‘A Tatarstan lieutenant was killed in a shootout with National Crime Group officers in Bradburn up in Lancashire last year,’ ventured Adam Gilcrist. As the Crew’s chief importer and seller of illegal firearms, he always had an interest in illicit gun-play. ‘The coppers think he was acting alone, but this new intel suggests different.’

‘The Russians have a permanent presence in Liverpool,’ Lennie Trueman said in his deceptively gentle West Indian accent. ‘And it’s not just them. We’ve got Mexicans interfering with some of our supply-lines.’

‘Ah yes, the cartels,’ Pentecost said thoughtfully. ‘It was only a matter of time before those gentlemen found the whole of Mesoamerica too small for their liking.’

‘They’ll struggle to make an impact here,’ Benny Bartholomew chirped up.

Benny B, the Crew’s Head of Security, was a beefy character, with slab-like arms and shoulders and an equally massive neck, but much of it was running to flab these days; his face was podgy, his curly hair receding, and, as he viewed the world by squinting at it through a small pair of circular lenses, the effect was often more comical than menacing.

‘You think so, do you?’ Pentecost said, intrigued to hear more.

Benny B leaned forward, his chair squeaking. ‘There’re no deserts here for them to dig pits in, which they can stuff full of headless corpses, are there?’

‘I hate to rain on your parade, Mr B,’ Toni Zambala interrupted.

Formerly a pirate and smuggler in the pay of the Mungiki crime syndicate in Kenya, Zambala, despite a machine-gun-toting youth in which he’d violently rejected all things western, had effortlessly adapted to the capitalist lifestyle of the UK. He was now in charge of narcotics, importation and distribution, and his annual contribution to company funds was greater by far than everyone else’s, so, though still an underboss, when he spoke, people listened.

‘Not three weeks ago, one of my sellers was fished out of a Fallowfield sewer.’ He took a sip of mineral water. ‘He hadn’t had his head cut off, I’ll grant you, but that was only because the guys responsible had wanted to put him down the sewer while he was still alive … minus his hands and feet, I should add. The cops reckon the chopping tool was a machete.’ He turned his gaze on Benny B. ‘Kind of a Mex thing, wouldn’t you say?’

Pentecost pursed his thin grey lips. ‘Not an ideal situation. When our own people are getting their hands and feet chopped off.’