All, though, were listening – mainly for any sign of increased volume from the boardroom next door. At present, it seemed calm, though this was a special meeting that had been called at short notice by Crew Chairman ‘Wild Bill’ Pentecost, and that didn’t always bode well. In fact, Mick Shallicker was so intent on listening – he knew there’d been a certain amount of strain in recent times between Pentecost and Frank McCracken in particular – that he half-jumped when his mobile suddenly buzzed in his jacket. Fishing it out, he saw to his surprise that he’d received a text from Lucy Clayburn.

Need to speak to him. ASAP.

He put the phone away and continued to wait and listen.

In the boardroom, Bill Pentecost was holding court from his usual place, standing at the head of the long teak table. At sixty-one, he was a tall, lean, permanently besuited man, and yet his appearance was never less than curious and unsettling. He had frizzy grey hair, a thin pale face and narrow blue eyes, which he levelled like a pair of laser beams through the square-lensed, steel-rimmed spectacles he always wore.

‘These are difficult times, gentlemen,’ he said in that slow, emotionless monotone that friends and foes alike found so difficult to read, and therefore so unnerving. ‘New challenges, it seems, are presenting themselves every day.’

The meeting had commenced at nine that evening, and only now, after ten, having dispensed with some routine matters, did Frank McCracken suspect the Chairman was at last getting down to his main business. By the concerted attention on everyone else’s faces, the rest of the Crew’s directorship felt the same. For his own part, McCracken was resolved to look calm and relaxed. Like all birds of prey, Wild Bill could sense fair game before it had even broken cover. Not that McCracken considered himself in those terms. Things were strange at present – there was something in the air he didn’t like – but generally he was at home in this dangerous company. Though in his mid-fifties, he’d kept well. He was tanned and fit, with a silver-grey crewcut, dark eyes and lean, predatory features that did little to conceal the hawkish personality underneath. As the Crew’s shakedown captain, his line wasn’t always as profitable as some of the others, but he was a regular and reliable contributor to company funds and he’d been close to Pentecost since their earliest days.