‘No way,’ said Beezer, who prided himself on his togs, the flashier the better. And he’d bought the jacket on a trip to honour Col’s memory. It had sentimental value, he said.

Terry shrugged. They divvied up the money and departed.

Ten days later, the Bill were round asking questions – everyone knew where the villains were on the manor, and Charlie had a reputation as a real heavy face now. They got hold of Beezer’s jacket and matched up fibres from that with some near the smashed office door.

Beezer got handed down two years and the rest of them got off with nothing.

Beezer’s sentence was unfortunate in one way.

But in another?

It was a cast-iron miracle.

14

With the loan she’d got from Charlie, Nula paid to have the operation on her nose done at a private clinic. It was two weeks of unbelievable pain, during which there was Mum forever at her bedside asking what had she done a thing like that to herself for? Nula was a pretty young girl with everything in front of her.

Yeah, including a monstrous conk, thought Nula, enduring her mother, patiently waiting for her to be gone. Hating herself for feeling like that, too: she knew how much her mother loved her, but she also knew that she wanted out from this suffocating little world that her sweet, placid, old-fashioned mum inhabited.

‘Our mum’s right,’ said Jimmy, eating the grapes he’d bought her as she lay in the nice private room in the swish hospital. ‘You must be off your head, our Nula, bothering about your fucking nose.’

So there was pain, and there was discomfort, and there was her mum fussing around and her brother who always had a go at her, he couldn’t resist it, and Dad who stayed away because he never could stand hospitals.

In between, there was the very nice plastic surgeon, and nurses who actually took trouble over you, not like in the NHS place she’d been in as a kid to have her tonsils out, where some of the nurses couldn’t be arsed to fetch you an extra blanket if you were cold, or even a pot to piss in when you were dying for the loo.

Then came the day when the gauze and tape was to be removed. She feared that when the big reveal was effected, her nose would be exactly as it always was. Huge. Lumpen. Yeah, shaped like a potato. Awful.

She held her breath as the nurse lifted the gauze free of her face. The air felt chilly, strange on the newly exposed skin. She’d already seen her reflection in the bathroom mirror, the big patch of gauze and above it two spectacular black eyes. Now, she would see everything.

The nurse was smiling. She was handing Nula a mirror. Nula lifted it nervously, and looked.

‘Oh my God!’ she burst out.