It took him an age to get back to his office. His client was now the king of the capital's criminal world. And he felt its implications keenly. He had made a pact with the Devil: he was Faust.

When would the Devil come for him?

He had sold his soul for wealth. Back in his office, he used a grubby handkerchief to wipe off the table the smears from the heels of Dubbs's shoes, and then he moved back the chair that Packer had used, lifted it from behind the desk to its usual place against a bank of shelves that bent under the weight of legal texts.

There was a knock at the door and his clerk brought in a tray to clear away the coffee cups and the water jug, left him the evening newspaper, and backed out respectfully. He had attached himself, voluntarily, to serious money. He picked up the newspaper…

Margaret Thatcher had left Downing Street that day

… The Iron Lady was gone with a tear in her eye, usurped in a palace coup… Vicious, but bloodless?

He turned the pages. That transference of power was of secondary importance to the one that had been played out in his small office. He found the news item.

A man from south-east London had been discovered in the early hours of the morning in Epping Forest. His legs had been severed by what police believed to have been a chain-saw. Death was due to shock and blood loss, a Scotland Yard spokesman had said, and added that the murder was assumed to have been a further atrocity in the capital's current gang-land turf war.

He put the newspaper in his brimming wastepaper bin.

In his mind, he recited,

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, The Devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.

Not today – not tomorrow, old cocker – not ever. He was entwined with Albert William Packer. Packer was a clever bastard, the top man. Packer would look after him. Of course he would… The light was slipping.