More than once I'd felt like taking him up on the offer. It was getting close to eleven o'clock when I got home that night, home being a rented one-bedroom flat at the southern end of Islington, not too far from City Road. The first thing I did was take a long hot shower to wash the cold out of my bones, before pouring myself a decent-sized glass of red wine and settling down on the lounge sofa.

I turned on the TV and lit a cigarette, relaxing properly for the first time that day. I took a long slow drag, enjoying the fact that a potentially hazardous job had been completed successfully, and flicked through the channels until I found a report on the killings. It didn't take long. Murder's a numbers game. Kill one person and you barely make the inside pages. Kill three, especially in a public place, and it's big news. It adds a bit of excitement to the mundane grind of people's lives; even more so when it bears all the hallmarks of a so-called gangland shooting. Shootings are entertaining because they're not too personal. They make good conversation points.

Understandably, details were still very sketchy. The programme I was watching had a young female reporter on the scene. She looked cold but excited to be involved in what was potentially a meaty, career-enhancing story. It was still raining, only now it had turned into that light stuff that always seems to soak you more. She'd positioned herself in the rear car park and you could make out the Cherokee in the background about twenty yards away, behind reams of brightly coloured scene-of-crime tape. There were a lot of police and forensic staff in lab coats swarming all over it.

The report didn't last long. The girl confirmed that three people had been murdered – no idea as to identities – and speculated that they'd been shot.