Every Monday morning, the twelve underbosses who constituted the Crew’s Board of Directors would each despatch a cash delivery to a drop-off point in the back room of a dog-grooming salon in Whiston, Merseyside. Each delivery would constitute that particular section’s weekly earnings, all of which, at this stage, existed solely as dirty money.

At the salon, dog-groomer extraordinaire and famously eccentric Crew bookkeeper, Milo Kennedy, would receive and register (in code) each batch of notes, ensuring to make a careful count so that on payday, every head of section, in addition to his monthly salary (from which he would also pay the salaries of his underlings) would receive any bonuses due. The following Thursday, with Milo happy that his records were straight, the cash, which usually totalled in the low hundreds of thousands, would be parcelled in several brown paper packages, and with no cover letter, return address or accompanying paperwork of any sort, be handed to a security detail, who’d deliver it to a private address in a secluded rural area on the outskirts of the Cheshire market town, Knutsford, where they would post it through a specially enlarged letter box in the right-hand gatepost at the front of a cosy, thatch-roofed residence.

The owner of this residence was a certain Margaret Millington, who, as well as being senior accountant at Hooper, Klein and Cromarty, a respected accountancy and business advisory firm in Stockport, also had a sideline as chief money-launderer for the Crew.

Millington never knew the money’s source, and never enquired; she didn’t even have contact with the delivery boys. She would take charge of the cash, again auditing the delivery and counting it to ensure there were no discrepancies – skimming was one inside job the Crew would never tolerate – keeping her own cryptically coded records, and then, over the next few months, despatched it piecemeal to the various legitimate businesses owned by Ent-Tech Ltd (aka the Crew), such as hotels, nightclubs and restaurants, bars and pubs, bowling alleys, gymnasia, fast-food outlets, tanning salons and the like, where it could be surreptitiously fed into the profits, at which point of course it was all nice and clean.