‘I’m leaving for work now, Mam.’

She spun around to face him. ‘What, now? The klaxon hasn’t gone yet.’ Her voice was laced with a hint of irritation at being caught spying on her neighbour but Callum couldn’t have been less interested in what was happening across the road.

‘I’m knocking on for Jerry,’ he said. ‘There’s a full load of lumber in today and I want to make sure I’m taken on because I’m going to have to miss a day when Jimmy gets out.’

Her expression altered in a heartbeat, her eyes alight. Her firstborn, her Jimmy, her favourite had been mentioned. ‘Oh, everyone will be up for a party that night!’ Annie clasped her hands together and almost danced across the parlour.

Callum sighed inwardly. She had chosen to believe Jimmy’s version of events, deliberately chose to ignore the pain of the poor man he had tied up, bruised and shaken, with a lump the size of an egg on the side of his head. He hadn’t worked since and in a hard-working community, Jimmy’s actions were a breach of common decency. Rob from the rich but do no harm to the poor was a well-established principle. The fact that Jimmy had crossed the line from scally to baddun was not a thought that had entered Annie’s brain.

Callum shook his head; there would be no partying when Jimmy came home. Jimmy had broken the code of honour and for that the community would cast him out.

‘Why can’t I go with you to meet him when he comes out? Why won’t you let me? Can’t you get Jerry to take Jimmy on too?’

Since his own stint in prison, Callum, a good-looking boy, had managed to keep himself out of trouble and had been taken under the wing of their neighbour, Jerry Deane. Jerry had persuaded the gaffer down on the dock to take Callum on so long as Jerry guaranteed his good behaviour. Callum had sworn, to himself, Jerry and the priest, that he would work every day to repay this generosity and there was nothing and no one on this earth who could persuade him to do anything that would let Jerry down.

The O’Prey twins had earned a dockside-renowned reputation of stealing to order as soon as they realised they could run faster than anyone else, but in the past it had always been for a good cause – the back of a bread van emptied out so that a child on the four streets could have a birthday party; a delivery to the off-licence on the Dock Road, intercepted in time for Christmas. Their mother Annie, widowed young, had never been able to handle her boisterous twins and had long ago given up.