‘He likes you,’ she whispered to Milly. ‘Say the word, he’d be yours.’

‘Shut up,’ said Milly, but she did like Sammy. He was OK. She’d chatted to him once or twice. He worked for Dad, here at the house or on the cars or on the doors at Dad’s clubs or snooker halls, or at the furnishing factories. He’d told her about his own dad, who’d been an army man, ballistics or bomb disposal or something like that, and how Sammy had been a disappointment to him when he didn’t join the army too, preferring PPO work like this.

‘Mum? Can we have a word?’ she asked, opening the door to Nula’s sitting room.

‘What’s the problem?’ asked Nula.

‘I’m not sure about this,’ said Milly to Belle.

‘About what?’ asked Nula. ‘Come on in, don’t stand in the doorway.’

The two of them stepped inside. Belle glanced back into the hall, and carefully closed the door. Then she followed Milly over and sat down beside her.

‘Well?’ said Nula, not liking the troubled expression on her daughter’s face.

‘We don’t want to upset you,’ said Milly.

Nula smiled. ‘Come on. Spit it out.’

Milly glanced at Belle again, then took a deep breath and told her mother about what she’d found back in the summer, in Harlan’s room.

73

‘What you got to understand is, you work for us, not some pissing pitiful lowlife, all right?’ said Beezer.

They were in a flat in Shoreditch. Two of Charlie Stone’s soldiers had a kid who didn’t look any older than eighteen pressed down on a piss-stinking mattress in the bedroom. There had been a girlfriend in the flat when they arrived, but Beezer had quickly ushered her out the front door and told her to fuck off and not to even think about telling anyone about this or next time he wouldn’t be so gentlemanly, did she understand what he meant?

She understood. She went. And that left just her boyfriend, a spotty little oik with spiky blond hair, dressed up in a hat and eyeliner, like Boy George. Ten minutes into the visit, Charlie’s boys had his fancy pants off him and were holding him down on the bed while applying his girlfriend’s steam iron to his ball sack. His screams were echoing around the room, nearly deafening the lot of them.

‘I said, do you understand?’ asked Beezer.

‘Don’t think he did,’ said Harlan, grabbing the iron off one of Beezer’s cohorts and sending a long jet of steam billowing over the boy’s private parts. The screams were dying away to little more than tired choking barks. Tears of anguish were running down the boy’s thin cheeks, ruining his prettied-up hairstyle and smearing his make-up.

‘He’s had enough,’ said one of the men.