Even the birth of his only daughter had not scratched the surface of his arrogance; he was still too involved with what he saw as his personal crusade to wipe out the competition. Peter could not help wondering when that would include him and his boys. Daniel was not a man to take kindly to criticism, and Peter was criticising him left, right and centre at the moment.

Daniel continued, ‘I want to be there when we tell him the score. I don’t think you understand how important it is for us to show a united front, Pete. You seem to think this is cut and dried.’

Peter sighed heavily. ‘It is, Dan. You have got to lighten up, mate. We have achieved what we set out to achieve – now we can play the good guys. You acting like A Man Called Horse ain’t going to earn us any creds. Calm down, will you? We don’t need the blatant violence any more, Dan. Alfie’s a good earner, let’s keep him on-side.’

Daniel was annoyed at his brother’s interference, even though he knew he had a point. ‘What are you trying to fucking say, big bruv?’

Peter bit back his anger, and instead said reasonably, ‘What I’m trying to say is, Dan, we don’t need the bully-boy tactics any more. We have sorted everything out perfectly well so far. We need to establish a new order, a new way of handling things. You have to see that taking everyone out at a second’s notice will only cause upset and distrust. We have worked long and hard for this, I’m begging you, don’t let’s fuck it up by generating bad will. We don’t need to prove ourselves any more. We’ve arrived, mate. Let everyone else take the chances – we need to be here to oversee everything. To make sure it goes in our favour.’

Daniel grinned. ‘So it’s all right for you to do things off your own bat but not me? Is that it?’ He was still upset with his brother for taking out Kevin O’Neill behind his back, and Peter knew it.

He smiled, and held his hands up in mock surrender. ‘I’ll give you that one, Dan. But this isn’t about now, this is about the future. We have always been very different in our approaches to our work, and up till now that has been one of our strengths. No one knows how to handle us, not separately and definitely not when we are together. We are like chalk and cheese, but now we have to pull together properly, and we have to keep a low profile.’ Peter could see the scepticism on his brother’s face and it angered him that Daniel could not see the danger he brought to their daily lives with his violence and his pettiness.