Paying for stuff is for losers, kiddo. People like us, we play the system and we win.

He made it sound like a game. And the people he screwed – the bargain-hunters who bought at his mock auctions, the donors giving generously to causes that didn’t exist, the grieving widows he’d scope out before sliding effortlessly into their lives – were paying the price for having more money than sense.

I’m doing them a favour, Dazzler, teaching them a lesson. Better they lose a few quid to me than thousands to an actual criminal.

And Pete Lennox had his own code of honour. Rule number one: look after your own. Rule number two: never grass.

Stop this now.

I leave the tent for a piss in the bushes. As I walk back, I take in the view across the water: shiny office windows, funky brewhouses, cranes promising more of the same. So different from how rough it was when I first camped here, after prison. But search hard enough and there’s plenty of poverty and addiction underneath.

A couple walk past, so into each other that they don’t notice me or my tent. As I squeeze back into my sleeping bag and zip out the rest of the world, thoughts of Gemma climb inside with me. If there’s any justice, on Saturday she’ll find out she’s pregnant with her husband’s child. A new adventure. I close my eyes. Did my parents see Mum getting pregnant as an adventure? My dad only talked about her when he’d been to the pub, and the sadder he was, the more likely he was to turn on me.

‘If the doctors had given me the choice,’ he said more than once, ‘I wouldn’t have hesitated. I’d have said: Save her, not the bloody baby. You wouldn’t be here.’

Of course it wasn’t fair to say that to a kid. But it wasn’t fair either that my father, a man who’d have struggled to keep a fairground goldfish alive, was saddled with a baby and a bucketload of grief, when what he’d wanted was the life of Riley with his glamorous young wife on the Costa del Crime . . .

I know I’ve got it bad when I feel sorry for my father. I push the other cans of cider to the other end of the tent and gulp water instead, to sober me up.

I turn my phone on for the first time since leaving the penthouse last night: I told myself I was saving the battery, but I also wanted to avoid angry WhatsApps from Casey, or crowing from Angelica.

There’s nothing. Hopefully they’re moving on already. As my thumb hovers by the off button, the screen lights up:

ANGELICA CALLING

I let it go to voicemail. An alert pops up a few seconds later:

You have 4 new messages

As I dial my voicemail, the buzzing in my head begins. Angelica’s first message was left an hour ago:

‘Hi. It’s me. Is Casey with you? We went for her scan this morning and I left her to go to hospital school on her own. But she never showed up and she’s not answering her phone. So if you’ve picked her up on some bloody secret jaunt, you need to tell me now. I hope you did, because if she’s not with you, then . . . Call me, OK?’