It was like this: a boy who’d grown up off the Whitechapel Road, who’d doted on his father – God rest him – and followed him down to the Brancroft Social Club every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday night. Old Mr Cohen was fond of the dogs, and they took bets in the back room there, but on Saturday nights the place would be cleared, there’d be a pianist, a couple of decent trumpet players, and, if they were lucky, a singer. If the singer didn’t show up, they made do with some of the local girls instead – and that was good enough, because, with so many people swarming onto the dance floor, you could hardly hear the music anyway. All that really mattered was that there was enough drink and enough dance. Raymond had seen men who’d brawled with each other in the market one day drinking together the next night, and even stepping out onto the dance floor to waltz with each other’s sisters, as if drink and dance could shed all the nastiness of day-to-day life clean away. And his father . . .

His father was the strong man at home. He’d done a stretch in Pentonville for fencing stolen goods – at the trial they said he was the mastermind, that he played father figure to all the young crooks who went out robbing on his account – and this was legend among the family. The bare bones of it were true, but the way they painted him as a dastardly genius, well, that was just rot. When Raymond was small and Stanley Cohen had come back from the War, he’d sold scrap metal to make ends meet. Where the scrap metal came from, nobody asked – nobody but the occasional policeman doing his rounds, who soon got driven out or shut up by the local boys, who always owed Mr Cohen a thing or two. Scrap metal pilfered and scrap metal sold, that was Stanley’s line of work – until, one day, the law caught up with him.