There was a look of furious indignation on Dink’s face. He was still small, but he had filled out, a mixture of workouts, steroids and making up for all the calories he’d missed out on as a kid. His pink shaven head seemed to rise out of his tattooed shoulders like a plug amid the flesh and muscle, his features crowded into the middle of his face, as if they’d been grafted on from a much smaller head. His disconcertingly full, feminine lips parted and Sam saw the straight white teeth of a man with money to burn on dentistry, and the ability to manage a drug habit, a sure sign that he had got where he wanted to be.

‘What’s in the bag, Arsehole?’

Although he was three years younger – in the same year as Karza – age had never inhibited Dink from taking on his elders. He had two others with him, half a foot taller at least, heavily muscled, their heads identically shaved. One had no eyebrows, which gave him a misleadingly babyish appearance. The other had an unusually narrow skull and slightly sloping eyes, more likely a legacy of foetal alcohol syndrome than any exotic ancestry.

‘I asked yer a question, Paki.’

Indignation rose in Sam like acid. ‘I’m not a Pakistani.’

Dink’s approach to racial profiling: anyone who wasn’t pure white like him simply shouldn’t exist. His eyes blazed. He jabbed Sam in the chest. ‘You’re all Pakis to me, you Paki fuck.’

‘Okay, whatever.’

Sam knew Dink’s story – in fact, he had thought of him when he was preparing his last lecture, ‘The Gang as Family’. A textbook example of what he’d termed ‘Son of McDad’, the product of a ‘domestic void’, the child whose father only shows up from time to time to take the kids to McDonald’s, the mother on benefits, a stream of adult males through the home treating it like it was theirs, and Mum telling him to piss off out when she had company. The child, neglected and constantly out on the streets, falls prey to the gang, who brutalize him, then test him with tasks – at first relatively trivial, such as a mugging, then increasingly violent. As they absorb him, they put him to work, teach him how to steal, how to threaten, how to be feared. He gets respect, status. It’s addictive, like the stuff they’re dealing. The gang becomes his family, their values his.

Dink had done well. The teeth said it all. As the older members were picked off – killed or maimed or sent to jail – he had risen through the ranks until he was number one. Respected, feared and rich, everything he wanted out of life.

But right now, all of Sam’s insight counted for shit.

Dink snatched his bag.