When Charlie finally came home and Nula broke the news about no more kids to him, he seemed to take it well. Although he petted his daughter and cooed at her, Nula could sense his disappointment. But more and more he piled his time into the business. Charlie was busy spreading his net wider. Leaving Nula at home with little Milly and with Terry in place to watch over them, Charlie took off again. Ketama this time, high in the Rif mountains of Morocco, to shake hands with a fresh supplier. He didn’t listen to Terry’s objections about him needing his wingman alongside him.

‘You got family too,’ Charlie told him, slapping him on the back before he left for the airport. ‘So you know. You watch things here. You watch Nula and the kid, I don’t trust no one else to do that. Beezer’s going to come with me on this trip.’

Terry said: ‘I’m sorry as fuck about Nula not being able to have any more, mate.’ He was thinking that Beezer would be as much use as a chocolate teapot if things got lairy. Poor idiot didn’t know his arse from a hole in the ground.

Charlie shrugged. Only Terry could have mentioned personal matters to him and not got a bunch of fives for his trouble. ‘These things happen. It would have been so much better if it’d been a boy. How can a bloody girl take over in the business we’re in? But what the hell. It is what it is.’

‘I’ll keep a tight eye on things here,’ Terry promised him.

‘Stay up at the house, will you? Nula gets nervous at night. It’s a big place.’

‘Sure. If you want,’ said Terry. He didn’t think Jill was going to be too delighted with this plan, and he wasn’t either, but if that was how Charlie wanted it, then that’s how it would be.

Charlie didn’t like Morocco, but this was good business, he sussed that straight away. Cannabis crops supported more than a million families up in the mountains. They called it kif and it was their saviour in a land far too harsh for growing olives or wheat.

‘Two thousand tonnes of good kif brings the country two billion a year on the black market,’ Saddam, his contact, told him.

Charlie was stunned by the sheer scale of it. Everywhere you looked, as far as the eye could see, were cannabis plantations. He haggled with Saddam over a good price, and wrangled over the difficulties of exporting their product while at lunch in a five-star Tangiers hotel.

Saddam said transport would be no problem. ‘We can stash the kif in the lorries coming out of some of our friendly warehouses.’

‘Ain’t that risky?’