That was an ugly thought. It would also explain a lot. But all Lazenby could do was shake it from his head. What would be would be, and anyway, unless they were still following him, there was no way they could know what he was up to at this moment. He checked his rear-view mirror, but it was half past nine at night: the streets, which were dark and wet from the rain that had fallen earlier, were deserted.

‘It could be you’re flattering yourself,’ he said under his breath. These guys ran what amounted to an underworld corporation. ‘Don’t kid yourself into thinking you’re so important that they’ll watch you every minute of the day.’

He told himself this with growing conviction. It was a realistic assessment of the way things were. But his hands still sweated on the steering wheel. Until this evening, everything had been fine. Now his road felt much, much darker.

When he arrived at the Bellhop Industrial estate, it was nearly ten.

At this time of night, there was nobody around, the corrugated metal warehouses and workshops all standing in darkness, their windows and entrances covered by roll-down security shutters. There would be CCTV in operation, of course, but Lazenby was not an unfamiliar figure on the site – he’d been a regular visitor in the three years since he’d taken out a lease here for one of the privately rented lock-ups – so if anyone was watching from a security office somewhere, or a mobile patrol made an unexpected drive-by, his presence, even at this hour, would draw no comment.

In truth, if you wanted absolute certainty that your goods were in strong safekeeping, the Bellhop wasn’t the ideal spot – there were certainly safer facilities in Crowley, but having lots and lots of officialdom around would hardly have suited Lazenby’s purpose. In any case, from the outside, the lock-ups here looked like old garages and so were unlikely to be tampered with by opportunist thieves, while those who knew there were personals stored here would also know that, because of the low rates, it was mostly rubbish: old furniture, moth-eaten clothes, a few corroded car parts. Slim pickings indeed. Nothing worth bothering with.

From Lazenby’s perspective, such anonymity was ideal. Because in his private little depot, along with various knick-knacks he’d installed to provide window-dressing, he also stored the bulk of his product, and just in case there was ever a real emergency, a supply of liquid cash.