RATHER THAN GO HOME to his empty flat, Rafferty headed to his Ma's house after work. He was still concerned that she had bought some of the stolen electrical items and intended to flog them off in her usual enterprising manner. She had the contacts for buying and selling as she had worked at the local market for a number of years before her retirement and knew all the stallholders, so could easily put herself in the way of stolen goods. She had done so in the past. Rafferty had been unable to cure her of it.
His Ma welcomed him as usual, her face as innocent of under-the-counter entrepreneurialism as a baa lamb. Though, when, as she always did, she offered him food, he felt reluctant to accept, wondering if that, too, was off the back of a lorry.
But Ma had been born with a need to feed
