Since boyhood, that was the way it had always been with them. Charlie forging ahead, Terry following on. But now Terry was full of doubt. The world Charlie was plunging headlong into was darker and more dangerous than anything they’d ever been involved in before. Charlie was self-confident as always, but how much of that confidence was misplaced? Terry thought that Charlie was getting drunk on his own power. Terry missed the old manor. Life had been simple then. Now, Charlie had bought up a cover company, a failing furnishings manufacturer with several factory sites and offices. He’d got it for a song. Then he introduced Terry to a group of shady accountants, bent solicitors, oily bankers – people who’d shake your hand and rob your wallet, all at the same time.

Over dinner at the Dorchester the group explained how Charlie’s increasingly complex business finances could be managed, running one entirely legitimate front business – Stone Furnishings Ltd – alongside ‘the product’. They made it sound simple, like everyone did it. With port authorities in Charlie’s pay, the suits were going to set up a ‘special purpose vehicle’ in one of the low-intervention jurisdictions.

‘Like Switzerland?’ asked Charlie.

‘Like the Caymans,’ said one of the suits. ‘The SPV lends money through the Bahamas and Panama in a series of transactions that are impossible to trace until the cash comes into your account, but of course your name doesn’t appear on the shares register.’

‘Once the money’s rolling in,’ said another, ‘you start to donate to charity, right? I mean, hugely. Makes you look squeaky-clean. Then who knows? One day you get the gong.’

Charlie stared. ‘The what?’

‘The gong. The knighthood. You’ll be Sir Charlie Stone. And lovely Nula’ll be Lady Stone. How’d she like that?’

So this was their life now. They dealt with a network of iffy accountants, questionable fund managers and clever lawyers, all of them with expensive habits to feed – women, drugs, gambling. And Terry was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, with a wife he loved to distraction and a mate he’d had all his life, closer than a brother, but who seemed to be heading in a direction that could spell disaster for the lot of them.

Finally Charlie snapped when Terry kept moaning on about it all.

‘Look,’ he said to Terry, ‘maybe it’s best we have a parting of the ways, what about that?’

‘No,’ said Terry, shocked that Charlie would even think it. ‘I don’t want that. It’s just . . .’

‘You don’t want it? Good. Then pipe down, all right? All this is doing my fucking head in.’

Terry was silent. Brooding.

‘And you don’t like the taxing business?’ Charlie went on. ‘All right then. We’ll stop it dead. Stick with the importing. How’d that suit?’

‘Yeah. Fine,’ said Terry, and felt a bit happier.

But not much.

24