His voice tailed away.

‘What, Dickie?’ Dora prompted.

‘If I don’t then I’m dead. Don’t think he can’t reach me just because I’m in here. That’s rubbish. He can get to me anytime he likes. Anytime. If I don’t go along with this, I’m finished.’

‘But you’ll be a middle-aged man – an old man – when you come out.’

Dickie gave a sigh. ‘I don’t expect you to wait for me, Dor.’ Then he looked into her face and his eyes hardened. ‘You’re turned out pretty smart for prison visiting. Got someone new, I suppose.’

Dora looked at Dickie and shook her head. This was all nonsense, Frank having eyes inside prison. The law prevailed in here. Not gang rule. But she felt awkward at his words. The someone new was Frank, but she wasn’t about to say so. Frank had them boxed in all ways. Her at his beck and call, Dickie up on a charge he was guilty of. She suddenly thought of her haul of expensive gifts, and felt ever so slightly sick. ‘Why don’t you ask your friend Frank about it? He seems to have all the answers,’ she said.

26

Donny thought his sharp words to Wills about pulling himself together seemed – at last – to be having an effect. It was as if a weight had finally lifted from Wills. He even tried to walk a couple of times, on his busted and twisted legs. Donny encouraged him when he was home from work, slapped his back, made a fuss of him. And somehow, the whole Maguire household stopped holding its breath and started, very slowly, to feel easy again.

Yes, their precious youngest boy might be a cripple; but at least he wasn’t miserable about it any more. At least he knew that he still had a life to live.

‘Wills, you seem different,’ said Mum one day when they were sitting out under the apple tree in the back garden. It was huge, that tree; a Bramley, the best of cookers, and already loaded with slowly maturing fruit. Every autumn Mum made pies by the bucketful, they always had too many and gave loads away.

‘I’m feeling better,’ William shrugged.

‘I’m glad. Perhaps we could get you some sort of job. Something easy.’

‘Yeah, that’d be great.’

Mum was cheered by this. She had her boy back. She started asking around. Of course he couldn’t do anything manual, that was out of the question, but some simple job in an office wouldn’t be beyond him. He was bright, and obliging.

‘Maybe you could find him something in the back room at the station,’ she said to Donny. ‘You know, filling in forms and stuff.’

‘I’ll ask,’ said Donny, pleased with Wills’s progress but still coldly furious over the circumstances that had brought his little brother to this pass.

He thought about Dora. Christ – all right – he was a man, and he had to admit to himself that she was a real looker. She knew it, too. She was vain and manipulative – she thought her beauty gave her the right to look down her nose at ordinary mortals. Donny disliked her instinctively, but he wouldn’t kick her out of bed.