Her next-door neighbour watched her with a slight frown on her face. The Jacksons should not have been living in a respectable residential street as far as she was concerned. They should have stayed in their privatised council house where they belonged. The woman’s disgraceful language was bad enough, as were the skintight clothes on her ample frame and that shocking bleached blonde mass of tangles on her head, but Carol Jackson’s choice of car was what really got her down. A shocking pink Golf Gti was hardly the kind of car one welcomed in Runnymead Close.

Georgio ate his breakfast in silence. He could feel the electric atmosphere around him as the men all waited for the off.

Lewis was nowhere to be seen, but this didn’t worry Georgio. He knew Lewis would be taking a leisurely breakfast in his cell, a full cooked breakfast, as he did every morning, consisting of eggs, bacon, fried slice and button mushrooms. Georgio couldn’t help smiling as he thought of Lewis’s face when he found out Georgio had jumped, right away from him and the prison . . . taking Lewis’s money with him.

He looked up from his breakfast and saw Ricky watching him. He winked and Ricky winked back. But he didn’t smile and Georgio carried on eating, knowing that it might be the only food he got for a good few hours.

Beavis and Butthead, aka Harvey Hall and Bernard Denning, watched everyone surreptitiously. Since arriving in Parkhurst they had realised exactly how much danger they were in. Listening to the men talk was a terrifying experience, and both being convicted childmolesters and paedophiles who had accidentally murdered some of their victims, they had become wary, terrified of ever being unmasked for what they were. The average person on the street would feel no compunction in attacking them. Outside the court, women had screamed abuse at them, had tried to attack them, and they were normal housewives. What would these hard-faced, violent men do if they guessed who these two really were? And both Hall and Denning knew that eventually the men would find out.

The waiting was worse than anything. They had listened to the men’s opinion of nonces. Transvestites and homosexuals were accepted in this environment, as long as they were consenting adults. But rapists, childmolesters and especially beasts, were hated, despised. Yet Georgio was a beast, he was a supplier. But no one in here was aware of that apparently. To them he was just one of the lads, a blagger, a villain.

Harvey Hall watched Georgio eating, saw him pushing the food into his mouth as if frightened someone was going to take it away from him. Unlike Denning, Hall could feel the tension in the air. He had made a shrewd guess that the men were all waiting for something, and he had a nasty feeling that the thing they were waiting for concerned him and Bernard.