‘You listen to me, Josephine. I don’t care what anyone says – she might have had a fright that night, and I get that – but that wasn’t any reason to carry on the way she fucking did. She had never, ever in her life had anything other than love and care from us. There are kids in this world who are living in war zones, who have seen their families murdered, and they get over it. Our Jessie’s fucking problem is that she let one fucking night cancel out all the years of love we had given her beforehand. I tell you now, and I’m being honest with you, I think she would have gone to the bad anyway. Look at how she’s living now! How she’s been living for years. Drink, drugs, fucking men. That is a lifestyle, Josephine, a fucking choice she’s made. I was talking to Tommy Ambrose the other week, six kids he has, and one of his sons is a fucking heroin addict. It’s breaking his heart but, as he said, there’s nothing he can do about it. The kid’s a fucking waste of space, end of. Tommy said a very true thing to me; he reckons it’s a kink in the boy’s nature. Nothing could have prevented it from happening. The boy was destined to be a fucking junkie. I think that applies to our Jessie. She would have found her level, eventually, I honestly believe that. She looked like a fucking paraffin lamp last week, when she came to get her money. I was so ashamed of her. Her breath was so bad, I could smell it from six feet away. Her clothes were dirty – she had obviously slept in them – her legs were scabbed over, and covered in fresh bruises, so I knew she had fallen over at some point. Then she had the fucking nerve to snatch the money out of my hand as if she was doing me a favour by taking it. I tell you now, Josephine, it took all of my willpower to stop myself from telling her to fuck off, and aiming her out the door on the end of my fucking boot.’

Josephine had never once heard her husband talk like that about their daughter, and she knew, then and there, that he had been thinking like that for a long time.

‘Oh, Michael, I’m so sorry to hear you talking like that about our Jessie. But I do know what you’re saying and, as much as it pains me to say this, I think you’re right.’