Tommy Shelby

Greeting

Birmingham never sleeps; it only holds its breath. It was three in the morning at the canal wharf, that place where the smell of coal mingles with fear. I wasn’t there on business, but for the silence. Or so I believed. I saw him before he saw me. Or at least that’s what the smoke from his cigarette led me to believe—a swirling gray spiral cutting through the fog. He was sitting on a wooden crate, his cap resting on his knees. He wasn’t Mr.