Pentecost’s willingness to use the most sadistic violence to achieve his ends had earned him the nickname ‘Wild Bill’ back in the day, and had cleared a pathway for him to the mid-ranks of the Manchester underworld before he was thirty. After that, his organisational and diplomatic skills came into play, when he recognised that small-to-average-sized outfits like his would never rise to prominence if they didn’t stop fighting each other. He was into all the usual rackets by then – drugs, protection, gambling, illicit alcohol, illicit sex – but constantly waging bloody war against his rivals on the next Moston housing estate ensured that this empire would never expand. As such, he commenced the formation of the Crew, which in due course – though it took a long time and only came together with much more of the same crazy violence that Pentecost had sought to eliminate – emerged as the region’s overarching crime syndicate.

What was more, even now, at sixty years of age, Bill Pentecost was still top-dog, the guy who ultimately was in charge of everything. Though he’d never looked an especially brutish individual, facially he was stone, with pinched, pale features, curious wire-brush hair, and narrow grey eyes, with which he’d spear people through a permanent pair of square-lensed, steel-rimmed spectacles. He was tall, six-two, and thin – but it wasn’t an unhealthy kind of thinness. You only needed to look at Pentecost, to suspect that, despite his advancing years, he still had energy and virility. This aura of strength was only enhanced by his Tom Ford suits and Grenson Albert shoes, by his easy, confident gait, by his near-infectious lack of humour.

It was often said of Bill Pentecost that he could turn a room ice-cold simply by entering it. But on the morning of October 31, this was tested on two fronts; firstly, because it was already a very cold day, and secondly because it was a scene of intense, exaggerated emotion.

They’d just buried Andy Northwood.

It was the usual extravagant inner-Manchester affair, a team of six handsome horses drawing a glass-sided hearse crammed so full with floral tributes that they almost concealed the huge, black-lacquered coffin, as it made its stately way from the Anglican church in Whalley Range that Flash Andy had attended as a schoolboy (no one could think of a church he’d attended any time since), with family, friends and general well-wishers walking behind it in a slow, reflective procession the whole mile and a half to the municipal cemetery. News crews and TV cameras were present of course, tolerated because showy occasions like this always needed to be broadcast to the outside world, so long as they kept a respectful distance – which they did, though it didn’t prevent them seeking out celebrity faces half-hidden in the crowd; as usual, there were plenty of those, and not just of the criminal variety.