He might have entered the criminal world relatively late in life, but Joe Lazenby had soon come to recognise this as a benefit rather than a drawback. It obviously helped that he didn’t have a rap sheet, and it helped enormously that after years of normality, he didn’t look like a criminal.

Whatever people said about the monsters in our society mingling easily and comfortably with the rest of us, that only really applied to the successful ones. As far as Joe Lazenby was concerned, some shaven-headed moron decked in cheap bling and wearing tattoos on his face and neck wasn’t even going to enter a street-corner boozer without the punters edging away from him, so his chances of getting close to someone it was actually worth robbing or conning were beyond zero. Not that Lazenby went in for primitive tricks like robbing or conning, but in complete contrast to those tattooed, knuckle-dragging apes, he still regarded his ‘ordinary joe’ appearance as his best asset.

In fact, that was the street name he used: ‘Ordinary Joe’.

He’d chosen it, himself, and almost unbelievably, it had caught on. Even so, as he sat here in the genteel environs of Hogarth’s Cocktail Lounge, working through his daily accounts, no one would ever know what he was really up to. They’d just see a guy in his mid-thirties, slightly stout of build, average height, with curly brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard and moustache, a wedding ring on one hand, a none-too-expensive Nautica watch on the other, wearing black horn-rims and a three-piece suit, sipping Perrier water as he tapped away on a laptop; clearly an averagely successful businessman wrapping up the day’s work with a few final, essential adjustments before winding his thankful way home – no doubt to a semi in the suburbs, where his pretty wife and two-and-a-half nerdy children awaited him.

It helped, of course, that most of the clientele at Hogarth’s were cut from exactly that cloth, though mainly that was down to the time and place – late afternoon on a Tuesday, and Pearlman Road in the very centre of Crowley, where, for the most part, it was office and retail staff now disgorging from the workplaces close by.

Outside, the mid-October dusk was falling quickly, and with it the temperature. But Hogarth’s prided itself on providing a warm, snug environment. The mullioned windows were shaded with velvet, the lamplight low-key, the various loungers and armchairs of the deepest, most comfortable variety. The music playing was easy jazz, while the real fire crackling in the grate threw cosy orange-gold patterns across the hardwood floors. There was no actual bar service in here; all drinks were supplied by waitresses, who would attend your seating bay or booth or coffee table, in response to the ornate Edwardian bell-pushes located nearby.