In the Metro he held her hand. They were standing, because all the seats were taken. In the space by the door stood two young girls, hardly older than Jessie, but their faces orange with make-up and their eyes black with liner and mascara. Squashed beside them, two lads. He watched what was going on there and hated what he saw, the pawing and the groping. Vera also called him a prude. He wouldn’t have minded so much if the encounter had been affectionate, but there was something unpleasant about the way the boys spoke to the lasses. Putting them down for their lack of street cred, mocking. Joe thought he’d like to bring the girls into the police station. Let Vera give them a pep talk about feminism – a woman’s right to respect. The thought made him smile. He looked at the badge on the girls’ blazers. One of the private schools in town. He and Sal had wondered about sending Jessie private. She was as bright as a button and they had high hopes for her. Certainly university. Maybe one of the grand ones. Watching the simpering and defensive girls, he wasn’t so sure about the posh school now.

The train pulled into a station. In the lights on the platform he saw that it was snowing even more heavily, the flakes bigger, settling on the terraced roofs. A woman with a long coat got on and took a recently vacated seat further down the carriage. Joe had been eyeing it up for Jessie and felt an irrational antipathy towards the woman. She had silver hair and discreet make-up, the fitted coat reaching almost to the ground. Despite her age – she must be seventy – there was something elegant about her. He thought she had money and wondered why she hadn’t called a taxi, instead of squashing into the Metro with the rest of them. At the next station a group of men filled the carriage. Suits and ties, briefcases. Loud voices talking about some sales conference. The mood he was in, Joe hated them too, for their brashness. The showing-off. Every station, a shifting tide of people, but he and Jessie were squashed into a corner by the door now, and he could see nothing but the back of a fat man wearing a Newcastle United sweatshirt. No jacket. A Geordie hard man.