She is thinking upon this, and more, when she closes her fingers around the phone. She is in such a frenzy that she doesn’t even register that it is ringing until she has raised it to her ear and said ‘hello’.

‘Roisin, it’s me. Valentine. It’s definite, sis – not just us, the Heldens too. They tried to call him off and he opened up Packy Ratcliffe’s chest like it was an umbrella. Left him on the roof of Papa Helden’s caravan. Weren’t found until the police helicopter spotted it. Dogs had been yapping but nobody saw. Jaysus, Roisin, he’s said he’s coming for the lot of us. You’ve got to tell him. Get yourself safe, or at least prepared. He won’t stop, and by Christ he deserves his revenge …’

Roisin can barely untangle the words. She has never heard her brash, impulsive brother so rattled. She shivers again, violently, as though somebody were blowing cold air against the skin of her neck.

Pulls open the door, and starts to run.

TWENTY-ONE

Twelve years ago

Twenty miles west of Scunthorpe, a mile or so back from the motorway, screened by a line of trees and a wall of rotting hay bales, is the funfair cemetery. It’s primarily a scrapyard, but it specializes in showground memorabilia. This is a place where derelict dodgems and rusted-up rollercoasters can be abandoned to slowly sink in upon themselves: a video-game city, built of great rusting metal towers and smashed, multicoloured glass. An area the size of a football pitch is covered in the rusting hulks of showground wagons, their sides patterned with lurid, leering faces – chassis sinking into oily dirt and their insides long since disembowelled for their still-useful parts.

The land belongs to the father of Michael Fitz and Padua McAteer. He’s been dead eight years now, but nobody’s asked any questions of importance and the brothers see no reason to stop claiming his pension or signing documents on his behalf. As the brothers see it, he owes them. He carried on with both their mammies, smoked cigars and drove a Cadillac while they were being dragged up in damp flats or being dumped in foster homes. His occasional visits were treated like a Papal deputation. They grew up thinking of their father as something approaching a deity: remote, unavailable, but demanding veneration. It struck both as ironic that he took religion, late in life. Stopped pretending to worship the Lord and actually started to do so. Repented for the man he was and decided he would use his twilight years making amends for his past misdeeds. He brought his sons together. Told them they were brothers; they were blood. Told them that whatever happened, they were family and needed to put one another, and the Lord, before all else. It is a time Padua remembers with something approaching fondness. For a handful of years, he and his dad and his brother ran the scrapyard. Michael had the brains for it all. Reached out to men in Ireland whom his father called ‘the cousins’ and set up a side business exporting crushed and cubed metal to their contacts in the west of Ireland, where men loyal to Papa Teague would disentangle the twisted squares and excavate their true cargo. False documents, fake invoices, European prescription pads. He knew forgers from his time inside. In return, he received ketamine from horse trainers and cash-strapped stable-hands, which he and Padua were able to flog to the recreational users in Sheffield, Doncaster, Rotherham – even as far as Nottingham before they pissed off the Yardies. They branched out, both on the legitimate side of things, and in the scope of their ambition. Ran a landscape business on the side, tarmacked the odd drive, and did some breakdown work in the backwaters round about. They put a few bodies under the patios of the nice, middle-class people willing to pay cash in hand for a landscaping and paving job. Life was briefly rather nice. That Padua was a sex offender was something that didn’t matter to his brother, but it weighed heavily on Daddy’s mind. He kept apologizing to him for not being there, for not setting the right example, for not giving him the love, or the whippings, that would have kept him on the righteous path. It became too much to endure. Padua had worked hard on himself. He took the medicine the doctors gave him and tolerated the nausea and the hallucinations and the weight-gain. He kept himself in his trousers and went to every therapy session his probation officer decreed. He believes he would have kept getting better had the girl simply had the good sense to walk away from him. He still can’t forgive her for that. Can still see her, sitting on the top step of the dirty, glass-filled wagon, drinking orange pop from a bottle, laughing at his awkwardness, telling him he was her hero for rescuing her and her stupid little car from the roadside. Thanking him, again and again, for letting her charge her phone and get her head together before ringing a friend to come and pick her up. She must have seen the way he was looking at her. He cannot imagine why she did not see the threat radiating off him like sweat. When he grabbed her, pinned her down, hurt her, she’d thought he was joking. Had laughed, bits of pastry in her teeth, sweet syrup in the warm wet cave of her mouth – and then Daddy had been there, shouting and screaming and telling him he was an animal, a monster, and Padua had had no bloody choice but to pick up the rusting car battery from the pile by the wheel arches, and bludgeon his father until his head was nothing but chunks of gory bone. The girl had had to die too, of course. Padua hadn’t thought himself equal to the task, but Michael had shown him how. He’d returned home to a scene of bloody carnage. Saw an opportunity, and took it. Buried both bodies beneath a great rusting wall of twisted metal and plastic: waltzers and spinning teacups and a great half built log-flume serving as a gaudy monument for the bodies beneath.