Peter hugged his younger brother, could smell the aroma that was so peculiar to him: Acqua di Selva and Palmolive soap. And prayed that he had done the right thing. As much as he loved his brother – and that had never been in question – Daniel was not a man who could be trusted to make sensible decisions off his own bat. He needed guidance, and Peter would have to watch him like a hawk because of that. They would start with the debts and the bets; let Daniel prove himself there and everything else should fall into place. After all, they were brothers, bonded by blood, and nothing would ever change that.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Peter Bailey was uneasy. It seemed that his brother was running true to form. He’d only been back in the fold a couple of weeks and already people were on the blower complaining about him, his attitude, and his aggression. Luckily, the people who were complaining were not people he had any real interest in. And, anyway, he had bigger fish to fry. Like Alfie Clarke, for example. Alfie, so the gossip went, was double dealing. He was still supplying the Baileys with drugs, but he was also supplying the very people they themselves were selling on to. He was going straight to the dealers, and side-stepping the middle men. Peter would see it as a good move if he wasn’t the middle man. Not only had the earn gone down considerably – a fucking irritation in itself – but the principle of it really offended Peter Bailey.

He had thought Alfie Clarke far too shrewd to think he could get away with something so fucking basic; he had not believed it at first because it was so fucking outrageous, and so blatantly a piss-take, he had been hard pushed to accept the truth of it. But then Daniel’s words came back to him: I’ve heard he’s mugging us off. So are we going to take that? It seemed his brother had been right about Alfie Clarke all along.

Delroy had brought him the news; he’d been as dumbfounded by it all as Peter was. Delroy, though, had noticed the gradual slide in the weekly take, and he had decided to investigate. It had not taken him long to find out the score, and then he had made it his business to pay a late-night visit to a certain Essex wide boy by the name of Robbie Jennings. Robbie had been only too pleased to tell Delroy the whole sorry tale.

Robbie Jennings was a young man, and a foolish one at that. He had not understood the seriousness of his offence, though Delroy had apparently disabused him of that notion. He would be drinking his food through a straw for the foreseeable future.