‘He wouldn’t listen. He stood up and went over to the balcony doors and before I could even realize what he was about to do, he did it. He just . . . jumped.’

‘Christ!’ Charlie put a hand to his eyes. His shoulders shook.

Nula, her eyes fastened on Harlan the way you’d keep your eyes fastened on a cobra, said: ‘Nobody else saw it happen?’

Harlan shook his head. He looked like he too was ready to shed genuine tears over this. But Nula knew her ‘son’. She knew he was cold right to his heart but he could make all the right noises, appear to care when he didn’t give a single shit. So far as she knew, Harlan had always disliked Beezer intensely, always mocking him for being ‘behind the times’.

‘So only you saw it,’ she said.

Harlan nodded again. ‘Yes,’ he said.

Nula’s eyes were still fastened on him. She’d never once known Beezer to be cursed with what she herself suffered from: clinical depression. He wasn’t the type. But of course Harlan was being clever, claiming that Beezer had concealed his condition, as many men did. She thought this was pure bullshit. She thought, in fact, that if Harlan was the only witness to this event then he was lying through his teeth about what really happened.

What Nula thought was more likely was that Harlan had pushed Beezer to his death. And why would he do that? She knew why. It was because Beezer was Charlie’s man, not his. She’d seen the young thugs Harlan was starting to surround himself with – Ludo, Nipper and all the others. They were a different breed to Charlie’s old gang. They laughed over the pain of others, drove flashy motors, enjoyed a level of wealth and ease that very few of their age could even dream of. What she thought was that Harlan was busily getting rid of the old and supplanting it with the new. She knew how dangerous he was. She wondered if Charlie knew it too, or if he thought her warnings were just the demented ramblings of a madwoman.

‘I’m so bloody sorry,’ Harlan was saying.

Charlie was still sitting there with his head in his hands. Nula was still watching Harlan.

He was having a clear-out of the old guard. But she knew that if she warned Charlie about it, Charlie would laugh in her face, or get furious and tell her she was bloody crazy again.

‘It’s a sad business,’ said Harlan.

‘Yeah.’ Charlie straightened and scrubbed a hand over his wet, reddened face. ‘It is.’

‘But look,’ said Harlan, putting his hands together and looking intently at Charlie’s face. ‘We’ll give him a real East End send-off, yeah? Do it good and proper. He didn’t have family left, did he? So we’ll be his family. We’ll do this for him.’