‘The reward was withdrawn this morning,’ he continued. ‘That’s why I’m quite happy for you, Frank, to throw your entire team’s weight at this problem. I know you’ll play it sensible and low-key. So, I’ve actually taken an executive decision to pull everyone else back. And I mean right back … thus clearing the decks for a more direct method.’ He returned to his chair, and stood behind it, hands on the backrest, and said loudly: ‘You can come in now.’

The office door opened, and a trio of people sidled through it.

‘In case anyone here doesn’t already know these honoured guests, Benny …’ Pentecost nodded at Benny B, ‘perhaps you can enlighten them?’

‘Erm, yeah … absolutely.’ Benny B got to his feet and turned theatrically to the rest of the room.

All three of the newcomers, two males and one female, were dressed smartly in suits, but McCracken – who knew them by reputation, if not personally – was well aware that this was only for show, a temporary disguise by which they could occasionally slide out of the shadows and mingle with the ranks of the ordinary and the sane.

The man on the immediate left was known simply – or so Benny B said – as ‘Bojan’. He was about fifty-years-old, and despite his heavy physique, broad chest and shoulders, and his bull-thick neck, he didn’t look as if he carried much spare. His scalp was clean-shaven, and his face, which was almost too small for his huge head, was leathery and seamed with old scars. His eyes were tiny and apelike, but there was an odd, greenish glitter about them. It was difficult to tell whether his cruel smirk was a permanent fixture due to some old wound, or a mark of undisguised contempt for the gallery of English gangland lieutenants confronting him. Benny B introduced him as a Serbian-born former spec-ops captain who had served in the Yugoslav war of the late 1990s with ‘a specialist urban commando unit called Arkan’s Tigers’. If McCracken remembered rightly, Arkan’s Tigers had chiefly been notable for the gang rapes they indulged in and their massacres of innocent civilians, but why quibble over details? This trio hadn’t been brought here for their sweet and generous natures.