Stephanie had a penchant for E; she said she couldn’t dance without it but, as Petey pointed out, this was a step too far. Danny had a little pash on her; he liked redheads, and she had relieved him of his readies on more than one occasion. She had slipped the customers one too many Mickeys in the past, and they had been lucky that the geezer concerned was a weekend warrior, not a man of any substance. If she carried on, they would eventually get a tug.

He sighed. ‘I’ll make sure she’s out on her fucking ear. Like you say, Pete, she ain’t worth the fucking aggravation.’

Petey Bailey refilled his glass. ‘None of them are – the fact they work here in the first place speaks volumes. Now, what else has been going down? Anything I need to know about?’

The subject was changed and Davey was glad about that, the night had already been far too fucking stressful for his liking.

Chapter One Hundred and Two

Tania was sorry for her cousin; young Delroy’s face had already swollen up like a balloon and she knew it would look even worse once the bruising came out. As he sat in her mother’s kitchen, she bathed his face gently with ice water. When he had texted her she had snuck downstairs and waited for him to arrive, already anxious; if he was coming there on the quiet it had to be serious.

‘Who did this to you, Del?’ Her tone was gentle.

‘My dad.’

His response was so low that at first she thought she had misheard him. ‘Why would your dad do this to you? Your mum will go mad! What on earth brought that on?’ She was scandalised, and her voice was rising because of that.

‘Shush, you’ll have your mum down on top of us.’

Tania could not believe that Delroy’s own father could have hurt him so seriously and, more to the point, that Delroy was so accepting of it.

‘Why did he hit you?’

Delroy shrugged. ‘I fucked up, let’s just leave it at that. Have you got any paracetamol? My head is splitting.’

Tania realised he was not going to tell her any more, but she was shocked; she would never have believed that Delroy’s dad could hurt him like this. She also guessed that if Delroy wasn’t willing to tell her about it, he must have really fucked up badly. She sighed, and instead made them both a mug of Ovaltine.

Some things were best left alone, and she had a feeling this was one of them.

Chapter One Hundred and Three