‘I like your thinking,’ Mike said with a smile.

‘Why pick on First Caly?’ Allan complained. ‘Plenty of other villains out there.’

‘And not all of them as public as Mr Calloway,’ Gissing agreed. ‘You say you were at school with him, Mike?’

‘Same year,’ Mike answered, nodding slowly. ‘He was the kid everyone wanted to know.’

‘To know or to be?’

Mike looked at Allan. ‘Maybe you’re right. Be nice to feel that sense of power.’

‘Power through fear isn’t worth the candle,’ Gissing grumbled. As the waitress swapped his glass for its replacement, he asked her if Calloway was a regular.

‘Now and then,’ she said. She sounded South African to Mike.

‘Big tipper?’ he asked her.

She didn’t like the question. ‘Look, I just work here…’

‘We’re not cops or anything,’ Mike assured her. ‘Just curious.’

‘Pays not to be,’ she confided, turning on her heel.

‘Tidy body,’ Allan said appraisingly, once she was out of earshot.

‘Almost as tidy as our own dear Laura Stanton,’ Gissing added, winking in Mike’s direction. By way of response, Mike said he was heading outside for a cigarette.

‘Can I bum one off you?’ Allan asked as usual.

‘And leave an old man on his own?’ Gissing pretended to complain, opening the catalogue at its first page. ‘Go on then, off with the pair of you – see if I care…’

Mike and Allan pushed open the door and climbed the five steps leading from the basement bar to the pavement. It had only just grown dark, and the roadway was busy with midweek taxis seeking work.

‘Pound to a penny,’ Allan said, ‘when we go back inside he’ll be bending someone’s ear.’

Mike lit both their cigarettes and inhaled deeply. He was down to four or five a day, but couldn’t quite give them up completely.