He had their faces burned into his memory. The last time he’d seen them was in the flat where drill music hurt his head and bodies came and went in a heaving mass, on the lookout for drugs or just to hang out somewhere illicit.

He flitted between intense concentration – formulating a plan – and simply watching, fascinated by how so loose a network could maintain a stranglehold on so many young people. It was the implementation of fear politics at its finest: he’d studied it in history lessons, analysing some of the most brutal regimes the world had ever seen, and it was alive and well inside this casual yet lethal band of brothers. On one level it was laughable – the lack of solid structure – but that was the point: structure killed regimes from the inside. Disorganisation was key when keeping human beings in a state of constant limbo and terror.

He knew from stories retold with vigour, for entertainment, by the boys and men he’d hooked up with, that the Cotton brothers earned every ounce of kudos they held, and wouldn’t hesitate to stick a blade into any person brave or stupid enough to challenge them. Jason was apparently the brains and Adam the incendiary device. Both vital, both necessary.

After his run-in with Adam, he’d dismissed him as a meathead. A dangerous meathead but one nonetheless. And he looked like a regular junkie. Jordan reckoned that Adam would be the easier of the two to overpower, if he had surprise on his side, and found him alone. The brothers were hiding somewhere, everyone knew that. There couldn’t be many people with him, and as the noose tightened, they’d start leaving.

Jason was a different beast. He was the one who called the shots. But Jordan reckoned Adam had gone out on a limb where his mother was concerned. Everyone knew that if a random hit on a woman had been ordered, it would be Jason who’d do it. Adam was the loose cannon, and it hadn’t gone unnoticed that he was nursing some pretty serious wounds: to his ego and to his face. Word had it that his brother had taught him a lesson for going rogue.

The people Jordan had met assumed him to be driven by scoring drugs, finding girls and riding bikes, but Jordan had been listening to every word. If he stopped for too long and thought of anything else, he reckoned he would go mad. The realisation that his mother might have been butchered on a whim was too much. He busied his mind with the girl he’d slept with, feeling disappointed with himself. He’d imagined chasing a girl for weeks, even months, before she allowed him to go that far. Here on the estate, within hours, he’d found someone who’d done it straight away. They’d performed the most intimate act together, and afterwards had nothing to talk about.