The Allens had been forced to stand back like a pair of errant schoolboys as everything they had built up over the years was just given away to a fucking no-mark. The Baileys had taken it away without a thought for the time and effort he had put in over the years, setting the deals up, making sure the people they dealt with were kosher, and not liable to turn at the first glimpse of Lily Law and put them all in the frame for a long stretch. And that was becoming more customary as the courts handed out bigger and bigger sentences. It was shocking – fucking murder didn’t warrant the sentences drug dealing did. Get pissed and take out a whole family in your motor – husband, wife, kids, the lot – and you were looking at a four or a five stretch; be found with three keys of coke, and you were doing a twenty. It was a scandal – especially as most of the drugs confiscated were back on the street within weeks. The Old Bill were not averse to a bit of dealing themselves; if it wasn’t for the Filth he wouldn’t have half the product needed to satisfy the demand. And, whether people liked it or not, there was a fucking big demand for it. Cocaine was a middle-class drug – he served up half of Canary Wharf, those city boys couldn’t snort it up their hooters quick enough.

The Baileys handing it on a plate to Michael O’Toole was the final insult. Although Terry knew he could not show his hand yet, that did not mean he could not show it at some point in the future. It was like a festering sore, not just the drop in wages, and the loss of prestige, but the fact that they had been replaced by a mug like Michael O’Toole, a man who was in no way clued up enough to run an outfit of such huge proportions. He was a fucking local boy, one step above a gas-meter bandit. He had done a few armed robberies back in the day, when a wages-snatch for twenty grand was still seen as a fucking big event.

Word on the street was that the Scallys were not too thrilled about Michael O’Toole either; that was because, along with the Allens, they had, over the years, devised a method of payment that ensured that they all got their money’s worth, even if the Baileys didn’t.