‘No trouble at all. Just over six hundred nicker. I ask you, who’d have gone labouring after a touch like that? My fortune was made. As I said, I’ve always had a head for heights and that kind of thing is a good number. You don’t need to work with anyone else which lowers the chance of getting nicked.’

‘They got you though, didn’t they?’

‘Twice, that’s all, darlin’. Once when I fell forty feet at the back of the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds and broke a leg. The second time was when I got nicked at that new hotel in the Vandale Centre. Seems they had one of these electronic eyes switched on. The scuffers were in before I knew what hit me. Oh, I gave them quite a chase over the roofs, but it was all for laughs. I’d been recognized for one thing.’

He yawned and shook his head slightly, suddenly very, very tired. ‘Better get moving I suppose. You don’t want me hanging round here in the morning.’

The cigarette dropped from his hand to the carpet. She picked it up and tossed it into the fire and the Gunner sighed, leaning back in the comfortable old chair. Very softly Jenny Crowther got up and reached for the rug that was draped over the back of the settee.

As she covered the Gunner, his hand slid across her thigh and he said softly, ‘Best looking lass I’ve seen in years.’

She didn’t move, aware that he was already asleep, but gently disengaged his hand and tucked it under the rug. She stood there for quite a while looking down at that reckless face, almost childlike in repose. In spite of the scar tissue around the eyes and the permanently swollen cheekbones, it was handsome enough, a man’s face whatever else he was and her thigh was still warm where he had touched her.

Perhaps it was as well that sleep had overtaken him so suddenly before things had taken their inevitable course – although she would have had no particular objections to that in principle. By no means promiscuous, she was like most young people of her generation, a product of her day and the sexual morality of earlier times meant nothing to her.

But loving, even in that sense, meant some kind of involvement and she couldn’t afford that. Better that he should go after an hour or two’s sleep. She turned off the light and went and stood at the window, her face against the cold glass, rain hammering hard against it, wondering what would happen to him, wondering where he would run to.

10