, breaking sternum and collarbone, before a man came bursting out of Room 52 and pulled him off. Blood was all over the place and Tudorlap was lying on the floor, groaning and vomiting. The police came and took Jonny away, the irony being that when they tried to get him downstairs in the lift they couldn’t summon it because someone had left the inner door open on the floor below.

Jonny got three years and served the whole sentence. It took him awhile to get work with his record but eventually he did, washing cars in a very upmarket garage in Hampstead where customers liked their Jaguars cleaned and polished by hand and the chrome worked over with a toothbrush. After that came the car-park job, the thieving and the connection with the drug syndicate that seems to have operated from an antiques shop in a street off the Edgware Road. He began to dream of making money.