Individually, none of these men were hugely valuable to Northwood, but ‘spreading the love’ was his buzz phrase. Each Wednesday Night Special saw him wining and dining a different set of such pals and would-be pals at Golden Roost, so that he gradually built up an extensive network of nefarious but reasonably empowered characters, who could, at any time in the future, be in a position to look on him favourably.

And it wasn’t as if the Wednesday Night Specials were too expensive a deal. Okay, the food and drink didn’t come cheap, but his girls usually earned so well from the tips they received that they didn’t need anything extra from him, while the drugs always came from his own stash. And on top of that, he very often made a lot back from the table; Flash Andy was a dab hand at poker himself, and if he won every so often, who would complain, he being the host? That night of October 25, he’d already acquired seventy grand by nine o’clock, and so thought it politic to withdraw from the game and supervise the rest of the evening instead.

It was dark outside and drizzly, but given the time of year, though it was chilly, it was not bitterly cold. On some occasions, regardless of the weather, there’d be a host of bodyguards, brought by guests and dotted around the exterior of the premises, often packing more hardware than he was comfortable with. But that wasn’t the case tonight. None of these guests were highly enough placed to have brought anyone with them, relying instead on Northwood’s own security arrangements, a single employee called Rob Hoon, who would operate the front gate from a dedicated security booth, a small prefabricated structure on the west side of the house, and who, thanks to the horseshoe of video screens around him, would keep an eye on other sections of the property as well. Hoon was an ex-cop who’d been sacked from the job and briefly jailed for child pornography offences. Northwood didn’t really hold with that kind of thing, but if nothing else, it meant that Hoon would know his way around computers, was completely without scruple, and as he was virtually unemployable anywhere else, was never likely to let him down, even though he was paid a pittance. The guy had also at one time been a trained firearms officer. What more could a gangster ask?