‘Could you? I’ll only be two minutes. I just need to find out how bad it is.’

She was out of the door before he had even stopped the car.

He was in a side cubicle. When the nurse showed her in through the curtain, Nigel rose from his plastic chair, his kind, doughy face taut with anxiety. Nicky was turned away, his cheekbone covered with a dressing and the beginnings of a black eye leaking colour into the socket above it. A temporary bandage snaked its way around his hairline.

It was all she could do not to let out a sob.

‘They’re going to stitch it. But they want to keep him in. Check for fractures and whatnot.’ Nigel looked awkward. ‘He didn’t want me to call the police.’ He gestured in the general direction of outside. ‘If you’re all right, I’ll be getting back to Belinda. It’s late …’

Jess whispered her thanks, and moved over to Nicky. She placed her hand on the blanket, where his shoulder was.

‘Tanzie’s okay,’ he whispered, not looking at her.

‘I know, sweetheart.’

She sat down on the plastic chair beside his bed. ‘What happened?’

He gave a faint shrug. Nicky never wanted to talk about it. What was the point, after all? Everyone knew the score. You looked like a freak, you got battered. You still looked like a freak, they still kept coming after you. That was the immovable logic of a small seaside town.

And, just for once, she didn’t know what to say to him. She couldn’t tell him it would all be all right, because it patently wasn’t. She couldn’t tell him the police would get the Fishers, because they never did. She couldn’t tell him that things would change before he knew it, because when you were a teenager your life really only stretches in your imagination about two weeks ahead, and they both knew that it wasn’t going to get better by then. Or, probably, any time soon after that.

She took his grazed hand and held it in both of hers. ‘It’ll be okay, you know,’ she said quietly. ‘It does get better than this. You need to keep hold of that. Really. It does get better.’

His gaze slid briefly over and met hers, and then he looked away.

‘He all right?’ said Liam, as she walked slowly back out to the car. The adrenalin had leached out of her, and Jess’s shoulders slumped with exhaustion. She opened the rear door to fetch her jacket and bag, and his eyes, in the rear-view mirror, took it all in.

‘He’ll live.’

‘Little bastards. I was just talking to your neighbour. Someone ought to do something.’ He adjusted his mirror. ‘I’d teach them a lesson myself if I didn’t have to watch out for my licence. Boredom, that’s what it is. They don’t know what else to do with themselves but pick on someone. Make sure you got all your stuff, Jess.’

She had to half climb into the car to reach her coat. And as she did, she felt something under her feet. Semi-solid, cylindrical. She moved her foot, reached down into the footwell, and came up with a fat roll of bank notes. She stared at it in the half-dark, then at what had fallen down beside it. A laminated identity card, the kind you would use at an office. Both must have fallen out of Mr Nicholls’s pocket when he was slumped on the back seat. Before she could think about it she stuffed them into her bag.

‘Here,’ she said, reaching into her purse, but Liam raised a hand.

‘No. I’ve got it. You’ve enough on your plate.’ He gave her a wink. ‘Give one of us a ring when you want picking up. On the house. Dan’s cleared it.’

‘But –’

‘No buts. Out you get now, Jess. Make sure that boy of yours is okay. I’ll see you at the pub.’

She felt almost tearful with gratitude. She stood there, one hand raised, as he circled the car park, so that she heard him as he shouted out of the driver’s window: ‘You should tell him, though, if he’d just try to look a bit more normal, he might not get his head bashed in so often.’

7.

Jess

She dozed through the small hours on the plastic chair, waking occasionally from discomfort and the sound of distant tragedies in the ward beyond the curtain. She watched the newly stitched Nicky as he finally slept, wondering how she was supposed to protect him. She wondered what was going on in his head. She wondered, with a clench of her stomach that no longer seemed to go away, what was coming next. A nurse popped her head around the curtain at seven and said she’d made her some tea and toast. This small act of kindness caused her to fight back embarrassed tears. The consultant stopped by shortly after eight, and said Nicky would probably spend another night in while they checked that there was no internal bleeding. There was a shadow they hadn’t quite got to the bottom of on the X-ray and they wanted to be sure. The best thing Jess could do would be to go home and get some rest. Nathalie rang to say she’d taken Tanzie to school with her kids and that everything was fine.

Everything was fine.

She got off the bus two stops before her house, walked round to Leanne Fisher’s, knocked on her door and told her, with as much politeness as she could muster, that if Jason came anywhere near Nicky again she would have the police on him. Whereupon Leanne Fisher spat at her and said if Jess didn’t f**k right off she’d put a brick through her effing window. There was a burst of laughter from within the house as Jess walked away.

It was pretty much the response she’d expected.

She let herself into her empty home. She paid the water bill with the council-tax money. She paid the electric with her cleaning money. She showered and changed and did her lunchtime shift at the pub, so lost in thought that Stewart Pringle rested his hand on her arse for a full thirty seconds before she noticed. She poured his half-pint of best bitter slowly over his shoes.