He was angry and she’d known him long enough to realise that when he felt something so deeply, so passionately as he did right now, if he realised on top of everything else that his daughter, Mia, was out there missing, there’d be no talking, simply a bullet in her head; and then Mia would be certainly lost forever, if she wasn’t already.

Whatever happened, whatever Franny had to do, she needed to keep Alfie away from Charlie as well as Barry. ‘What I’m talking about is seeing you would be like a red flag to a bull. You should’ve heard him before – there’s no way Charlie will speak to you. Jesus Christ, he’s lost his leg, Alf. He’s never going to walk properly again, and that’s because of you. He’s pissed, and you know something, Alf? I don’t blame him.’

Furiously, Alfie banged his chest. ‘He ruined our business. Burnt the fucking place down. So he needed payback … Don’t look like that, Fran, I know he did it, cos who else would it have been?’

Uneasily, Franny shrugged, wanting to change the subject. ‘Who knows? Who knows if he did and you didn’t even wait to find out if it was him. I told you to back off and wait but you couldn’t do that, could you? Anyway, the point is, he wants to kill you, so he ain’t exactly going to start talking if he sees you.’

‘But, Fran, it’s not like he even told you the truth, is it? He blatantly lied about Barry, so what’s going to stop him lying this time around?’

‘I’ll make sure he doesn’t.’

‘No, Fran, I’ll make sure he doesn’t, and if I don’t get the truth out of him, well he can kiss goodbye to life as he knows it.’

Scrabbling around for excuses for why Alfie shouldn’t go up and see Charlie, Franny quickly said, ‘But if we both go, and Barry does come back here, then we might miss him; or if I stayed here and you went to see Charlie, that wouldn’t work either. I don’t know what Barry looks like. At least if you stayed in the car you could keep an eye out, and if he did turn up, I dunno, take down the car registration or something.’

‘But what are the chances of him reappearing?’

Franny spoke matter-of-factly. ‘Alf, any chance is better than nothing.’

Thinking about it, Alfie nodded his head. What Franny was saying made sense. And in truth, him wanting to go up and see Charlie had been more about his paranoia than Franny not being able to handle him.