Nick suddenly turned and walked into the kitchen, and Frank quickly averted his gaze and reached for a tea towel to dry the dishes. It was pitch-dark outside, and he could see the reflections of the people in the hall clearly in the window. Watching as Karel, Viktorya, and the strangers left the house, he switched his gaze to Nick, and saw that the man had laid a pack of syringes on the table and was now unwrapping a bag of brown powder. Guessing that he was preparing injections for the girls before he took them to work, Frank clenched his teeth. He despised drugs and the destruction they wreaked in ordinary people’s lives. That was why he’d ploughed his redundancy money into the farm in the first place: to get his young son and daughter away from the heroin and cocaine that had been flooding the streets of Manchester at that time, before they reached the age where he could no longer control who they hung about with – or what they got sucked into. Yet, now, because of his own bad decision, those very same drugs were wreaking havoc right under his roof, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

The sound of a powerful engine roaring to life outside broke the silence, and a few seconds later the front door opened. Frank had expected Karel and Viktorya to walk in, but, instead, it was Gaz and the other two men who entered. They were speaking quietly, so he didn’t catch everything they were saying, but he gathered from what he did manage to hear that Karel and the girl had gone off with the men to celebrate something.

Nick had finished preparing the syringes by then, and he carried them upstairs while the other men helped themselves to a glass of whisky. Unsure what he was supposed to do, Frank pottered about putting away the dishes and wiping ledges and the cooker.

Nick came back down a few minutes later, and dumped a handful of now-empty syringes in the bin.

‘Yo, Granddad, it’s bedtime,’ he said when he noticed Frank was still there. ‘But I think you might wanna change your sheets before you get your head down,’ he added, grinning slyly. ‘It’s a bit of a mess up there.’

Frank went into the utility room. A neat stack of sheets were sitting on a shelf alongside a stack of towels, and he took one of each and carried them upstairs. As he passed the bathroom, he hesitated when he heard the sound of running water. Guessing that Irena must be taking a shower, he walked on to his bedroom and switched the light on.