Greg drew deeply on his cigarette. After he’d blown out the smoke, he said, just as Frankie Wallace had said the previous day, “I’m not a snitch. Even if it mattered.”

“It doesn’t?”

“He’s dead, so I’d say not.”

“Then I can’t see any reason why you shouldn’t tell us. Can you?”

Greg thought for a while, then said. “OK. It’s Lenny G. Like I said, it doesn’t matter. He’s dead. That’s why I got out myself.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know all the ins and outs. I was low-level. A cuckoo, as you say, with an old junkie called Howard on Hollyfield Lane, up in Eastvale.”

“Howard Stokes?”

“Yeah. You know him? Nice bloke. Real gentle soul, old sixties type, but fucked up, you know, up there.” He pointed to his head. “Years of sticking that fucking poison in his veins.”

“Howard’s dead,” said Banks.

Greg’s eyes went wide. “Is he? Fuck. How?”

“Overdose.”

Greg sucked on his cigarette again. “Had to happen eventually, man.”

“So how did you operate?”

“I picked up the stuff, carried it there, usually on the bus, hung out in that filthy old condemned house he lived in for a few days and sold what I’d got to whoever had ordered it, along with maybe some new customers, friends of friends. I got to know people. Regulars, like. A good crowd. But I got pulled.”

“Pulled?”

“Yeah. The timing couldn’t have been better, really. It was all a bit chaotic. There was a changeover at the top. Lenny G used to be the big man, top of the tree. Then all of a sudden, he wasn’t. And the next thing I knew, he was dead.”

“Excuse me, but was Lenny G Leonard Grainger?” Blackstone asked.

“I believe that was his full name, yeah,” said Greg. “But we all called him Lenny G.”

“Found floating facedown in the Leeds-Liverpool Canal out Rodley way,” said Blackstone to Banks. “He’d been gutted.”

“Ouch,” said Banks. “How long ago?”

“Three weeks.”

Greg seemed to turn pale. “I didn’t know that,” he said. “Just . . . you know . . . that he was dead. Gutted. Fucking hell.”

Blackstone nodded. “It was nasty. So what happened? We’ve still got it down as an unsolved murder.”