The stealing grieved his mum, who was so honest you could have given her a million pounds in cash to look after and found it untouched a year later. She tried hard to stop him from doing it, and eventually – after tears and recriminations – she realised that it wasn’t going to stop, and came to a practical arrangement with the understanding Mrs Hackett, whereby Titch’s mum regularly paid off in full whatever losses Titch incurred. And so even Titch’s secret rebellion became part of a scheme quietly regulated and operated by his mother, although it was rarely spoken of at all. I sometimes wondered if that was why he had tried to nick stuff from old McGee in the first place: to start his own game afresh.

He could be generous too, though. There was the time he had saved up his pocket money for weeks to buy me a birthday present, a personal stereo I had wanted so that I could listen to my music tapes without bothering Big Jacky. I remember opening the parcel, badly wrapped in blue shiny paper with about half a roll of Sellotape securing it. It was my fifteenth birthday, and Titch was watching me closely, his pale blue eyes moving from my hands opening the parcel to my face and back again, as though he couldn’t choose which to settle on. The second the paper fell away, and I glimpsed what was inside, he said breathlessly, ‘I bought it I didn’t nick it,’ because he wanted me to understand that it was a proper present, which had involved planning and self-sacrifice on his part, the very qualities that his mother and I were regularly berating him for not having.

I couldn’t even bring myself to think about Titch’s mother. Her grief was too vast to contemplate, a Milky Way of pain. He was the only one she had. I could think about Titch, though, so long as I didn’t dwell on the dull mechanics of how he must have patiently planned his own death. It had shown such efficiency and determination, qualities his mother and I had never suspected he had. How much fear and despair had it taken to forge this strong, alien capability in him? How long had these emotions burned away in him, unremarked or smoothed over with phrases about him being ‘still a bit down’?

He must have realised in the end that his protectors couldn’t shield him, that the forces outside were stronger than either of us. He must have understood that when his attackers shoved his frightened mother to one side to drag him out of the house, and again when he saw my battered face staring up at him from a hospital pillow. When he thought they were coming back for him, I suppose the only thing left for him to do was to go somewhere they couldn’t reach him.