Through the window he saw lights and figures moving around. People were coming out onto the streets again, carrying and dragging items from their homes. His eyes adjusted to the light and he realised that they were building a fucking blockade. He smiled to himself and closed the curtain, then went to the sofa and sat down, picking up the bag that the coppers had left him. Jackson had always complied in the past, to an extent, knowing the power of an institution willing to bend the rules, but these guys weren’t just wanting to buckle regulations a little; they were wanting to fucking snap them in half.

He looked inside the bag. It contained everything he needed to frame a friend. When he’d asked what was in it for him, he’d been told that if he didn’t do it, they could easily do the same to him. Before touching any of the contents, he pulled on a pair of gloves. Then he took out a small bag of hairs, a vial of fluid, and a box containing smudges of something between two slides. It was a veritable buffet of critical evidence.

He didn’t need to ask why. Tyrone Fenton wasn’t the sharpest tool in the drawer and he had a tendency to fire from the hip. There were reasons why he had a clean record, none of them to do with innocence, but that was by the by. They were trying to frame him, and it would be easy to pull it off. It had been done before.

He’d been told that if he wanted life on the estate to return to normal, he had to go ahead and do what was asked of him. If not, things would get ugly. Two pigs had been seriously hurt tonight, beaten half to death, and Jackson knew reprisals were coming. The coppers sitting in his flat had been unaware of that fact at the time; he’d seen it later, on the news. Was it better for him to be securely on the winning side? But which was the winning side? From where he was sitting, the cops had well and truly lost tonight’s battle, but did that mean that was the end of it? Not likely.

Everyone knew that the heat being imposed on the estate wasn’t some coincidental new government initiative, but a knee-jerk response to the fact that the murdered woman in Potton Park was a clean-living, well-bred, harmless, wealthy white member of this broken society of theirs. On the other hand, Keira was ill-educated, promiscuous, mixed race and poor, making her insignificant.