Sharon Bradley wasn’t yielding, so why should he? He knew enough about the police to know that the murder of the middle-class woman would have rattled the senior ranks: it looked bad that it could occur in broad daylight in the middle of a park used by kids. They needed a fall guy and he’d been asked to help. Well, threatened actually. But he’d detected a sniff of panic in the coppers’ tone, and he suspected they were under pressure too. It was the higher ranks who ran gigs like this: informants and snitches. They were called snouts, narks, grasses and finks. But the two coppers who’d sat in his lounge, trying to keep their shit together, were just as exploited as he was. He could tell from their eyes that they were doing somebody else’s dirty work.

He needed to get to Tyrone, but without drawing attention to himself. He went to the window again and peered out. There was no sign of the police, only more and more people spilling out onto the streets, adding stuff to the makeshift blockade. Sharon was becoming a social hub for the estate: a kind of mascot championing the little people. He smiled again. He wasn’t about to give in.

He felt alive.

The temperature had plummeted once more, and they were all waiting for snow, but nothing was stopping these residents who kept bringing stuff to block the road outside Wordsworth Towers. The estate looked like a grey pile of shit, while the mountains – not that he could see them from his flat – would be covered in blankets of the kind of white stuff that didn’t kill you. He wished he was out there, free from any kind of manipulation and obligation.

He’d considered joining the Mountain Rescue, but then he’d also dreamt of being a lawyer. People like him didn’t do decent things like that. The minute his mother shot her first bit of brown into her veins, his life was over. Not that he felt sorry for himself; on the contrary, his life was relatively good. He had friends, he enjoyed his bikes and he wanted for little. He just hadn’t had any fire in his belly. But since watching the events unfold from his window, he’d begun to lift his head.

The two coppers had been very specific about what he was to do with the evidence. And now that he’d cleared his head and considered what Sharon was doing for the memory of her daughter, it gave him an idea. Maybe he could play them at their own game and use the evidence to the advantage of the whole estate?