He’d done four years for a building society heist and his brother Jimmy had done two. He never intended returning to prison and he watched every jail drama to reinforce his conviction. He even watched Bad Girls and, of course, there was always the hope of a little lezzie action in that. The one sure thing you could say about Ray was he always had a drink on the go. This occasion it was Schnapps; Jimmy had boosted a Safeway and piled a lorry with every type of booze under the supermarket sun. The German spirit was going down easy and he had a nice buzz building. He stood up, stretched. Tall, he’d been told many times of his resemblance to the actor James Woods, and it made him feel good. JW was your stone psycho. Ray had Salvador on vid. But his all-time favourite was The Onion Field, where Woods played the cop-killer who, in the nick, manipulated all around him. It was the sense of total danger that Woods emanated. Ray worked on his mannerisms and pretended to be surprised when people remarked on them.

He was wearing a T-shirt with the logo:

Pog Mo Thoin

It had been given to him by a crazy Irish girl he’d been seeing. He had to let her go when she set fire to their gaff for the second time. It meant giving her a few slaps but his heart hadn’t been in it. Ray felt that as Jimmy Woods had been through the mill with Sean Young, he too had to earn his spurs with crazies. In south-east London, they were easy to find. It was months later that he discovered the logo meant ‘kiss my ass’. And he’d worn it ever since. Angie had tried to smarten him up, bought a stack of Ralph Lauren shirts, which he put in the Oxfam bin. The one time he’d worn them, Jimmy had said:

‘You look like a pooftah.’

Gave Jimmy a hard slap to the side of the head. He’d been looking out for his brother all his life. Jimmy was a bit slow; he didn’t seem to be on the same wavelength as the rest of the world and responded with a simplicity to most things.