Sharon was drinking a glass of wine and wondering how her wonderful, charmed life had been reduced to this. She had once been the envy of all her friends. But the reality could not have been more different to the illusion.

She closed her eyes and pictured her first husband, Lenny Scott, in her mind’s eye. She had started going out with him at thirteen and married him at seventeen, much to her parents’ chagrin. But they had been so happy together – they had had two sons and that had cemented their relationship.

Then he had been brutally murdered, found tortured and battered to death one night – and that was it.

That same night she had also uncovered his secret – the secret he had kept from her and everyone around him for so many years. A secret that would have caused untold aggravation and upset in the world of Faces, affecting her boys’ lives into the bargain, if it had ever been revealed.

But what good had keeping the secret done them really? Today she had visited her sons in prison, and they had acted like being there was just a game. They had killed someone and they thought it was funny. How had she allowed that to happen? How had she not realised that they were broken and turning into fucking thugs? Because that was all they were. They weren’t even true Faces; they had just beaten a man to death for no reason. She couldn’t believe that her two boys, who she had had such hopes for, could have turned out so wrong.

She swallowed down her tears, because tears were useless. Life was shite, really. No matter how great you thought it was, it could always creep up and bite you on the arse when you least expected it. Well, fuck it! She had never known the reason behind her Lenny’s death. She had lived all these years in ignorance – until tonight the one man left in her life that she trusted had told her the truth. And now there was no going back.

She gulped at her glass of wine. She needed the alcohol to get through this. Tonight she was going to right some wrongs. No matter what danger it might bring to her door, there was no stopping what was about to happen.

Young Lenny Scott and his little brother, Liam, were laughing raucously together. They were a handful, as the POs would say – protected, not just by their father’s name, but by the man who had become their stepfather; the boys knew this as well as the POs did. They more or less had a free pass – it was galling, but it was the truth. Being on remand for the first time was an adventure, but one of the older prison officers, Eric Marks, could tell from experience that they were not as hard as they thought they were.