Kissing the top of her silky head he said sadly, ‘I’ve got to go, love, the old woman’s expecting me home. I told her I’d gone to a Masons’ do.’

Junie smiled and followed him to the front door. ‘I’ll watch you from the balcony, all right?’

He kissed her quickly and went down in the lift whistling to himself. Junie was his lifeline. He made the trip from his home in Silvertown to Plaistow four times a week, sometimes more. Since his son’s accident, he was relying on her increasingly. Stricken with guilt, he had grown apart from his wife, knowing in his heart that his son’s accident was his fault. Like most men of his ilk, he couldn’t live with that, so he blamed his wife.

It was much easier.

Leaving the block of flats he walked across the small concrete car park and got into his dark green Cosworth. He could see Junie’s outline on the balcony and smiled to himself. She was so uncomplicated, was Junie. You shagged her and you had a laugh, and that was it. No long drawn-out conversations, no recriminations. No nothing. Not like his wife, who had known all along about Junie and didn’t have the decency to keep her trap shut about it.

What the fuck did these women want? he asked himself.

He flashed his lights so Junie would smile to herself in the darkness. He knew how to be romantic - whatever that mad cow at home thought.

As he put the key in the ignition he heard a noise behind him, and as he turned to look, he felt a rope going around his neck. Next thing, the passenger door was opening and he smelt petrol. Trying to pull at the rope, he felt the coldness of the petrol as it hit his face and shoulders, and soaked into his pure wool jacket.

Half-fainting with fright and lack of breath, he felt the pressure on his throat ease. As he tried to straighten himself up in the car he saw the naked flame of the lighter.

‘Tata, Danny.’

Junie watched in wonderment as she saw the man opening the passenger door of the car. She couldn’t see exactly what he was doing because the lights outside the flats very rarely worked. The little bastard muggers saw to that. It was only when she heard the screams and saw the flames that she realised something had gone very wrong. She wasn’t to know that the men had rigged up the car earlier in the evening, while she and Danny had been drinking Blue Nun and bonking away in bed as if their lives depended on it. The deafening bang as the car exploded made her sink weakly to her knees.