‘Just make sure he’s not wired.’

‘I have done this before, you know.’ McCracken hit the brakes, slowing down for a red light. ‘Stay in touch about the other stuff.’

‘Will do, Frank.’

The line went dead.

McCracken was on the A5145, heading towards Stockport, when he received this call. He’d been en route to see Eddie ‘Psycho’ Sikes, an old-time robber whose last job had been the infamous £6.6 million Midland Bank Clearing Centre blag in Salford, in ’95. Psycho’s main usefulness at this moment was not so much his expertise in that field – he’d ended up serving seventeen years for the Salford job, emerging an old man with health issues, which suggested that his expertise wasn’t total – but he knew a lot of people, and had a particularly good ear when it came to the up-and-comers, the young buckos, who were more likely than most to throw the rulebook away in an effort to make it big quickly.

‘Z-list wankers!’ McCracken said, as he spun his Bentley around at Albert Park and headed northwest towards Stretford, and beyond that, Crowley. Psycho could wait till later. He’d need to get his foot down if he didn’t want to be late for the RV at Crowley Tech.

McCracken didn’t necessarily blame all the woes of the world on the celebrity no-marks who, thanks to social media, now seemed to encircle British youth, endlessly partying: champagne, yachts in the Caribbean, pissing it up in the swankiest hotels on earth, living the high life in an epic, reckless way. But it was no wonder kids today thought they were entitled to the same thing, and just like their cheapjack heroes, seemed to think they would never have to do any actual work to attain it.

Except maybe take down scores from easy targets.

Easy in this case because no one had ever thought that anyone would actually dare.

Unfortunately, for this Red-Headed League, as Wild Bill had christened them, there’d be a big price to pay for such a colossal misreading of the situation. McCracken’s job now was to ensure that the right people paid this price. Because, though he never objected to using violence when necessary, it was only ever effective in McCracken’s mind when it was targeted. The very last thing they needed now was this whirlwind of paranoid craziness, with everyone blaming everyone else, opportunist shitheads trying to earn bounties off the innocent, old wounds being freshly torn, various families falling out with each other all over again.

But still, business was business. And Ordinary Joe Lazenby came first.

It was 4.25 p.m. when McCracken drove into central Crowley. A blue autumn dusk was falling, street lights casting their sodium-yellow pall over the late-afternoon traffic. When he turned into the college car park, a succession of vehicles were headed out in the opposite direction.