Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Kimberley Chambers 2018
Cover photographs © Traven Milovich/Arcangel Images (warehouse), Stephen Carroll/Arcangel Images (figure)
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Kimberley Chambers asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008144739
Ebook Edition © January 2018 ISBN: 9780008326418
Version: 2018-08-15
In memory of my dear friend Ronnie’s son
Lee John Richardson
1974–2008
‘We are all in the gutter, But some of us are looking at the stars’
Oscar Wilde
Contents
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Part Two
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Part Three
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Part Four
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Kimberley Chambers
I was thirteen the first time I ever got arrested and can remember it as though it were yesterday. I was driving a stolen Ford Escort MK 2, my feet barely able to touch the pedals, yet I’d still been able to handle that car like a man.
Cigarettes, I’d been caught with. Illegal ones that’d been brought into the country from Belgium via France. Yet no matter how hard the Old Bill interrogated me, I never admitted to where I’d really got those fags from.
‘One of life’s losers, that’s what you are. You’ll never amount to nothing, you stupid little bastard,’ my mother bellowed when the Old Bill brought me home.