THE AREA IN HARMSWORTH where Joey Briggs had lived had loser written all over it. They found his flat down a street that had cars up on bricks, vicious looking dogs roaming free, and pensioners who felt it wiser to walk more swiftly than their arthritis would find comfortable. They saw an elderly woman walking quickly along the street with a shopping trolley. Rafferty turned away.
‘God, what a dump. How can people live like this?’
Rafferty rang the bell of the house in which Briggs had once shared the top floor flat with his wife. There were lots of graffiti decorating the lower half of the building; whoever had penned it hadn’t thought a lot of their late tenant, because in bold black letters that had out-lasted that late tenant, it proclaimed that, ‘Joey Briggs is a no good tosser’. Wh
