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omitted to mention that he had been carrying a weapon. He maintained that he had turned up at Wilberforce’s house for a visit, surprised some men who were hurting his friend, and scared them off. They had shot at him—an unarmed man!—as they were fleeing, and had accidentally killed one of their own.
    The detective constable who took his statement was sceptical, to say the least.
    “How do you account for the broken glass on the ground outside, Mr Dove?” he asked. “The bits of a car mirror? You’re saying, in all the confusion, the intruders not only shot one of their own men but their car too?”
    “That’s exactly what I’m saying, officer. It was chaos. Bullets flying everywhere. Frankly, I was lucky to survive.”
    “And did you happen to recognise any of these men?”
    “Complete strangers to me. Never seen them before in my life.”
    Wilberforce claimed much the same. Taking his cue from Lex, he said it had obviously been a random home invasion. The burglars had tied him up and started hitting him in order to get him to tell them where he kept his valuables.
    “Don’t take this the wrong way, Mr Allen,” said the detective constable, “but it isn’t what you’d call a high-class neighbourhood. What sort of valuables do you think they were after?”
    “Who knows?” replied Wilberforce. “I’m no robber. I’ve no idea what goes on inside these people’s heads. Maybe they thought I got some secret stash of gold bullion or something.”
    “And do you?”
    Wilberforce laughed, then winced, because laughing was painful. “Yeah, right. I’m sitting on a fortune. That’s why I live in this palace.”
    The detective constable left with a parting shot. “Your stories don’t add up. Neither of you gentlemen is telling me the whole truth. You’ll be hearing from us again, sooner than you think. Maybe by then you’ll have decided to come clean.”
    “Or worked out some better lies,” Lex muttered to Wilberforce as he closed the front door.
    He retrieved his SIG from the bathroom. He had dumped the gun in the toilet cistern as the police arrived, and taken the precaution of scrubbing the telltale gunpowder residue off his hands before going out to meet them.
    As he dried off the SIG with a towel, he said, “All right, Wilb. Out with it. What’s going on?”
    Wilberforce looked rueful. He had a swollen eye and significant facial bruising, and was shaken after his ordeal, but basically okay.
    “It’s no big thing really,” he said. “Just business.”
    “No big thing? How much do you owe the Garfish?”
    “Not much. Couple of hundred.”
    “Seriously? A couple of hundred Manzanillan? That’s nothing.”
    “Couple of hundred thousand.”
    “Ah. Well, still, not a huge amount.” Lex did some quick mental arithmetic. At the current exchange rate, roughly £15,000. “I can lend you that, no problem. Clear the debt at a stroke.”
    “Yeah, thanks, but you see, it’s not quite that simple. I’m paying it off at a pretty high rate of interest.”
    “How high?”
    “Works out at around four hundred per cent.”
    “You what!”
    Wilberforce fetched two bottled beers from the fridge, handing one to Lex. “What you don’t appreciate, my friend, is this is Manzanilla. Things aren’t as straightforward here as they are in a country like the UK. In the UK, you want a start-up loan, you go to a bank, show them a business plan, they either like it or they don’t, and they maybe cough up the money, maybe not. All above board. Here, the banks don’t lend, period. Too much risk. Plus, you got payoffs to make, councillors and planning officials to be bribed, all that sort of thing, which adds to your initial outlay. So you go to a guy like Garfield Finisterre. It’s the only realistic option for a lot of folk.”
    “But four hundred per cent? That’s taking the piss.”
    “Of course it is. But without it I’d never have had my rum shack. And with my rum shack I earn an income, enough to