An autumn wedding would give them just about time enough to prepare, and they would need every moment. It was so exciting!

Every Romany girl starts planning for her wedding the minute she is past her first Communion, and Claire was no exception to that rule. Communion was a big event in itself, but a wedding was huge. The groom would buy a new van and get it on site at the ready, and after that he would bring home the money any way he could – by fighting, in Josh Flynn’s case – while the woman he married would keep house and raise their kids.

Claire Milo had already been collecting Coalport and Royal Doulton china to adorn the van that she and Josh would share as newlyweds. She couldn’t wait to marry him; if anything she loved him more than ever now. For her, the only fly in the ointment was his love of the boxing ring. That worried her. She couldn’t understand why it meant so much to him when he never seemed to win. Undaunted by his dismal record, he trained endlessly in one of the spare sheds; he had weights set up in there and a punchbag to keep himself fit. He even had a ‘manager’, that rascal Cloudy Grey. Claire avoided seeing Josh fighting. She knew he’d like her to attend the fights, but she couldn’t. The thought made her feel sick. Seeing someone punching him, hurting him? Maybe it would be different if he won a match once in a while, but strong and fit though he was, he never seemed to.

So the plans for the wedding went ahead, and so long as Claire didn’t think about the fighting thing, all seemed fine. Then one day she was round behind the vans. Her grey lurcher, Blue, a cross between a Saluki and a greyhound, was sitting at her feet. Blue was a brave dog, the best; he coursed for hares with Claire’s dad. The catgut on his chest and belly glistened in the sunlight from where he had charged through barbed wire after his quarry and had to be stitched up afterwards. Blue was the best dog in the whole of the southern counties, all the way up to London. Claire cried over each new injury Blue suffered; she’d had him since he was a tiny pup. But her dad wasn’t so softhearted. If the dog got cut, Pally stitched it up himself; soon as Blue was mended, out they went again.

Claire was grooming one of Pally’s piebald horses, pulling the colt’s ears and talking low to him as she worked, when someone grabbed her arm. She whirled around, startled. The horse shied and she steadied him. Blue stood up and growled.

It was Shauna Everett.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Claire. What the fuck did she want?

Blue had his teeth bared, staring at Shauna.