Frank McCracken was the only one who didn’t mutter his discontent. He was too busy wondering where all this was leading. He too had heard rumours that foreign powers were slowly muscling in on their action. Not so much his, maybe. He dealt mainly with those established British gangs who even after all these years still failed to recognise the Crew’s authority. But it was plain there was a foreign presence on the streets.

‘You’re very quiet, Frank,’ Pentecost suddenly said.

McCracken shrugged. ‘We might have to make deals, Bill.’

‘Surrender?’ Benny B said, sounding shocked.

‘Not that exactly,’ McCracken replied. ‘Just talk to them, so we can buy them off for a while … give ourselves more time to plan.’

‘Bollocks!’ Nick Merryweather blurted. ‘We’re not losing so much ground that we’re being forced into that, surely?’

Merryweather was the Crew’s whoremaster-in-chief, and a depraved, violent pimp. But for all that he was good at brutality, he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box.

‘Even if we were confronting them,’ McCracken replied, ‘which we’re not because we never know where they are, all we’d really be doing is fighting fires. Like you say, Bill, they’re scouting rather than invading.’

A silence followed, as the rest of them ingested this.

‘Well, Frank,’ Pentecost finally said, ‘the latest batch of accounts appear to support your POV inasmuch as we certainly need to rebuild our powerbase.’ He wafted a fistful of print-outs before slamming them down on the table. Even those seated farthest away could recognise the columns of financial data.

‘And as you gentlemen no doubt can tell from my demeanour,’ Pentecost said, ‘they don’t make for happy reading.’ He snatched a sheet up and turned to Jon Killarny, the Irishman who ran their counterfeiting scams. ‘August this year – down three per cent on July. July down two per cent on June. June down one per cent on May.’

‘Now, Bill … I …’ Killarny, a one-time IRA sergeant-at-arms, struggled to explain himself, only for Pentecost to switch his attention to Al Reed, whose role was the ‘protection’ of pubs, bars and nightclubs.

‘August this year …’ The Chairman shook his head. ‘Down six per cent on July. Six per cent, gentlemen. July down three per cent on June … and then this, June down eight per cent – yes, I kid you not – on May. None of you need to look smug, by the way.’ There was now a snap in his voice, his frosty eyes roving the room. ‘It’s the same across the board. When we reach November, we’ll have a better picture of our earnings for this last financial year, but even the boldest estimate puts them down an average four per cent on last year, which was four per cent down on the year before …’