‘I mean it. That arsehole thinks he’s the big noise around here? He’s joking. He ain’t even English. I’m a Cockney. Born to the sound of Bow Bells. These streets, this manor, they ought to be mine. I got enough foot soldiers to crush that cunt and I’m going to do it.’

Terry felt bad. He’d been right there, on the spot, but unable to help. Helping Charlie was his job in life, he’d given his word on that. And he’d failed.

‘I’ll do it,’ he said, feeling uneasy. Around Charlie, things moved fast. Too fast, he thought. He wasn’t sure, as Charlie was, of their capabilities when it came to mixing it with the big gangs.

‘We’ll do it together,’ said Charlie.

‘Yeah. But rest up first, OK?’

‘Yeah. I’ll do that.’

4

When she was seventeen, Nula Perkins fell in love with nineteen-year-old Terry Barton, Charlie Stone’s handsome number two. How it happened was like this: she went ballroom dancing with her brother, who got off with the girls while she sat there alone at the edge of the dance floor listening to song after endless song and being thoroughly ignored. Finally Jim Reeves was crooning out the last number of the night – the smoochy one where couples always got together. Couples, but not her. She sat there, red-faced, a failure. Somehow she wrenched herself out of her seat midway through the song and went into the bogs and cried. When she came out, teary-eyed and blotchy, Terry Barton was standing there.

‘Want to dance?’ he asked.

She was so grateful. And she fell for him, right then and there, because with her mousy hair and her big nose she was no looker – and she knew it. Terry was being kind; he’d rescued her from an embarrassing situation.

Of course, he didn’t linger. Once the dance was over he was out the door like a shot, with not a single glance back in her direction. She watched him peel out of there with a group of young men, at the head of which was short, bulky, hard-eyed Charlie Stone. Charlie Stone was always in the lead and, wherever Charlie went, it seemed Terry Barton was never far behind.

Still, Terry had turned her disaster of an evening – and oh yes, she’d seen her big brother laughing at her with his mates and their girlfriends as she sat there, her face burning with shame – into a good one.

‘You want to watch him,’ said her brother Jimmy on the drive home in his cream Ford Anglia, which shuddered as it went round corners. Its heater was clattering and throwing out no real heat at all.

‘Who?’ Nula asked.

‘Come on!’ Jimmy shot her a laughing glance. ‘Terry fucking Barton. He’s in with a bad lot.’

‘What, you talking about Charlie Stone?’