The interior of the lock-up was rectangular, about twenty-five feet by twelve, enclosed by breeze-block walls. When he hit the light switch, an electric bulb shuddered to life, exposing what he thought of as his ‘knick-knacks’ but which, in reality, was a clutter of junk expanding wall to wall and comprising all the odds and ends he’d assembled over the last few years: from disused garden furniture and dated, dust-coated office-ware, to boxes of second-hand books that he’d bought cheaply at auction for this sole purpose. Even the hooks on the walls had come in handy, and now dangled with rusted, cobwebby tools, both of the garden and DIY variety.

The good stuff was right at the back, but even if some intruder managed to navigate his way through to that distant point, all he would see, jammed between a rusty fridge and a stack of propped-up bamboo matting, were two ratty old armchairs. The one on the left had a cardboard box crammed with video tapes on top of it, but underneath this, and underneath the cushion, the chair’s base had a false bottom, and a hidden compartment in which there was a steel strongbox containing twenty rubber-band-wrapped blocks of clean twenty-pound notes, each one totalling around £8,000, an overall sum of one hundred and sixty grand. The chair on the right was weighed down by a long-broken television, but the strongbox concealed inside it contained the real gold in Lazenby’s stockpile: eight one-kilo bricks of cocaine wrapped in cellophane, the street value of which came to just under half a million pounds.

He unzipped his sports bag and went first to the chair on the right, loading the bag with the eight bricks of coke. When he’d finished, he moved to the chair on the left. One-sixty K wasn’t humongous money in gangland terms, but it would serve to give him some kind of safeguard, a final fall-back if everything else went pear-shaped. He got it all into the bag, which was now heavy and cumbersome, but he was still able to zip it closed and lug it back through the junk and out into the fresh air, where he humped it round to the Galaxy’s boot.

He wasn’t overly keen on taking this stuff home with him, but it would only be for one night – tomorrow he’d find somewhere else, somewhere better.

‘That would be ours, wouldn’t it?’ a muffled voice said.

Lazenby spun around, startled.

Two men faced him from about ten feet away.

He hadn’t heard them approach, which was probably no surprise given that he’d been banging around inside the lock-up, lost in his thoughts. But even if he had, it didn’t look as if there’d have been much he could do – their intentions were pretty clear.