It had been so easy. A pillow pressed over the little kid’s face, and it was soon over. And it had been entirely justifiable. He couldn’t ever be number two; he had to be number one, or nothing. But fucking Beezer, creeping about in the night! Harlan thought he’d managed to close the whole thing down, but Beezer must have talked before he shut him up for good.

‘Get the fuck out of it,’ he said coldly to the girl.

‘All right, I’m going, I’m going.’ She was grabbing her underwear and scrabbling around for her dress and shoes. ‘Christ Almighty, what a charmer you turned out to be!’

‘Go on, get out!’ yelled Harlan, chucking his boot at her head. It missed and went sailing on and knocked a priceless Jackson Pollock from the wall. The painting crashed to the floor, breaking the frame. The phone started to ring as the girl ran out of the flat door.

Harlan snatched it up. ‘Yes? What the fuck is it?’ he snarled.

‘Boss, you better get over here,’ said the voice of one of his lieutenants. ‘You are not going to believe this.’

143

The Clacton office had been the first dedicated crack cocaine production unit in Charlie Stone’s empire. Now it was Harlan’s, everything was Harlan’s, and he had taken a great deal of pleasure in seeing the day-to-day functioning of the place as the workers – mostly dirt-poor illegals that were kept poor and housed in filthy sheds round the back – did the complicated chemical business that produced the crack.

Harlan could remember the very first time Charlie had taken him on a guided tour of the manor. Charlie had – to be fair – taught him a lot. Told him about how you could smoke cocaine in its powder form by mixing it with tobacco – these were called ‘primos’, but they weren’t good for delivering a nice big hit of the drug.

‘Or you could freebase,’ Charlie had told him.

Freebase was using alkalide ether to free the cocaine from the hydrochloride powder form.

‘Flammable,’ Charlie had told him. ‘Too fucking dangerous.’

Harlan had taken it all in, soaked it up like a sponge.

He drove up to the Clacton place and there was a bustle going on out front. People milling around on the pavement, shouting and screaming. And . . . he felt his heart literally falter in his chest.

The house was on fire.

His crack factory was on fire.

Harlan got out of his Porsche and stared at it, not believing a thing he was seeing with his own eyes. The people in front of the building hadn’t seen him. And that was good. They didn’t know him, he didn’t know them. Alec, his boy, had phoned him, but Alec would never tell a soul Harlan’s name or anything else about him. He had more sense.