Gready had offered him a deal. He could get him acquitted on appeal with the help of a bent detective who would testify that the chain of evidence was unsafe. This happened and Starr walked free. He developed a relationship with Gready over the next eighteen months and one day Gready told him he wanted to make him an offer. Partly in return, but also because he needed someone he could trust, Starr would work for Gready as his trusted confidant in the various drug operations that he was looking to set up.

It had been the start of a friendship – and bond – between the two men. Starr had trusted Gready implicitly ever since. And despite his current predicament, he still had faith that the legal team would pull some kind of a rabbit from a hat and get him out of this shit.

But he had been here now six months and there was no sign of it yet. Gready was himself in the dock and Mickey knew that part of Gready’s defence was that there was no connection at all between the two of them and that they did not know each other.

It was both Nick Fox’s team and the barrister he had got him, who had advised him – out of kindness to him and Stuie – that if he pleaded guilty, he would get a lesser sentence and be reunited with Stuie sooner. So long as Mickey kept up his story that there was no connection between him and Gready, it would be fine.

Mickey knew how stressed his brother always was when he was away, and couldn’t imagine quite how Stuie was feeling with him being absent for this length of time. He was desperate to get out and carry on doing what he had done before his arrest, giving his little brother the best life he could.

And prison was even more shit since the smoking ban had come into effect. In the daytime, anyhow. After evening lockdown he shared cigarettes, which he got on the prison black market, with his cellmate.

Mickey had always been a good listener and was helping the poor sod, Charles Nelson – a posh guy of twenty-nine, an insurance broker who’d been privately educated and never in trouble with the law before – to cope with the nightmare he was currently living through. Nelson was in bits, facing a potential life sentence for one stupid, drunken moment.

Six months previously, Nelson had been with his girlfriend in a bar in Brighton, late night, after a dinner out to celebrate a bonus much bigger than he had been expecting, when another drunken guy had hit on her. Nelson had remonstrated and received a punch for his troubles, which somehow, according to him, had been missed on the bar’s CCTV. In return he’d decked the guy, who had struck the back of his head on a table on the way down. And died.