‘Afternoon,’ he said in his usual emotionless monotone. ‘I’m guessing you all know why you’re here, but let’s cut to the chase anyway. To be frank … whoever this fucking Red-Headed League are, their fun in the sun is about to end. At least, it had fucking well better.’

He paused to let that sink in, to let his underlings realise, if they didn’t before, that such liberties as these bandits were taking reflected almost as much on those empowered to stop them but failing, as it did on the villains themselves.

‘You know my normal position,’ Pentecost said. ‘I’ve always had a soft spot for enterprising lads. And I don’t mind terribly if certain so-called associates of ours find themselves up against it from time to time. Flash Andy was a case in point. He thought he was a face, but in reality, of course, a total fuckhead. Don’t get me wrong, it stank what happened, and we put the word out for info … and if we’d got a quick line on who was responsible, I’ve no doubt we’d have made an example of them by now. However, the money-drop lost yesterday puts this problem into a different league altogether.’

He paused, his narrowly glazed eyes roving across them.

‘The bottom line is, gentlemen … you steal from our associates, you steal from us. But that’s just about tolerable to me if you’re punting for a job, or if you’re willing to put yourself forward straight away after and offer the usual restitution. But when you steal from us, as in right out of our pocket … well, that’s something else altogether.’

Another long pause followed, during which his audience brooded as effectively as they possibly could, faces fixed like gravestones, no one daring to do so much as twitch or fidget.

McCracken pondered what he knew about the previous day’s robbery.

It seemed that the cash delivery had been hit on a quiet country lane on the outskirts of Knutsford. It had followed the same pattern as the hit on Andy Northwood’s pad: two bandits wearing red masks and wielding sub-machine guns, which Sam Brodie, an ex-army man, had pegged as SIG-Sauer MPXs, the sort of high-tech military hardware that was not commonly found on the streets of the UK. Both the couriers had been shot in the legs even after the cash had been handed over. No one had died this time, because no one had behaved in the same braindead fashion as Flash Andy. But it had still been a pretty sadistic move. The blaggers had done the deed in a wooded area a few yards off the road – they’d certainly plotted the ambush point carefully – and had then simply abandoned their badly wounded victims.