It only made sense to cooperate. If you didn’t, the cost could be shocking. He’d heard enough bloodcurdling tales – drive-by shootings, firebombed properties, limbs broken by hammers and axes – to know what might await him if he didn’t.

But as O’Grady walked stiffly up the steps to the garage’s side-door, his fists were clenched at his sides like bone mallets, his incisors bared between lips drawn tight and grey.

It just wasn’t in his nature to give in to toe-rag criminals. Because ultimately that was all they were. For all their swanky cars and hand-made suits, they were low-level filth from the bad side of town, bullying, immoral scum.

All that previous night, he’d been tormented by thoughts like these, tossing and turning under his sweat-soaked bedsheets, only just avoiding giving Megan a slap when she’d snapped at him to stop keeping her awake. When he entered the office and sat behind his desk, he glared at the open doorway in front of him, as if it was somehow the fault of the wooden frame that Frank McCracken had come in through it. However much he mulled it over, the essential problem remained – that attempting to double-cross the Crew, in any shape or form, was likely to be lethal. And it wasn’t as if they hadn’t offered carrot as well as stick. It was a simple equation: you joined them or you died. But no …

‘No!’ he snarled.

This gig was his creation, his game. He hadn’t gone to all this trouble teaching the law-abiding world that it had been a grave mistake kicking him out, just to see it immediately absorbed into some vast, shapeless underworld conglomerate.

He glanced at his watch, which jerked him back to the present and to his feet.

It was almost ten, and there was a job to do this morning; in the angst of the last twenty-four hours he’d almost forgotten.

A short side-passage led off the office, connecting with a toilet and a small tea-making area. O’Grady hurried down there, grabbed a plastic bag from the draining board, and took several items of clothing out of it: a sweatshirt, a pair of jeans, a baseball cap and some trainers. Hurriedly, he put it all on, taking care to hang his suit in its correct creases. There were four other items in the bag: a notebook and pen, a Tupperware lunchbox and a camera with a neck strap and extendable lens. O’Grady checked they were all present and correct and took the bag with him as he headed out of the office, stopping to pull a knee-length waterproof over his casuals and to take two mobile phones from his desk, his own and a throwaway device that he’d purchased the previous day.