When he wasn’t paying women to take off their clothes in an ironic postmodernist way, Alexander Smith operated out of a small office above a sex-shop-turned-coffee-bar on Greek Street. I buzzed the intercom and a voice asked who I was.

“PC Grant to see Alexander Smith,” I said.

“Who did you say you were?” asked the voice.

“PC Grant,” I said.

“What?”

“Police,” I said. “Open the sodding door.”

The door buzzed and I stepped into another narrow communal Soho staircase with worn nylon carpet and handprints on the walls. A man was waiting for me on the landing at the top of the stairs. He seemed quite ordinary when I was at the bottom but like one of those weird corridor illusions he got bigger and bigger the farther up I got. By the time I reached the top he was four inches taller than me and appeared to fill the landing from one side to the other. He was wearing a navy blue High and Mighty suit jacket over a black Led Zeppelin T-shirt; he also had no visible neck and probably a blackjack concealed up his sleeve. Staring up his hairy nostrils made me quite nostalgic. You don’t get old-fashioned muscle like that in London anymore. These days it was all whippet-thin white guys with mad eyes and hoodies. This was a villain my dad would have recognized and I wanted to embrace him and kiss him firmly on both cheeks.

“What the fuck do you want?” he asked.

Or maybe not.

“I just want a word with Alexander,” I said.

“Busy,” said No-Neck.

There are a number of police options at this point. My training at Hendon Police College emphasized polite firmness—“I’m afraid, sir, that I must ask you to stand aside”—while my street experience suggested that the best option would be to call in a van full of TSG and have them deal with the problem, using a taser if necessary. On top of that, generations of cockney geezers on my dad’s side were yelling at me that this was a diabolical liberty and he deserved a good kicking.

“Look, I’m the police,” I said. “And we could … you know … do the whole thing, but you’d get arrested and blah blah blah and stuff, whereas I just want a chat … so what’s the point of all … this?”

No-neck thought about this for a moment, before grunting and shifting enough to let me squeeze past. That’s how real men settle their differences. Through reasoned discussion and a dispassionate analysis. He farted as I reached the inner door as a sign, I decided, of his respect.