‘All fine,’ said Harlan, thinking of his trips out to Bogota to press the flesh and do deals with Javier’s lot. This latest load of cocaine was going to be concealed in scrap metal ingots on board a freighter sailing out of Santamaria in Venezuela. It would journey to Rotterdam and from there to Southampton. He hoped to God it would be OK. And what the fuck to do with it once it got here, with crack production out? He’d have to market the pure coke instead. Profit would be way down, but there was no other choice. Meanwhile, there was a Spanish cannabis subsidiary causing him problems, because the Spanish government was getting stick over lack of control on drugs. The Spaniards had tightened up on it, making many more vehicle searches and increasing patrols.

Maybe the whole damned thing’s getting too big, thought Harlan.

The production lines going hit him hard. He sat in the apartment that night and literally shook with apprehension, convinced that his manor was falling. He’d been expanding hard since Charlie’s death, feeling invincible. He’d got rid of the old guard, all the old pals Charlie had gathered around him, Terry Barton, Beezer, the lot of them. But maybe he wasn’t as bomb-proof as he’d thought. Now he was transporting heroin, crack, cocaine, cannabis and a whole lot of recreational drugs besides, and he trusted no one – how could he? – so it was hard to stay on top of things sometimes. He’d spent a lot of these past few months motoring around Europe, even visiting Jamaica’s Burke Road – and missing a hail of bullets by inches that had killed five other men. He’d got used to attending meetings in other very dangerous places too, places where you fully expected not to get out alive.

But he had. He was tough – a survivor. He’d escaped a rotten childhood, lived through having a disgusting junkie for a mother, adapted to the pressures of living in Charlie and Nula’s world, blending in like a chameleon. But somehow he knew he’d got it wrong. He didn’t connect as other people did. Charlie and Nula had obviously thought so, because they had preferred that fucking baby to him, had overlooked him after Jake’s birth, seen him as an interloper, unwanted.

Well, he’d sorted that out. And he would sort this. He’d come through hell in his life. His mother had preferred heroin to him, his step-parents had preferred the new baby, and Belle? She’d preferred to meet a grisly end rather than be his girl. He was used to crap. So he would rebuild. And the Spanish muddle, he’d already laid plans to overcome that, getting guys with backpacks carrying the gear over the Pyrenees, staying in hostels and mountain huts then loading up in France when they reached the other side.