In truth, he was letting the bastard off easily. Stripped of his illegal earnings or not, Lazenby owed the Crew money. They’d made a demand of him that day in Hogarth’s wine bar; £140,000, if McCracken remembered rightly. And what would their reputation be worth if they simply walked away from that? It was something they’d need to work out, of course. Lazenby wasn’t some street-fighting hoodlum whose head they could squeeze in a vice till he came up with a secret stash. But he did have other assets: a house, a car, a regular wage through his day job. In due course, by some discreet means or other, they’d get what he owed them. It wasn’t as if McCracken had any choice in the matter, especially not the way things were going; he was supposed to be the Shakedown, the tax-collector – he couldn’t keep losing out on big paydays.

But in the meantime, he had other problems to contend with.

And then his phone rang.

He saw that the call was from Mick Shallicker. When he answered, he did so grumpily. ‘Better make this good, Mick … I’ve had enough bad news for one day.’

‘On a Richter scale of bad news, Frank,’ Shallicker said, ‘this is pretty seismic.’

McCracken didn’t reply; he just waited, listening.

‘I’ve just killed a cop.’

McCracken arrived on Felton Lane in what had to be record time for a busy Friday evening. On arrival, he saw that one car was already parked there: Lucy’s Jimny. Not wishing to leave his Bentley out in the open, he found an entrance to a backstreet where there was a row of disused garages. He reversed in, halting alongside another vehicle, the Peugeot 307 that Shallicker had been driving. McCracken didn’t know what the hell his minder was playing at. Shooting coppers was no-go territory even for the Crew; it only ever happened in extreme circumstances, and with the entire Board of Directors’ approval obtained beforehand. But if nothing else, at least Mick had been sufficiently smart to tuck his vehicle up this backstreet, where no one would see it.

McCracken parked alongside the Peugeot, climbed out, locked up and hurried down to Felton Lane. He found Shallicker about a hundred yards along Jubilee Gardens, standing beside a twisted body, the white face of which had been brutalised to some tune, the right eye swollen closed, the nose a mangled, gory mess.

But it wasn’t this that stopped McCracken in his tracks.

He leaned down incredulously.

The dead man’s dark hair was cut stylishly short, but his soft, rounded features clearly revealed that he was actually not a man at all.

‘A bird!’ McCracken half-shouted. ‘You’re telling me it’s not just a cop … but a fucking bird!’