They would have the best that could be offered to them, the best that could be bought. Not like this place. This place was concrete hate. It was what was wrong with the world they lived in, and the worst of it all was, in her own way, she loved it. It was all she knew. Yet it was everything she wanted to get away from.

She and Jimmy had already bought a house to live in, and she would only ever come back here to visit. It was a small, semi-detached place in Leytonstone. It had a lounge diner, it was decorated in browns and creams, and it was beautiful to her. It was also a bus ride away from her family, which was eventually the deciding factor.

She leaped off the bed. It was six a.m. and she felt as if she was a newborn, as if the world was waiting for her to become a whole person.

She was eighteen in three weeks. Before then she would be a married woman, and she would be the happiest girl alive.

Jimmy saw the girl beside him and groaned.

The night before was a complete blank, and he knew that was how this was meant to be. He had been drinking brandy and port, a lethal combination, and he felt as if someone had hit him over the head with a billiard ball in a sock. Even that scenario was not too off the wall, given the company he kept most nights.

The girl was young, he could see that much, and she was also snoring, which had woken him up. She sounded like one of the seven dwarfs and he grinned to himself. Trust him to end up with fucking Sleepy. Yet he knew if she woke and tried to strike up a conversation he would then have to change her name to Dopey.

He sat up and sighed. He felt terrible. His clothes were nowhere to be seen and the window was shut tightly, which was why the smell of sex was so overpowering in the tiny room.

He had woken up with a tom, and at a glance he couldn't see any condoms anywhere. He could be clapped up to the eyebrows on his wedding day, and no one would think it was funny other than Freddie.

He got out of bed and stepped gingerly on to the carpet. It had the tacky feel of a tom's carpet. Covered in everything that was disgusting, it had the stickiness of what was commonly known as crud, and it smelt of cigarettes and punters.

He felt as if twenty Paddies with hammers were knocking holes in his skull. It was only after he had spent five minutes trying to open the window that he realised it had been nailed shut.

He groaned. It followed that the door would be nailed shut as well. The heating in the house was full on, which accounted for the heat and the smell, and he would lay his next paycheque on Freddie already being home and dry and laughing his head off at the predicament he was now in.

This was Freddie's idea of a joke.

If it had happened to anyone but him Jimmy would have been the first person guffawing. As it was he couldn't just see the funny side. That Freddie had done it to him made him feel as always where Freddie was concerned – that there was an underlying nastiness behind it.

His only glimmer of hope was a used condom glistening in a green glass ashtray. He breathed a sigh of relief and then tried to escape.

Patricia had been woken at five thirty, by a phone call from one of her girls.

She walked into the house in Bayswater all sheepskin coat and Chloe perfume. The elder, a girl of thirty-five with a bad tit job and crooked teeth, was panicking, and Patricia had to talk her down for twenty minutes before she could ring round and locate Freddie.

She then walked into the bedroom of a black girl called Bernice. The girl was nineteen, looked thirty, and was one of the best earners they had ever had. Unfortunately, one of her regulars, a managing director of a multinational company, had chosen her bed to have a heart attack in an hour earlier. It was put down to amyl nitrate and Patricia thought that this was probably an accurate diagnosis.

He was over fifty, overweight and overdue a medical.

Bernice was calm, for which Patricia would be eternally grateful, and the other girls were keeping a low profile.

This had happened before and so they had a protocol.

She covered the man with a bright green sheet, and, pouring herself a coffee, she waited for Freddie and Jimmy to come and sort it all out with the minimum of fuss.

Freddie Senior was lying in the bed staring at the ceiling.

It was eight months since the attack and he had been out just once. That was only to have the stitches out. Now his wife was expecting him to go to young Jimmy's wedding, and he had no intention of going anywhere near the place.

Every time he tried to leave the house he felt hot air rushing to his head, he felt physically sick and he knew that if he stepped outside the door he would faint. He looked at his suit hanging on the back of the bedroom door and felt the familiar waves of nausea washing over him.

Maddie had great hopes for this wedding. She assumed he would go and everything would automatically be back to normal. Women were complete cunts when it suited them. She had caused all this and she was now trying to make out like it was nothing, that his son had only committed a misdemeanour. That it could all be put behind them.

He had been broken in the most public way possible and there was no way he could ever get even with the perpetrator. He fantasised about killing his son, but he knew he would never actually do it.

He could hear the familiar sounds of his wife in the kitchen. She didn't sleep either these days. He heard the kettle boiling, the cups rattling and, closing his eyes, he wished the biggest heart attack ever experienced on his wife of thirty-five years.

Anything, to get him out of this day.

Joseph Summers was over the moon, and even though his wife had stopped him having his first celebratory drink of the day the moment he had opened his eyes, he was still happy at the turn of events.

His daughter was about to marry the man of his dreams. The fact he was also the man of her dreams was just the icing on the cake. He would never have to do a day's collar again in his life, and no one could say a word. He was set, settled and he was about to begin a whole new way of life.

If only his other daughter had had the sense to marry a man like Jimmy instead of that useless prick she had settled for, how happy life would be. But he was shrewd and he knew that little Jimmy was one day going to be big Jimmy, and it was that day he would dream of until it came to pass. He had wanted to take Freddie out so many times, but he knew he would never have the guts. But if life had anything left to offer him, then it would be that he lived long enough to bury the bully his elder daughter had tied herself to.

His younger daughter brought him in a cup of tea and he smiled at her like a man who had won the pools and then found out his son-in-law had died.

Happy could not even begin to describe it.

This was the new order and it was not before time.

Freddie and Jimmy were tired, but they had to finish what they were doing. It was imperative that they made sure their tracks were covered.

As they carried the man out of the house they started laughing. Jimmy knew it wasn't funny, but Freddie's eyes as he looked at the inert form between them had made him crack up.

'When I saw he was dead it shit me right up. At least it got me out of that fucking room, though!'

Freddie laughed again. 'He's fucking dead all right. But what made me start laughing just now was remembering your face when I finally opened the bedroom door. You did not even hear us nailing it shut, you mad bastard.'

Jimmy grinned. 'Thanks to you I was out of me fucking box!'

'Too right.'