His wife died after she crashed her car into a bus on the way to see him at a police station after he was arrested. According to the detectives who broke the news to him, Slack flew into a rage and blamed them.

Then after his father was stabbed to death in prison he told a newspaper that it was the fault of the police. He claimed his dad was serving time only because detectives had planted evidence against him in order to get a conviction.

My thoughts were racing now and I kept coming back to the phrase that Slack had allegedly used at Malone’s funeral wake.

The final straw.

Did it mean that Terry Malone was more to Slack than just a low-level employee? Was that why he attended his funeral and said what he did? And was it also why the copper who had killed Malone in the raid had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared?

I spent the next hour finding out as much as I could about Terry Malone. He’d been on the scene for a few years apparently. He had worked as a drugs dealer for the Romanians in North London before the task force snared his bosses. He’d then been recruited by Slack’s South London firm, ostensibly to work as a bouncer at one of his night clubs.

He had a girlfriend, Amy, and she was pregnant with his baby before she had the miscarriage on the night he was shot.

His mother had died about eight months ago and there was no record of his father.

I realised that I needed to know more about him if I was going to establish whether or not his death had indeed played a part in triggering the nightmare that was now engulfing us.

I decided to start by talking to his girlfriend. It took me half an hour to track her down. She was now living with her sister in Leeds but I managed to get her on the phone.

She wasn’t very helpful, though. She said that as far as she knew Terry had not had a particularly close relationship with Slack.

‘He was just his boss,’ she said. ‘He had a lot of respect for Terry and Roy was good to him. He paid him well and Terry enjoyed working for the firm.’

She then revealed something that I hadn’t been aware of – that Terry had returned home late on the night he was shot because he’d had a meeting with Slack at one of his clubs.

‘Terry was a bit tipsy because they’d been drinking champagne,’ she said. ‘And that stuff never agreed with him.’

‘Were they celebrating something?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. Terry didn’t say. He just got into bed and that was when those crazy coppers barged in and shot him. And there was no need to. He wasn’t armed and he wasn’t a threat.’