Ricky felt the excitement, always the same when he took delivery.

He wore plastic gloves. He counted out the packages, in the light thrown by a battery lamp, and the contents of each weighed one kilo. With a knife he had slit one open, had seen the dark powder and sniffed it.

He would not open any of the other twenty-four tightly bound packets of brown – no need to, not where they had come from. The last divisions of the load coming to him had been made in Germany and he would have trusted that source with his life. Ricky was in a derelict factory on the north side of the Peckham Road. Once, it had produced cheap leather coats but that market had now gone to Turkey, and he rented the premises. He had realized long ago that it was a waste of his money and dangerous to own the property where the twenty-five-kilo or fifty-kilo parcels were split. Around him, but with cut-offs for security, was a loose network of experts and facilitators. He wanted a driver for a shipment: he hired one. He wanted enforcers, such as the Merks: he went outside for them. He wanted premises: he rented them. He wanted information: he bought it.

He wanted a chemist: he went into the market-place

… It was his way of operating, and he believed it to be the safest.

Security was everything with Ricky Capel.

Little details missed sent men down for the big bird stretches. The men in the A Category gaol wings had all missed little details, and would do fifteen years for the mistake. He despised them.

Each packet was checked, after the one that had been opened, to be certain that the sealing had survived the immersion in the North Sea – but he wore gloves and out in the yard, between the building and the high wall, a brazier was already lit.