‘Landry is a man of means,’ said Rory. ‘Men of means are rarely right in the head.’

‘Drone surveillance,’ said Bimbo. ‘I think it’s class.’

The Alps were shortish men with massive arses and brutally capable forearms. They breathed coltishly through their noses and rolled their shoulders with a circumspect flourish whenever women crossed their paths. They billed themselves as tradesmen, though between them had never acquired a qualification in any particular trade. What they did was try things at a competitive rate. They painted, wired, plumbed, tiled, but where they excelled was in the displacement of the earth: digging holes, filling holes back in. Holes of any circumference and depth. Holes were their forte.

Bimbo had just turned ­thirty-­seven, Rory and Eustace were coming up on fifty. The Alps still felt young in their souls but it was the bloodshot eyes, pouched necks and capitulating hairlines of middle age that leered back at them from mirrors. They ate too much takeaway, slept fitfully, downed vats of Guinness every weekend. In addition to their remorseless lifestyles there was the disgraceful odds offered by their genes. The Alp family tree was a stump mutilated by cancer and coronaries. Few of their male forebears had made it into their sixties, which meant the Alps’ days were probably almost over. The Alps carried this knowledge around with them. Because what else could they do but carry it. They were gleeful, boisterous and deprecating in company, except when they weren’t. Then, it was like a switch got switched. It was not true to say any of them had a temper, only that they possessed a reserve of a certain kind of energy, an energy that periodically required venting. Fights happened and they got in them. The outcomes, generally in their favour, were nonetheless irrelevant. The Alps were built for punishment, they were not built to last.