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It was time to share his good fortune, he knew that, but at the moment he was collecting a debt that was long overdue. A debt that Barry had tried to ignore, believing that he would not have the front to come after him.

Brodie's name was synonymous with skulduggery, and he knew that only the rumours surrounding his dishonourable discharge and his phenomenal temper, coupled with the element of surprise, had stood between him and a firearm this night.

But there were others Barry dealt with, and they had their creds. Barry would be all over him like a rash once the shock wore off and he realised that he and his associates were more than capable of taking on a lone man with a large amount of dosh.

He smiled and it occurred to him that whoever he decided to pal up with needed to be a new Face, an up-and-coming lad like himself with the heart and the nerve to take on the more established of their counterparts. The world was changing, and the younger men were needing money and the older men were needing a lesson in the real world. The country was still rebuilding, not only buildings, but the economy, and the pickings were juicy enough to make Brodie not just a man of means, but also a man to be listened to, and more importantly, a man to respect.

Everything had changed with the war, and Patrick had seen that it was a new era coming, and that the new world they would finally inhabit was open to all sorts of money-making schemes. This meant a new criminal fraternity, and Brodie was determined that he would be a big part of that change. It was what he had worked towards, it was what made him the man he was, and it was why Barry was now awaiting his downfall.

It was the sixties, and life was sweet for anyone with a bit of nous and a few quid to sweeten their journey through life.

Patrick was one of the first to challenge the likes of Barry Caldwell and his ilk. It was in with the young and out with the old.

They had all known this day was coming, they had just not had the foresight to make any kind of provision for when it all finally fell out of bed.

Well, fuck them. His rep would gather enough talk tonight to make him a household name in East London. The debt was large and had also been a long time coming, but when he actually went after Barry
and
his peers and took all their work off them they would understand that he was now not just their equal, but one of their betters. His rep would finally be strong enough for him to become the lynchpin of a new and exciting world that he would not only create, but also control.

The war had separated the men from the boys, and the old men who had ruled because the country's youth had been scattered to the ends of the earth, were now going to find out that it really was about the survival of the fittest.

Their days of being the dog's bollocks were over, finished with, gone. This lot might have been the instigators of this brave new world way back, but they had no control over it any more. They were like fucking antiques, decrepit, and frightened of the new generation who had access to guns and no real fear of the filth. It was time to make his move all right, and he was ready to take the consequences of his actions.

His mind made up, he picked up his beer and, emptying the straight-lined Courage glass of its contents, he proceeded to smash it with all the force he could muster, into Barry Caldwell's chubby, pasty and comically surprised face.

Patrick had the psychological advantage, he had drawn first blood. He was quick to note that none of the men around him tried to intervene, and he knew then, without a shadow of a doubt, that his instincts, as usual, had been spot on.

They all looked defeated, they all looked shocked and they were all frightened that the next person on his agenda was going to be one of them. They were old, old before their time from piss-ups, chain-smoking and easy pickings. None of them had been seriously challenged since their call-up papers, they were rejects, they were from the past, from a life that was grey and empty, and their antiquated moral code stifled younger men like himself. They were carrion, old, wizened wankers. They were finished and they all knew it.

Well, he was still young enough to make his mark, yet old enough to command respect. Pat Brodie was on his way up, and at twenty-nine, he was ready to put his money where his notoriously close mouth was.

The courts were handing out long sentences, and instead of that being a deterrent, it only made him and his counterparts more reckless, more violent, because if they were going to go down then they would make sure it was for a fucking good reason.

He looked down at Barry. Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.

Lily Diamond was tired out. Her shift had been long and her legs were swelling from fourteen hours of standing in a freezing factory on a cold floor, and then waiting over an hour for the bus that dropped her off a ten-minute walk from her home.

As she went into her house, she was already yawning and her mother took her coat from her, hung it on the back of the door and poured her a cup of steaming black tea. Then, with her usual swiftness, she placed a plate of ham and eggs in front of her.

This was all done in silence so as not to wake the drunken man who was quietly snoring on the settee in the small parlour nearby.

Lily smiled at her mother but they both knew it meant nothing, these were two people who had realised that there was no real connection between them many years before.

Lily knew that she looked like her mother. They had the same thick hair and the same grey eyes, their builds were similar enough for people to mistake them for each other from the rear, and they were both blessed with a fantastic bone structure that belied her mother's advancing years, and reassured her daughter that her looks were probably going to last a lot longer than the majority of her friends. But other than that, they were as different in temperament as a dog and a cat.

They had only one thing in common and that was a hatred for the man who ruled their lives, and who terrorised their every waking moment.

Mick Diamond was not her father and she thanked God for that every day of her life, but he had married her mother when she was already pregnant with another man's child, made her respectable and then waited for the children of his own that had never arrived. Consequently, she had not only been resented by him, but also been a constant reminder that it was his fault there were no sons around his table, no children to look to in his old age and no other wages available to assuage his unhappiness by providing him with the alcohol he so desperately craved.

His name would live on through a bastard, through someone else's child. The fact she existed was proof positive that the blame for his wife's childless state must lie with him.

Lily had grown up in a household devoid of any kind of love, or any kind of normality. She had learned at an early age that keeping quiet, staying in the background and trying to be as invisible as possible, was the only way she could hope to survive.

She was a constant reminder to her mother of her shame and a constant reminder to her stepfather of his inability to sire any children of his own. By five, she was a diplomat, already understanding the need to keep both these unstable people happy by not ever making any noise, never demanding their time and most importantly, never bringing any attention to either them or herself from anyone outside their scuffed and well-worn front door.

Now, as a wage earner, she had gained a certain grudging respect, but it had been a long time coming. At fifteen, she understood her life better than people three times her age; she needed to keep the peace until she had enough money to set up on her own, or marry herself out of it all.

As Lily ate, she felt the oppressive atmosphere that always pervaded her home, and she swallowed quickly and quietly as she always had.

Meals were not something to be enjoyed in this house, they were just a necessary part of life, and the social element of eating had never been made apparent to her until she had gone to friends' homes. Seeing them eating leisurely whilst talking about their day or about what was in the newspaper, she had felt as if she was experiencing a revelation not unlike those of St John the Divine.

Until work had claimed her, she had never played outside her house, had never interacted with anyone, at school or otherwise, and she had never realised that her home life was so different to everyone else's.

At school she had been timid, and she had not made friends because her mother and stepfather had never seemed to make any friends either. It was a social skill she had only procured for herself since work had opened her eyes to a world she had never known existed.

At school she had been ridiculed, because of her clothes, her shyness and her terror of mixing with the other children. Her fear of them had given them all the power, but her greatest fear had been of bringing any kind of intrusion into the house she had been brought up in. The fear of someone knocking on the front door for her had caused her to almost faint with fright. Her loneliness had been so acute it had made her ache inside as if she were suffering from some kind of physical illness. Even the most hardened nun had been, to her, a contact with someone other than her parents, and she had relished even the wicked onslaughts of their tongues because at least someone was acknowledging that she existed.

Being part of a crowd was something she now understood, in fact now needed, and more than anything else, it was something she knew was actually keeping her sane. The 'you never had it so good' era had come and gone without anyone in her household mentioning it. But then again, apparently her mother and granny had sat under the kitchen table or in the Anderson shelter in the small backyard and had not once made any kind of comment about the Germans, the war or Hitler himself; they were proud of that fact.

Nothing of note had ever been addressed in this house; it was as if the outside world didn't exist for them. Her granny had died suddenly one night and her mother had hardly mentioned it; she had been slid out of the front door in a wooden box and it had been just another day to them. But at least Lily's burden had been eased a little; her fatherless state had never failed to be mentioned at every available opportunity by her granny, so it was with relief that she mourned her passing.

Lily was scared, all the time she was terrified, but she had never really known what of. It was jumbled inside her head and as no one ever addressed her unless absolutely necessary, it had stayed there.

Her fear had been ignored in the same way she had, and not once had anyone tried to still the terrified beating of her heart, or explain to her that it would all be over soon. It was only at school, when she had eavesdropped on other kids' conversations, that she had an inkling of what other people's lives were about.

Now, the need to escape these people was all-encompassing, the need to cut herself off from them was so overpowering she wondered how they could not hear her thoughts, so loud were they at times, and so vicious, she was frightened of what she might be capable of doing to the pair of them while they slept.

Her mother cleared her plate away and refilled her cup without once speaking to her, and, as always, Lily took her cup of tea up to her tiny bedroom, undressed herself in the dark and lay down in the cold bed to sleep. She was shivering from the cold, and from her deep-seated fear of having to live a broken and lonely life like this for the rest of her days. So stunted were her emotions, though, that even now, at her lowest ebb, it did not occur to her to cry.

Crying had never gained Lily anything, even as a baby it had never brought her mother to her side, and so she did not understand that to most girls of her age it was a powerful weapon to be used, was a tool to be harnessed and eventually unleashed on the men in her life, both old and new, to guarantee that she got exactly what she wanted.

Her life was all wrong, and she knew it, had always known it deep inside, but her foray into the real world had made her not only aware of how it could, indeed should, be lived, it had also made her impatient to leave these two people in her past, and start living her own life in her own way. Without them.

The first thing she would do when she had enough money and confidence to branch out on her own, was to buy herself a wireless.

She was going to surround herself with noise and with people, she was going to make her life mean something, if not to anyone else, then to herself. She wanted colour and sound and laughter, she wanted to feel easy inside, wanted to experience the love of another human being and, most of all, she wanted peace of mind. She needed to feel a part of something bigger than her, bigger than the world that had been forced on her without her knowledge or her permission, wanted to be part of what was happening in the world. Lily Diamond had finally had a taste of reality and she was heady with the feeling of freedom it evoked inside her budding breasts, and she was suddenly beginning to understand just what life was really all about.

Lily Diamond had discovered boys or, more to the point, they had discovered her, and the exciting feelings they could engender inside her body amazed her. She had finally discovered freedom, the power to talk to people and to know they were listening to her. Lily was planning her escape, and it could not come soon enough for her.

She lay in the damp darkness and waited patiently for the sleep that would come because she was bone-weary. She welcomed it, sleep had always been her friend, sleep had been her only escape from a life that was as drab as the rain-sodden streets she walked, as drab as the woman who had borne her. Sleep had always been her only salvation; even God had abandoned her because her mother and father had also controlled what contact she had with him.

As her eyes closed, she was certain that, even though she had no idea what she was going to do when she left this house, once she was far away from the dragging dullness and the quiet desperation of these surroundings, she would miraculously know what to do with her life next.

She wondered if the man with the black car and the scar on his cheek would be there again tomorrow when she went for the bus. She hoped so. He excited her more than the pimply boys she worked alongside, or the clerks that gave her the once-over in the grubby factory offices when she picked up her pay packet.