‘But Cliff, murder!’ Crane said. ‘Surely you must have realized it had all got too big to handle?’

‘No one lets Dougie Mahon down,’ he said, the whites of his eyes briefly flaring. ‘Not even if Bobby had put half a pound of Semtex under the town hall.’

‘Did Bobby do it, Cliff?’

‘He swore he hadn’t. Over and over again. Even to his dad, even though he knew Dougie would never have grassed him. Dougie needed to look after his own arse and he’d always thought Donna was getting to be serious trouble anyway. He has a nose for things.’

‘Do you believe Bobby?’

He shook his head despondently. ‘He’d been me best mate since we were kids, but he was a born liar. Got it from Dougie.’

‘Liar, liar, pants on fire. That’s what they used to shout at him in the playground at school,’ Patsy added.

‘Why get involved in giving Dougie an alibi in the first place, Cliff? When you were trying to go straight?’

He shrugged. ‘Old times’ sake. They were good to me when Mam and Dad split up, treated me like one of the family. Whenever they gave Bobby pocket money they’d give me some as well. Everyone knew Dougie shifted bent gear, it didn’t seem no big deal to say I was there that night.’

‘How big was this big one?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Oh, come on, Cliff, there were rumours all over the Willows,’ Patsy said. ‘It was guns, wasn’t it?’

‘Guns?’ This time Crane couldn’t conceal his shock. ‘God, not the IRA! There’s been a ceasefire for years, they’re supposed to be handing them all in.’

Greenwood gave a wry smile. ‘No, not the shamrocks. Antiques. The geezer had a roomful. Dougie set it all up.’

Crane remembered now. A palatial house on the moorland fringe of the metropolitan area. A clean job, the guns carefully lifted and just as carefully disposed of. ‘And Dougie was never in the frame?’

‘He knew he would be if it ever came out he’d not been at home. It was the sort of scam had his dabs on, know what I mean?’

‘So where were you that night, the rest of you?’

‘Two of us went to a pub in Otley where they didn’t know us from Elton John, played darts. Bobby … well, he went off on his own. Said he’d been clubbing in Leeds with some French totty he’d picked up in Bradford the week before.’

‘And the totty’s back over the Channel now and he’s no idea where she lives?’

‘Doesn’t even know her surname. Said they called her Nicole.’

‘Nicole from France. He’s going to have to do better than that. Well done, Cliff. You have my word none of this will put you in it. We’ll leave you in peace now.’

He nodded unhappily. They left him hunched over his pint. He was clearly struggling to come to terms with the breaking of the only rule that counted on the Willows: you never grassed anyone, not ever, whoever they were, whatever they’d done.

They walked out to Crane’s car; he opened the passenger door for her from the outside. She looked confused. Maybe no one had ever done that before. ‘Thanks, Patsy, you’ve been a great help. I’ll drop you at home, yes?’

‘I don’t live there. I stay a lot since Ronnie legged it, but I have my own place. Conway House.’

He’d once made a call at Conway House. It was a largish two storey building on the edge of the Willows. It had been built to a tight budget and had pebbledash walls and a shallow roof. There was a single communal entrance and small flats ran off both sides of end to end corridors. ‘They’re not much,’ she said, as Crane drew up in front, ‘but they’re cheap. We were supposed to be saving for our own place when he took off. Fancy a drink?’

He didn’t, but she spoke in such a flat, resigned tone as if certain he’d refuse, that he said, ‘Thanks, I wouldn’t mind.’

She looked confused again. He followed her across the narrow, paved front yard and inside. The corridor was dimly lit and carpeted in shabby grey rubber-back. The doors were painted a uniform magnolia and identified by screw-on metal numbers. The flat had four little rooms: bath, kitchen, living and bed, and overlooked a poorly tended oval of lawn and half a dozen garages in need of repainting, lit by a single overhead lamp.

‘You have to be here five years to get near one of those,’ she said. ‘Ronnie used to go bananas. He thought more of that broken down Escort than he ever did of me and it had fifty thousand on when he bought the bloody thing.’

He sounded to be a true son of the Willows. But she’d furnished the living room imaginatively in a mail order sort of way, with tab-top curtains in a cheerful check, a plain green carpet, a metal-framed uplighter and ceramic is table lamps. There was a tiny three piece and a small dining table with upholstered chairs. ‘Nice place,’ he said.

She coloured slightly. ‘Glad you like it. Ronnie was all for using things from his mam’s till we could afford a mortgage. I told him you’d have to pay someone to take them to the tip. Do you want G and T, like in the pub?’

‘A small one.’

She went in the galley kitchen. Crane took off his jacket and stood at the window. Poor kid. In Donna’s shadow most of her life and then Ronnie, fonder of an old banger than of her. But Crane knew his own reasons for taking a drink with her couldn’t be looked at too closely. He felt sorry for her but he also needed her input. She’d made a first class job of fixing the meeting with Greenwood, and her inside knowledge of what really went on on the Willows couldn’t be bettered. She was a valuable contact. Story of her life: being used.

He gave a crooked grin. If only she’d ditch the ghastly hairdo and the garish make-up. She was a plain woman and whatever she did with her looks she would never have any of the kind of glamour her sister had been given in spades, at birth. He still felt maturity would bring its own reward. Maybe one day she’d wake up and realize she’d never be able to compete with Donna’s ghost, and she’d look better for being herself. And if that brought her any kind of self-confidence, well that went a lot further than looks anyway.

‘There you go,’ she said, handing him his drink. ‘Glad you didn’t ask for beer. Looks as if Ronnie took it all when he scarpered. Sit down.’

They each sat in an armchair. ‘Were you and Ronnie married?’

She gave a sour grin. ‘A bloke from the Willows? Do me a favour. They all promise to, once you’re in a place of your own. Only problem is, they never seem to hang about that long.’

Crane gave her a sympathetic smile. She at least had those lavender eyes. Decent figure too. Small-breasted and slightly boyish, but it was the sort of figure that stayed where it was when the curvy ones were getting middle-aged and hefty. She sipped her drink.

‘It cuts both ways. If they don’t marry you they can’t take anything when they do a runner. I bought this gear, on the weekly. All he had was that bloody car and I hope he’s living in it.’

‘How do you get to work? Bus?’

‘No, I bought a Fiesta, on the drip, like the furniture. It’s old but it goes. I could just about run to it once I didn’t need to pay for everything, with Ronnie never managing to get his hand in his pocket. I put a lot of overtime in and I’ll always work Sundays.’ The fate of plain girls on the Willows seemed to be that if you could get a man at all he expected to be bought and paid for. Crane’s mobile rang.

‘Geoff here, Frank,’ Anderson said breezily. ‘Just wondered if you’d got any further since we saw Mahon?’

Crane swore silently. He supposed he’d better get used to this, hard as it was for a man like him. ‘Oh hello, Geoff,’ he said evenly. ‘It could be I have made some kind of a breakthrough. I picked up on you asking Mahon where Cliff was. It struck me it might be worth talking to him. I asked Patsy Jackson if she could put me in touch. I’m at Patsy’s place now.’

There was a brief silence. ‘What … made you think he could tell you anything? He was one of those—’