‘Go on then, do it,’ he said.

Jake and the other men watched as Tony knelt there with his shirt open, displaying his chest and stomach to the man with the knife. He was daring the man to thrust the knife into him.

‘You haven’t got the guts,’ Tony sneered, his eyes wild and blazing.

Jake saw the man with the knife look at Tony, then he took the knife and thrust it forward towards Tony’s chest. In the nick of time Tony moved, but he was slashed across the arm. Tony burst out laughing. ‘My turn,’ he said, and he took a handgun from the waistband of his trousers and shot the man through the right hand, then he picked up his left hand and shot him through that, too. Blood poured everywhere.

Jake and the others watched the injured man writhing on the floor; he was screaming and shouting. Tony stood up and put his gun back in his waistband. He picked up the machine gun and put it on top of the bar, then promptly started doing up the buttons on his jacket. The knees of his trousers were stained with blood. He looked at his watch. ‘Time to go, Jake,’ he said.

‘What about him, you crazy bastard?’ said one of the other men cowering behind the bar; he was pointing at the man with the ruined hands. ‘They all say you’re crazy but I never believed them till now.’

‘He’s your problem, call an ambulance or something, but whatever you do, always remember that you’ve just witnessed how crazy I am first-hand, okay?’ With that, Tony took the machine gun off the bar and bent down to the man writhing in pain on the floor. He took hold of the man’s hands and pressed his fingers on the body and the trigger of the gun. It was only then that the other men saw that Tony was wearing leather gloves. The only fingerprints on that gun belonged to the man writhing on the floor.

Tony walked towards the door. The landlord popped his head around the side door to see if the coast was clear.

‘You,’ Tony said to the landlord, ‘need to watch the kind of custom you let through the door. Here.’ He took a bundle of money – a thousand pounds – from his inside jacket pocket and threw it at the landlord. The money went flying through the air and hit the floor. The publican bent down and began hurriedly picking it up.

‘Thank you, Mr Lambrianu, thank you, sir,’ he said, as he shoved the notes down his T-shirt.

Tony got back into his car and told John, his driver, to get his other suit out of the boot. ‘For God’s sake, Jake, this suit cost me nearly 3,000 pounds and now it’s trash. I hate blood, it gets everywhere.’

He got changed in the back of the car, then sat back in the seat and straightened his tie.

‘Did you really need to shoot him in both hands, Tony?’ asked Jake. He had witnessed Tony’s anger many times, and always thanked God he had never been on the receiving end of it.