I’m not going to lie, the surveillance has been exhausting, so this guy pretty much telling me what I’d half suspected for years was almost a relief. After twenty-nine minutes, I grabbed his hand and pumped it up and down like he’d done to me, and told him it was OK.

It was an accident, sir. Un accidente.

It’s OK.

25

Danny

I started to look forward to the daily ceremony of unwinding the gauze bandages from Lou’s leg. The gentle, hand-under-hand motion, the anticipation of the reveal. The bruises on her face had faded to small, dirty smudges, and the train track of staples seemed to stay as clean as a whistle almost on its own, so it was a relief when the part I was in charge of started to look a little bit better as well.

Every day we’d both lean forward to examine the edges of the circular wound, moving self-consciously into each other’s space. Mostly things seemed to be going well, but there were moments of apprehension when I imagined I saw tiny streaks of red, or one of the other signs of trouble Dom had told me to look out for. When that happened, I’d gently prod the skin, and Lou and I would watch it change colour, discussing if it really did look different, or convincing ourselves it had just been a trick of the light.

In the first week after I took over, Wolfie appeared unannounced one day, just as I’d finished taking the bandages off. When I saw her I stood up, immediately feeling ham-fisted and clumsy, worried that she’d caught me at it, doing everything wrong.

‘Early release for good behaviour?’ I asked, to cover my awkwardness. But she completely ignored the crack, so I took the hint and didn’t make any more mention of her supposed detention, which she seemed to attend at her own discretion.

She walked over to Lou and managed to elbow me out of the way without actually doing it. It was a pretty nifty trick, and I didn’t feel a thing until I was standing off to the side, holding a bunched-up handful of bandage and looking down at the top of two identical heads. As I watched, Lou reached out and rested her hand gently on Wolfie’s shoulder, and the heads moved closer until they were touching. It was such a tender moment I felt like I was intruding, and I was almost relieved (yet also slightly sad) when Wolfie drew back and sat on her heels.

‘It looks really good, Lou. Loads better, don’t you think?’ She swung around like she’d just remembered I was there. ‘Sorry. I’m not trying to take over or anything. Dom said—’ She stopped and flashed a look at Lou.

Guilty as hell. I bloody knew this had been her and Dom’s plan all along, to drop me in it and put the kibosh on my well-laid intentions to keep a low profile.

‘All good, I . . . it’s fine.’ I took a couple of seconds to absorb the fact that I wasn’t in the slightest bit upset about them getting one over on me.