He had been very clever. He had got dressed one day, and walked out of his bedsit without anything, as if he was just going to the shops, and he had never gone back. That’s when he had shaken off the authorities – they were all a part of the conspiracy anyway, giving him tablets to stop him knowing the truth. He was a lot of things but a moron wasn’t one of them.

Ha! He had shown them all, and he would carry on showing them all. Now here he was in a den of thieves, living with actual thieves. What was it his father had always said? Never steal off your own – and yet that was exactly what this lot had done. As bad as they had tried to make him out, he had never stolen unless he was at rock bottom. He prided himself on that.

Now these pieces of scum had robbed him. He could smell the sourness of the girls’ bodies and wrinkled his nose in distaste. One of the girls, Alicia, was quite nice. She was very posh and had gone to an expensive school, but her parents had washed their hands of her, and who could blame them? She was a thief, and thieves never prosper.

He sat down on the hearth of the old-fashioned fireplace; it was filthy, overflowing with cigarette butts, roaches, and the usual detritus of a junkie’s lair. Needles, wraps, and sooty tinfoil burned and wrinkled, McDonald’s wrappers, and sugar-laden drinks bottles. He looked at Dougie’s narrow face, thin beyond belief, and his filthy beard full of food and grease. He wondered if they were really asleep – perhaps they were pretending, hoping he would go away so they could get their stash out behind his back. The stash he had paid for, that they had bought with his stolen money!

He stood up and went into the kitchen. Holding open the heavy door was a rusty old iron. It had once been a lovely piece of metalwork, burnished black, and it had probably ironed ladies’ lawn handkerchiefs, or their knickerbockers; he smiled at the thought.

Picking it up, he walked back into the room and, raising the iron above his head, he brought it down with all the force he could muster on to Dougie’s face.

Dougie, so full of heroin he couldn’t feel a thing, was knocked out cold by the first blow. Ten blows later his face was gone and, placing the iron carefully on to the floor by the body, James Tailor methodically searched the man’s clothes for anything of value – he wouldn’t miss it now, after all – before leaving the flat. He had to get away. Far away.

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Three

‘But it’s my scan, you said you’d come with me.’

At the other end of the line, Vincent could hear the disappointment in Gabby’s voice.