‘I think you must be mistaking us for people who have nothing better to do than wait around all day for a piece of shit like you, Timmy,’ Huggins says. ‘When we arrange a time and a place for a rendezvous, we expect you to be there.’

Timmy props himself against the range, rubbing the backs of his legs. ‘You fucking bastards,’ he says.

Huggins hunkers down beside him and squeezes Timmy’s plump chin between his fingers. ‘Does your mother know you use language like that, Timmy?’ he says. ‘I bet she brought you up to be a good boy.’

With an abrupt downward movement of his arm, Huggins pushes Timmy Kwok to the floor, pinning his head to the tiles with his hand.

‘Pass me the cleaver, Johnny-boy,’ he says, gesturing to a gleaming metal chopping knife suspended above the range.

‘For Christ’s sake, Phil,’ Fallow says.

‘Pass me the fucking cleaver.’

Fallow does what he is told. Huggins grabs the handle and examines his reflection in the woven stainless steel. ‘Chinese proverb say: “Man who call police fucking bastards make very big mistake,” ’ he says. Then he raises the cleaver.

‘For fuck’s sake!’ Fallow says.

But Huggins brings the blade down in a sweeping arc so that it wedges in the plastic vat of cooking oil. When he removes it, the glutinous contents begin to glug out across the floor.

‘Now I’ve got a question for you,’ Huggins says to Timmy Kwok. ‘Have you been doing any of your sordid little drug deals with a Turkish gang from Amsterdam?’

Timmy is looking at the puddle of oil creeping inexorably towards his head.

‘Do I have to ask you again?’ Huggins says.

‘I dunno what you’re talking about,’ says Timmy. The oil is now soaking into his carefully sculpted hair and beginning to seep around the circumference of his head towards his face.

‘Do you know of anybody who is doing sordid little drug deals with a Turkish gang from Amsterdam?’

The Chinaman is instinctively trying to move his face from the oil as the slick begins to lap against his nostrils, but when he does he feels the pressure of Huggins’s hand on his head.

‘I don’t know any fucking Turkish gang!’

‘Are you absolutely sure of that, Timmy?’

‘Yes!’

‘Because if I find out that you’re lying to me—’

‘I’m not lying! I’m not fucking lying!’

‘Good.’ Huggins lifts his hand and stands up, just as the puddle of oil threatens to reach his own shoes. ‘If you do hear anything, be sure to let us know.’

The owner of AAA Star Taxis is a woman called Jean Breaker, known as Ma Breaker because she has three sons – Craig, Kyle and Ryan – all of whom have done time for various offences, including drug peddling, possession of firearms, assault, burglary and kidnap. Ma Breaker has never done time herself, partly because she has her sons to do her dirty work for her, but mainly because she is far too clever to put herself in potentially compromising situations.

Bernice Seagram has known Ma for many years. Indeed one of her first cases as a detective was an investigation which led to Syd Breaker, Ma’s no-good husband and father of her three sons, being put behind bars for life for stabbing someone to death in an argument over a round of drinks. Of course nobody saw anything and Syd might have got away with it had it not been for Ma, who saw an opportunity to be rid of him for good and willingly testified to his guilt. Seagram could still vividly remember the ghostly smile on her leathered face as Syd, shouting abuse at her across the courtroom, was led down to the cells to begin his sentence.

The taxi office is in a narrow cobbled alley running alongside a railway viaduct near Central Station and is one of a series of drab lockups and workshops built into the sooty Victorian arches. It has a reinforced door and a frosted window with wire mesh over the front, and it faces onto the back of an old bottling plant, and the only clue to its purpose is an intercom on the wall with the words PRESS FOR TAXI printed above it.

‘Where to?’ a woman’s voice says.

‘It’s me, Jean,’ Seagram says.

The door buzzes and Seagram enters an unlit vestibule with a concrete floor and recently plastered partition walls that still feel damp to the touch. To the left is a tiny kitchen and toilet; ahead is a plywood door on swing hinges. She pushes through into a room that smells strongly of cigarette smoke, damp and inexpensive perfume.

Ma is sitting at a desk beneath a large street map of Newcastle. She is a plain woman in her fifties who has never cared much for her own appearance, despite the fortune she is thought to have accrued since taking over Syd’s half-baked crime enterprise and turning it into a slick money-making operation.

‘Hello, Bernice,’ she says. ‘How are you doing, pet?’

‘I’m very well, Jean. How about you?’

‘Can’t complain.’

She picks up a pen and throws it at a man sitting on a battered sofa on the other side of the room. He is in his mid-twenties, thin-faced with receding hair shaved down to a rash of dark stubble. He is wearing jeans and a leather jacket and reading a copy of Viz. This is Ryan Breaker, the youngest and stupidest of Ma’s three boys. He looks up and regards Seagram and his mother through slightly squint eyes.

‘Don’t just sit there,’ Ma snaps. ‘Go and put the kettle on.’

With a loud, petulant tut Ryan throws down his paper and skulks through to the kitchenette that is attached to the office.

Ma watches him with barely concealed contempt, then turns and gives Seagram a snaggle-toothed smile. ‘Sit down, love. What can I do for you?’

‘Do you know this man?’

Ma looks long and hard at the mug shot of Okan Gul. ‘Should I?’ she says.

‘He’s part of a Turkish gang from Amsterdam. Apparently they’ve been doing some business over here.’

‘That’s news to me, darling,’ she says. Then her voice hardens as she hands the photograph back. ‘What sort of business?’

‘We’re not sure. But Mr Gul’s most recent visit was cut short. He’s currently in the morgue at the General Hospital.’

Ma looks interested now. ‘Really? How did it happen?’

‘Let’s just say our investigations are ongoing.’

Seagram knows full well that criminals are worse than fish-wives when it comes to gossip, and she doesn’t want the gory details of Gul’s demise to become the topic of conversation in every lowlife pub and club in Newcastle.

Even so, Ma looks genuinely surprised. Tyneside has as lively a gangland scene as any other provincial city, yet murder remains the exception rather than the rule. Round here they still talk in hushed tones about the killing on a Wallsend street of Viv Graham, a local hard man renowned for extortion and racketeering – and he was gunned down twenty years ago.

‘I wondered if you’d heard anything,’ Bernice says.

‘No, pet,’ she says thoughtfully. ‘I haven’t.’

‘What about your boys?’

‘Believe me I know everything they know – and they don’t know anything.’

‘Well, if you do . . .’

‘You’ll be the first to know, Bernice.’

And Seagram knows that she will, because Ma Breaker appreciates that even though they are your sworn enemies, the police can also be your best friends.

Ryan Breaker emerges from the kitchenette carrying two mugs of tea. He’s overfilled them and the contents are slopping over the carpet as he treads cautiously towards Ma’s desk, as if walking a tightrope on a particularly windy day.

‘Just put them there, son,’ Ma says, watching as Ryan painfully lowers the dripping mugs onto the desktop then stands grinning with inane triumph. Ma stands and clubs him across the back of the head with an open hand.

‘Now get a dishcloth and mop up that fucking mess,’ she says.

In the Star & Garter public house in Benwell, pleased to be among sinners at last, Father Lawrence Meagher buys a bottle of Guinness and a cheese sandwich and sits down at his usual seat in the corner of the lounge. It is twenty past midday; the pub is a quarter full of old men in flat caps. A couple of young lads are shooting pool in the far room, and a dishevelled drunk is hunched on a bar-stool cradling what looks like a pint of piss.