'Remember this, Mags, little Jimmy was my son. I know that and you know that.'

She smiled sadly, 'I know that better than anyone, Jimmy.'

'He tried to break us, but he won't, mate, he weren't worth a wank, and neither is anything he ever said.'

She squeezed him to her then, knowing he had killed the person he had once loved more than anyone else in the world.

She only wished now she had let this all come out years ago. Her silence had ruined everyone's lives in the end, yet all she had ever wanted was to keep the peace, to protect everyone she loved from a man who she hoped was burning in hell at last.

Jackie was looking down on the body of her husband, and she was without tears. She had insisted on seeing him, even though she had been warned that he was not in a fit state to be seen, that he had serious head and neck injuries, and she would be well advised to let her father identify his body, so she could remember him how he was.

She had been on the verge of outright laughter, as the only thought that popped into her head was of her saying to these nice people, 'What, you mean, dirty, scruffy, drunk and drugged, and with a fucking bird on his arm?'

But she had not said it, she was aware she was getting the sympathy vote, and she was not about to fuck that up for herself. Her father was being lovely, and she wasn't going to do anything to upset him or anyone else for that matter.

But her first glance at Freddie's body had not sent her into convulsions or tears, as she had thought it would, it had just sobered her up. Now, as she looked at him and the obscene wounds that had been inflicted on him, she felt nothing but an odd calmness.

Looking down at him, knowing, seeing for herself, that he really was dead, she felt a weird elation washing over her. It was as if everything in her life had been careering at full speed towards this moment in time.

She felt the strangest feeling, as if she had won something.

She had known instinctively, from the first time she had kissed him, that she would one day have to look at his dead body. His temper would be his downfall, and his luck would eventually run out.

She had always assumed that he would pick on the wrong person one day, and either find himself up against someone with a will, and a temper much stronger than his, or someone with a huge fear of him and a sawn-off shotgun in their hand.

She had never in her wildest imagination dreamed that that person would be Jimmy.

She had also believed, that when it finally happened, and Freddie was gone from her, she would be destroyed. But she wasn't. In fact she was surprised with herself, because all she felt looking at his lifeless corpse, was a deep and abiding sense of euphoria.

She felt free.

She had always said to friends that it would be easier for her if Freddie died, rather than if he left her for someone else. She always joked that she could cope with that, with not being with him as long as no one else was.

While he was alive, and breathing, she could not bear the thought of him with anyone but her. Yet now he was gone, and his shagging days were over, she was almost happy inside, because he had died her husband, and that meant she was now his widow. All the women he had pursued over the years and all the girls he had given kids to were nothing to her now, because Freddie was gone, and he had gone while she was still his legal, his wife. Now she would never again have to worry about him, or where he was, or even wonder what he was doing.

All this business with Maggie could be conveniently forgotten, and her mother and father would have to allow her back into the fold. She would watch her P's and Q's, and make herself likable. She was no good on her own and she was going to need her family, and Maggie especially, as she had plenty of dosh as well as a very forgiving nature.

These were wonderful thoughts, and she was enjoying them.

Freddie would have left her eventually, she had always known that, and her life had been blighted because she had wondered, every day, if that was the day he would meet the love of his life.

And it would have happened in the end. He would have hit an age where he needed to prove himself, needed a young bird on his arm to make him feel young once more. He would have met one, the usual blaggers' bird, a tanned no neck with a council flat, who would be only too willing to play him, because he needed her youthful adoration and she had a killer body and a desperate need for the criminal limelight. Freddie would have succumbed to one of them in the end. All women in her position knew that.

She had been his bird once, many years ago, but four kids and Freddie Jackson as a husband had aged her before her time. Even if she had kept herself nice, had all the treatments, fought off age with a fucking hatchet, youth always won in their world.

It was what she had dreaded more than anything else. Without Freddie she was nothing, but as his widow, she would still have the honour of his name and the respect due to her because of his reputation.

Over the years she had socialised with sixty-year-old men who had children younger than their grandchildren and wives younger than their daughters. She had also observed many of the first wives as they were pushed aside like an old crisp packet. These were the women who had borne their husbands' children, visited them in prisons all over the country, who had loyally lied to the police and in some cases under oath for their men, and been happy to do it. Then suddenly, some little bird enters the frame, thin, with a fake tan, no stretchmarks, a Gossard bra and the conversation of a retarded orang-utan, and she was now the new significant other in his life.

Overnight, it was as if the first wife, the one who had struggled to keep things going when times were hard, and the kids were small, the one who had borrowed money off her family when things were tough and spent her youth defending her husband to everyone who told her he was a waster, and who should now be enjoying the benefit of her husband's hard graft, was dumped unceremoniously and it was suddenly as if she had never existed.

The older children either accepted the new bird because she was a permanent fixture now, not a quick booty call (those girls knew their place and had the sense to ignore the man when he was out with family), or they ended up not talking to their fathers, and by taking their mother's side they then put themselves up for a life of hurt and betrayal.

It was awful seeing the look in the women's eyes when you met them out shopping, or at their children's weddings. You could see the bewilderment and the pain and, worst of all, you could see the way people treated them now they had been discarded. They were barely tolerated. She had witnessed first-hand the humiliation on their faces if the husband was there with the new wife, who Jackie had noticed nearly always got drunk and caused a scene because even the woman he had left for them was seen as a threat.

She had been pleased to see that once the girl had got the man off the wife, she then had to live with the knowledge that it could easily happen to her too, and she did not have the benefit of the years together that the first wife did.

The pain in the women's faces as they watched the men they still loved with their new and improved models had always been painfully evident to Jackie, no matter how brave a face they put on it. These women, like her, eventually realised that they had devoted their lives to, and showered all their love on, a man who had no concept of what they had gone through over the years, and who felt no actual guilt for casually smashing their lives to pieces.

That had terrified her for years, the prospect of Freddie discarding her with about as much care and attention as he would a cigarette butt, or a used Durex.