– childhood in married quarters, boarding-school, the teenage home in a Devon village, the inevitability of following his father's career – was erased from his thoughts in waking hours, but came stabbing at him during the night so that he would wake and find the perspiration dripping from him and not know whether, in the last moments of sleep, he had screamed at the darkened walls.

He existed. Through the autumn his salvation had been the heavy, thudded knock of the big West Indian's fist on his door. Less often in the winter. Now he never came, as if Ivanhoe Manners's life had gone on, as if he had found new destitutes to throw his time at. Through Manners he had learned of the estate's pulsebeat. He could stand now at the back window of the unit and look down on the square below, where the kids' playground apparatus was broken, where the grass was worn away, where many windows had plywood hammered over them, where graffiti were spray-painted on the walls, and watch the rule of the youth gangs. Some days he would unlock the door, draw down the bolt and go out on to the walkway to stare across the estate's inner roads, but only when he knew the door behind him was open and there for fast retreat, the key in the door for turning.

In the early days of life on the Amersham, Manners had come, thrown the charity-shop overcoat at him and made him walk, had bullied him as if that were the therapy he required.

So, Malachy knew where the crack-houses were on the estate; ground-floor units with heavy bars on the windows and steel plates on the inside of the doors where rocks of cocaine were sold and consumed.

'Fortresses, man. They seem to know when the police are coming and can spot the surveillance. They have a nose for the raid that's on its way, and nothing's ever found.'