‘Put them in the bin provided,’ I said, pointing at a square black box attached to a pole nearby.

He pulled a face and deposited the said items in the bin, but at his arm’s length.

I laughed. ‘Anyone would think you’d had a privileged upbringing.’

But I knew perfectly well that he had spent all his childhood either in violent children’s homes or, occasionally, with foster parents, mostly the former. He had once told me that he was mercilessly bullied as a youngster by the older boys in the homes, probably because of his curly hair and smallish stature. It was why he’d taught himself judo, learning the throws from black-and-white photos in an old dog-eared training manual he’d found, in order to fight back against the bullies.

I’d always thought it strange that the word judo, in its native Japanese, means gentle way, when it seemed far from gentle to be thrown over someone’s shoulder onto the hard ground.

‘I clearly didn’t have such a privileged upbringin’ as old Dick the Shit by the looks of it,’ Chico said.

‘Dick the Shit?’

‘Richard the Turd. Have you seen the size of his castle round the corner? Ruined now, mind, but it must have been quite a sight in its heyday.’

‘I know. I’ve been in there.’

‘Bit bleedin’ creepy, though, if you ask me. I wonder how many of Dick’s enemies came to a grisly end in there.’ Chico made a chopping action to his neck with his open hand.

‘He definitely had form,’ I said. ‘He almost certainly murdered his own two nephews—the Princes in the Tower—to become king in the first place. But he, himself, also came to a grisly end. He’d only been on the throne for two years when, at just thirty-two, he had the back of his skull hacked off by a Lancastrian sword at Bosworth. He was the last King of England to die in battle and he ended up being buried beneath a car park in Leicester.’

‘But surely they didn’t have cars back then?’

Good point, I thought.

‘Come on, let’s get into this particular car,’ I said. ‘There’s a video to watch and I don’t want to be seen doing it here.’

I drove out of town on the Coverham Lane and again pulled off the road next to Pinker’s Pond, the exact same spot where I had previously met Gary Bremner.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Let’s see what he got.’