I perhaps haven’t mentioned that Mrs Mack’s cupboard wasn’t the first thieving that I had done, by a very long way. But it had never been personal before. Pocketing a couple of Yorkies and a can of Fanta now and then wasn’t the same as taking an old lady’s money. Those minor acts of dishonesty had given me an excited buzz, but this, now, was something very different; like the world was spinning too fast around me and I needed to get off.

I grabbed a jumbo bag of crisps, a 1.5 litre bottle of Fanta and two Snickers bars, then made a last-minute decision to include a Peperami. I wasn’t even hungry, but I had to spend some of the money to get it away from me.

‘You last of the big spenders today, heh?’ said Mr Ghosh, in unusually friendly form, but I was too sick with myself to reply.

Outside again, it was raining now, and Robbie Williams’s ‘Angels’ was blasting from someone’s open window. To this day I loathe that song.

I walked through the estate and down to where there was a small park. It was a sorry excuse for one, with double swings, one of which was broken, and a roundabout that was so peeled and rusty it would scour the skin off your legs. Dog shit studded the grass and it was often a place where deals were made, and worse. I didn’t know where else to go, though. Because the weather was turning bad, at least no one was there.

I sat on a wet bench, hunched against the rain, which was beginning to come down in earnest now. But I welcomed the miserable wet metal under my legs and the chill seeping through me. It felt like a punishment I deserved.

I opened the packet of crisps with hands that shook from cold and forced them into my mouth, feeling one of them scratch my dry throat as it went down. I tried to picture him, Mark Little, lying on the floor of a hospital cell, dying, and I ground the toe of my trainer into a tuft of dirt and grass in front of me, fighting unshed tears that burned and clogged my sinuses.

‘What the fuck have we got here then?’ said a voice. I looked up, startled, because I hadn’t heard anyone coming. There were three of them, all much older than me, probably close to twenty. I recognized Kieran from next door as one of them, a hood pulled high over his head. The third bloke was a black kid I only knew as King. I never found out whether it was his actual name or not.