Chapter Seventeen
‘There’s no need for you all to have been arguing at all,’ Ma told them on the Tuesday, after Eric Chambers and Alice Pickford were charged. ‘I’ve bought myself a present.’
Aghast, Rafferty stared at his Ma. His heart sprang upwards in his chest, and then did a triple salchow on its way down. They were gathered on the eve of his father’s birth and death day for a celebratory meal at Ma’s home. There had been drink taken, and under its influence, Katy had confided that they had clubbed together to buy her a present. Now his Ma said she had bought her own present. Not another purchase of the questionably legal kind? An even pricier one this time. A gold bar? Fifty gold bars? Acting as the fence on a heist on Fort Knox?
But before his imagination could fly off to the stra
