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was due to go off. Although I had no idea what time it was when I’d crashed, I doubted I’d had more than four or five hours’ fitful sleep.
    ‘Why don’t you go and watch Toy Story for ten minutes,’ I suggested, ‘and then I’ll come and make breakfast?’
    Kate’s big blue eyes widened in almost comical astonishment and glee. ‘I’m not allowed to watch DVDs in the morning,’ she said, as if it were some divine edict. ‘You said it makes me late.’
    ‘I know I did,’ I said, ‘but this is a special treat. If you go now, you can watch it for ten minutes, but then you have to switch it off and get ready for school. Deal?’
    ‘Deal!’ she yelled, loud enough to make my teeth ache. She leaped off the bed and scampered towards the door, a whirling dervish in yellow Little Miss Sunshine pyjamas. At the threshold she skidded to a halt and looked back at me as a sudden idea occurred to her. ‘Can I watch Toy Story 2 instead of Toy Story ?’
    Her round face was so earnest that I had to clear my throat to stop myself from laughing. ‘Course you can.’
    ‘Yay!’ she bellowed, and shot out of the room like a bullet from a gun.
    I flopped on to my back and stared up at the ceiling. There was a brown stain there shaped roughly like the British Isles, probably from some long-ago flood in the bathroom of the top-floor flat. The stain had been painted over, but it had seeped through in speckles and patches, as if the joists and floorboards above were still saturated with damp. Ever since Kate and I had moved in four years ago, the attic had been occupied by a little Jewish woman in her seventies called Mrs Hersh, whose husband was dead and whose four children were scattered all over the globe. Although she looked frail as a bundle of dry sticks, Mrs Hersh was a tough old thing – always out visiting friends, or getting her hair done, or lugging her shopping back from the supermarket on the high road, her feet clomping up and down the wooden staircase. I was dreading a time when the stairs might become too much for her and she’d be forced to move out. I had visions of some new, heftier tenant climbing into a brimming bath, only to come crashing through the ceiling as the spongy floor gave way.
    I wasn’t thinking about that this morning, though. Just as it had the night before, my mind returned to the promise I’d made to Candice. I felt like someone who’d lost a vital set of keys, but couldn’t shake the urge to keep going over and over the same ground in case they’d missed something. I’d been trying to think of an alternative to getting in touch with the person I’d told my daughter would be able to sort out her mess, but even though my mind was working overtime, I knew that nothing else I might come up with would be anywhere near as effective. Just because I’d once – when I was young and stupid – been nicked for armed robbery, which had resulted in a nine-year jail sentence (of which I’d served six years and two months), that didn’t make me a tough guy, or an anti-hero. And neither did it mean I had a string of underworld connections I could call on when I needed a favour.
    I did have one connection, though. Just one. But it was a fucking good one.
    The day before being released from prison I’d been given a phone number, and told to call it if I ever got into trouble or needed a favour. I’d thanked the man who’d given it to me and put the number away in a safe place. But even back then I’d vowed never to use it, never to look back over my shoulder like Lot’s wife, never to open Pandora’s box.
    I’d never thrown the number away, though. Call it superstition, call it hedging my bets, but I’d not only kept the number, I’d made sure I knew exactly where it was at all times. Now, because of that, I felt torn right down the middle. Half of me wished I had thrown the number away, that it wasn’t there to tempt me, whilst the other half saw it as my salvation – or at least