Now June was talking about the Maguire boy. What was it she’d said?

‘What you on about?’ Dora asked her. ‘You mean William?’

‘Yeah, him. Someone broke his legs,’ said June.

Dora stared at her sister. ‘You what?’

‘Both of ’em. Broken.’

‘What . . . how?’

‘He was set upon on Wednesday on his way home from the foundry. Two blokes took him to the bomb site and hit him with a crowbar. He didn’t see their faces. They wore masks.’

4

It was a horrible thing to have to do, visit your own little brother in hospital when he’d been set upon and beaten to a pulp.

Donny Maguire had to do it, though; as the oldest brother, the responsible one, he had to get down there and smile at William, and tell him that it was all going to be OK, even when their mother was breaking her heart in floods of tears, and their father was pacing up and down, yelling about lowlife bastards and that he’d murder the feckers given a chance.

Officers came and took statements. But William couldn’t give them much. He’d been hustled onto the bomb site by two grown men; nothing had been said. They had simply beaten him with the crowbar, knocked his legs out from under him, leaving them broken in bits.

Donny Maguire sat by his brother’s bedside and looked at the frame over Wills’s poor busted legs and felt cold rage. William was only a kid. This couldn’t happen.

But it had.

‘You upset someone? Anyone?’ asked Donny. He was thinking of that tussle at Lil O’Brien’s wedding, that brief spat with Dickie Cole.

‘No,’ said William.

‘Don’t worry, the police are going to find out who did this to you, son,’ said their mother, standing by her youngest boy’s bedside, her face as haggard as William’s as she felt her son’s pain.

Donny didn’t know about that. Some of the coppers he knew couldn’t find their own backsides with both hands and a flashlight, and he was a copper himself.

‘They didn’t take your money then?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t have any on me, except some loose change. They didn’t take anything.’

‘None of that mob lot we told you not to go near? You know, the gangs?’ There were some terrible sorts out on the streets. All the family’d warned Wills about them, told him to steer clear. ‘You haven’t been doing jobs for them? Shifty stuff? You swear?’

‘No. Dad told me not to touch them, and I ain’t. God’s truth,’ said Wills, and started to cry.

So why would anyone do that? Break a sixteen-year-old’s legs? wondered Donny.

He thought again of Dickie Cole, and that flighty little bitch Dora.

‘It’s going to be all right,’ he said.

But he doubted it.

5

After June’s revelation about what had been done to William, Dora wandered out of the door feeling sick. All right, William was a fucking nuisance, but the poor little sod! He hadn’t deserved that. She met Dickie as arranged at the memorial and they caught the bus. All the time he was chatting to her, and she was answering, but she wasn’t thinking about what she was saying. She was thinking of fully-grown men with their faces covered breaking a kid’s legs all to fuck with a metal bar.