Tony put on an innocent expression and shrugged.

‘Good day, Mr Lambrianu.’

‘Tony! Tony!’ Jake had waited until the police had left but couldn’t hold it in any longer. ‘Come out the back; you were right!’

Outside, in the back yard, an Alsatian dog was convulsing and foaming at the mouth. It had spewed everywhere. Suddenly, it gave one last howl and collapsed. The dog lay still; it was dead.

‘What happened, Jake?’ Tony stared at the dog lying dead on the ground; he was at a loss for words.

‘I gave it that jerk chicken Marlon brought you last night. It ate it, then it just started spewing and foaming at the mouth. What the fuck was in it?’

‘Marlon was going to poison me and make me look like that?’ Tony looked at the dog, bewildered. ‘Well, Jake, he got a nicer death than the one he planned for me, didn’t he?’ He turned round and walked back into the club, where a team of workmen were sorting out the mess.

‘Sorry, Tony, you were right,’ was all Jake could say.

‘Get someone to sort the dog out, then we have some work to do. The South London mob boss is dead. We need to sort things out before someone else steps in and it gets out of hand.’

Once Tony arrived at Marlon’s place, he saw that the bodyguards were still there. A little mournful and at a loss, but they were there. They seemed pleased to see him; it was time to talk.

‘Will you be taking over, Tony?’ one of them asked. They didn’t know what to do. It was pretty obvious they needed a leader.

‘I don’t deal drugs, lads, you know that.’ He was adamant he wouldn’t get drawn into that game.

One of the men spoke up. ‘Bennie knows all the drug dealers around here and he’s getting a little too old to be standing at his usual street corner,’ he said. ‘Maybe we could leave things in his hands. After all, he’s known and they all trust him.’

It seemed to Tony and Jake that they had already thought this through. Bennie was a good and trusted friend. They knew him well.

Scratching his chin and leaving them in suspense, Tony made a big pretence of thinking about things. There was money on that side, to be sure, and he could offer protection and possibly even do some money-lending.

Tony felt sick to the stomach about how things had ended up. He had liked Marlon in the beginning. They’d both worked their own turf in their own way, without any gang wars. It was now up to Tony to put the South London mob in order and make sure the drug dealing was done as far away from him as possible. He knew people took drugs; he wasn’t stupid. He just felt that, if he was going to spend twenty years behind bars, it wasn’t going to be for drug dealing, plus it brought back all those horrible memories of his mother and her ‘medicine’.