Kevin Young had been one of those kids who got his adult face years ahead of schedule. Christine used to say that you could look at him at ten and know exactly what he was going to look like at forty. At the time, Robin had had no idea what her mother was talking about but when she’d gone on the website this morning and seen the picture of ‘Our MD Kevin’, she’d remembered straight away. The defined nose above the short upper lip, the chubby cheeks – it was the sort of face that, depending on context, could belong to a Tory MP, smooth and pink, or a pub landlord. For a while in their teens, people had called him Crafty, after the darts player Eric Bristow, the ‘Crafty Cockney’, whom he actually had looked a lot like, even then. ‘Fair enough,’ he’d said. ‘Except I’m not a bloody Cockney and neither’s he, now – he lives in Leek, don’ he? Up the road.’

Crafty had been an ideal name for Kev. He wasn’t at all devious, she’d never known him do anything dishonest, but he’d been naughty in inventive ways. The other boys had traded in things like rubber dog shit and putting worms in people’s trainers but Kevin’s stuff had always been ingenious – like the time he’d got his dad to distract Mrs Bucknell at drop-off while he rigged an elaborate marble-run down the stacks of books on her desk. It had been brilliant, run around her stapler, the ruler in her pen pot, weights and elastic bands, the whole thing triggered by a length of string he’d attached to the back of her top drawer. Mrs Bucknell’s eyes had followed the marble round her desk like a spectator’s at doubles tennis. He’d planned it for weeks, he said, when she’d made him demonstrate it to the class.

Kev and his dad, little and large, partners from the off. Kev and his sister Kelley, who was almost exactly a year younger, had been late children, arriving just when Mr Young senior – Morris – and his wife had given up hope, Kev said. As children, they’d had crazy-extravagant parties, always shared because their birthdays were days apart – one year when they’d been eight and nine, or nine and ten, Mr Young had got a mate to set up bumper cars, a shooting range and a candy-floss machine in their back garden. It was like going to a party at Willy Wonka’s. Until a few years later, Robin hadn’t understood Christine’s disapproval about the whole thing or linked it to the muttering to Dennis afterwards about ‘gyppos’.