‘Sad day,’ said the sergeant from the police station as the mourners shuffled outside.

‘Yeah,’ said Donny. ‘Thanks for coming.’

A lot of the coppers had turned out for the funeral, and Donny was grateful to them for that. It buoyed up Mum and Dad a bit, to see so many people come and pay their respects. It was a long day for him. Chatting to people at the wake back at the house, making sure everyone had enough to eat and drink because even that seemed beyond Mum at the moment, and Dad was blank-eyed with grief, hardly taking in the fact that anyone was here.

All the while, as he chatted and fed people, handing round platefuls of sandwiches and doling out drinks, he thought Dora O’Brien. That high-toned bitch was at the back of all this. She was the reason Wills wasn’t here today. She was the reason he was six foot deep in the earth, dead. Donny thought of her, with her white-blonde curls tumbling down her back, her sleepy seductive blue eyes, her flirty arrogance, her certainty that she was completely adorable and could have any man she wanted.

The Doras of this world made up their own rules.

Well – so did Donny Maguire.

34

When she’d been completely sure that Frank was out and about in town, doing whatever the fuck it was he did when he wasn’t beating up pregnant women, Dora had packed her one small suitcase with her few belongings, careful to stuff in all the saleable treasures Frank had given her. Then, trying to get what Lil had said about William Maguire and Donny, his scary older brother, out of her mind, she put on her coat and headed for King’s Cross and boarded the train for York.

Once there, she took a taxi and arrived at Uncle Joe and Aunt Min’s farm, way out in the sticks. The farmhouse was long and low, formed of grey stone like an old monument, and tiled with slate. Just looking at it gave her the dry heaves. None of the rest of the family had ever been up here. Nothing could have prepared Dora for the sheer heart-stopping bleakness of the scene on this cloudy rain-lashed spring day. The farmhouse was tucked into a deep wet fold of the rolling dales, and the very sight of it made her want to turn and run.

But where to?

She hadn’t announced her arrival, and as she paid off the taxi and walked through the gate and up to the door, she wondered if anyone was in. The house looked deserted. The wind was bitterly cold and howling, thrashing at her exposed skin as it tore up through the valley.

Dora put down her suitcase and yanked the chain on the bell hanging beside the door.

Nothing.

She yanked it again.

Distantly she could hear a female voice saying, ‘All right, all right.’

And then Aunt Min opened the door, big and aproned and ugly with a tight grey-curled hairdo. She had a faint look of Lil about her.