Stolen. Paul Finch

these two were most likely skirmishers sent ahead to check out the lie of the land. No doubt there’ll be others.’

      ‘A Tatarstan lieutenant was killed in a shootout with National Crime Group officers in Bradburn up in Lancashire last year,’ ventured Adam Gilcrist. As the Crew’s chief importer and seller of illegal firearms, he always had an interest in illicit gun-play. ‘The coppers think he was acting alone, but this new intel suggests different.’

      ‘The Russians have a permanent presence in Liverpool,’ Lennie Trueman said in his deceptively gentle West Indian accent. ‘And it’s not just them. We’ve got Mexicans interfering with some of our supply-lines.’

      ‘Ah yes, the cartels,’ Pentecost said thoughtfully. ‘It was only a matter of time before those gentlemen found the whole of Mesoamerica too small for their liking.’

      ‘They’ll struggle to make an impact here,’ Benny Bartholomew chirped up.

      Benny B, the Crew’s Head of Security, was a beefy character, with slab-like arms and shoulders and an equally massive neck, but much of it was running to flab these days; his face was podgy, his curly hair receding, and, as he viewed the world by squinting at it through a small pair of circular lenses, the effect was often more comical than menacing.

      ‘You think so, do you?’ Pentecost said, intrigued to hear more.

      Benny B leaned forward, his chair squeaking. ‘There’re no deserts here for them to dig pits in, which they can stuff full of headless corpses, are there?’

      ‘I hate to rain on your parade, Mr B,’ Toni Zambala interrupted.

      Formerly a pirate and smuggler in the pay of the Mungiki crime syndicate in Kenya, Zambala, despite a machine-gun-toting youth in which he’d violently rejected all things western, had effortlessly adapted to the capitalist lifestyle of the UK. He was now in charge of narcotics, importation and distribution, and his annual contribution to company funds was greater by far than everyone else’s, so, though still an underboss, when he spoke, people listened.

      ‘Not three weeks ago, one of my sellers was fished out of a Fallowfield sewer.’ He took a sip of mineral water. ‘He hadn’t had his head cut off, I’ll grant you, but that was only because the guys responsible had wanted to put him down the sewer while he was still alive … minus his hands and feet, I should add. The cops reckon the chopping tool was a machete.’ He turned his gaze on Benny B. ‘Kind of a Mex thing, wouldn’t you say?’

      Pentecost pursed his thin grey lips. ‘Not an ideal situation. When our own people are getting their hands and feet chopped off.’

      Frank McCracken was the only one who didn’t mutter his discontent. He was too busy wondering where all this was leading. He too had heard rumours that foreign powers were slowly muscling in on their action. Not so much his, maybe. He dealt mainly with those established British gangs who even after all these years still failed to recognise the Crew’s authority. But it was plain there was a foreign presence on the streets.

      ‘You’re very quiet, Frank,’ Pentecost suddenly said.

      McCracken shrugged. ‘We might have to make deals, Bill.’

      ‘Surrender?’ Benny B said, sounding shocked.

      ‘Not that exactly,’ McCracken replied. ‘Just talk to them, so we can buy them off for a while … give ourselves more time to plan.’

      ‘Bollocks!’ Nick Merryweather blurted. ‘We’re not losing so much ground that we’re being forced into that, surely?’

      Merryweather was the Crew’s whoremaster-in-chief, and a depraved, violent pimp. But for all that he was good at brutality, he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box.

      ‘Even if we were confronting them,’ McCracken replied, ‘which we’re not because we never know where they are, all we’d really be doing is fighting fires. Like you say, Bill, they’re scouting rather than invading.’

      A silence followed, as the rest of them ingested this.

      ‘Well, Frank,’ Pentecost finally said, ‘the latest batch of accounts appear to support your POV inasmuch as we certainly need to rebuild our powerbase.’ He wafted a fistful of print-outs before slamming them down on the table. Even those seated farthest away could recognise the columns of financial data.

      ‘And as you gentlemen no doubt can tell from my demeanour,’ Pentecost said, ‘they don’t make for happy reading.’ He snatched a sheet up and turned to Jon Killarny, the Irishman who ran their counterfeiting scams. ‘August this year – down three per cent on July. July down two per cent on June. June down one per cent on May.’

      ‘Now, Bill … I …’ Killarny, a one-time IRA sergeant-at-arms, struggled to explain himself, only for Pentecost to switch his attention to Al Reed, whose role was the ‘protection’ of pubs, bars and nightclubs.

      ‘August this year …’ The Chairman shook his head. ‘Down six per cent on July. Six per cent, gentlemen. July down three per cent on June … and then this, June down eight per cent – yes, I kid you not – on May. None of you need to look smug, by the way.’ There was now a snap in his voice, his frosty eyes roving the room. ‘It’s the same across the board. When we reach November, we’ll have a better picture of our earnings for this last financial year, but even the boldest estimate puts them down an average four per cent on last year, which was four per cent down on the year before …’

      And so it went, the Chairman listing and describing each and every one of their underperformances. In the end, only Frank McCracken’s department’s monthly returns were more or less in alignment, August showing a reduction on the previous month of less than half a per cent, though even that, to Bill Pentecost, was less than tolerable.

      ‘Of course,’ he said, resuming a calmer tone, ‘these are our net earnings, are they not? They’re not gross.’

      There were visible stirrings of discomfort. Suddenly, they all knew what he was driving at, and it was exactly what Frank McCracken had feared.

      The Crew was born of bloodshed. Back in those distant days of the twentieth century, numerous criminal firms had dotted the post-industrial wilderness that was Northwest England, each with its own territory, each with its own speciality, though they’d shared many overlapping interests, which for decades meant they’d existed in a state of semi-permanent warfare, ensuring that no one was earning to their full potential. The Crew had been the remedy, Wild Bill Pentecost, whose stronghold at the time was in East and South Manchester, and whose field was loan-sharking and general racketeering, eventually luring the bosses of his rival firms into a new kind of unity which promised peace and prosperity for all. Many of those original men still sat in the room, equal partners in the overarching enterprise that was the Crew, deferring only to their acknowledged Chairman, their various departments still reflecting the particular expertise they’d each brought to the table.

      But all along Pentecost had known that he couldn’t expect this rapacious band to work solely for him, each week feeding the entirety of their ill-gotten gains into central funds via an elaborate money-laundering operation, from which they would all be paid an equal monthly share. That would have been totally unacceptable because it would have been unfair. Toni Zambala, for example, outsold all the others, while at the other end of the scale Benny B added nothing to company cashflow, a discrepancy exacerbated by the fact that his role as Head of Security was largely nominal these days, most of the underbosses preferring to resolve security issues themselves. McCracken alone had at least as many bent coppers, solicitors, local government officials and journalists on his payroll as Benny did, while Lennie and Toni held both the region’s major cities in thrall to their innumerable dealers, street gangs and general-purpose thugs. Benny B couldn’t be underestimated, of course. Having spent much of his time recruiting mercenaries and other ex-military personnel, he could put a considerable force of well-trained killers into the field – but still, he didn’t produce anything. Appreciating the dangers of this imbalance, Pentecost had authorised at an early stage what he called ‘the skim’, which