"He ain't coming."

"What?" Cheryl is distracted by her reflection. "Bloody wind."

The foyer they're standing in is brightly lit, and the darkness outside has turned the windows into mirrors. She fiddles with the wisps that were blown loose from the arrangement of her hair in the short dash from car to building.

"He ain't coming," her brother repeats.

"Who? Who's not coming?"

"Who d'you think? Should'a been here by now, shouldn't he. He ain't coming. Little..." Little bastard.

"You talking about Ste?"

"Steven. Yeah."

There's only one other person in this room, but Cheryl steers Brendan off into a corner so they won't be overheard. Is he serious?

"For god's sake, Brendan, don't talk daft. Why wouldn't he come?"

"Dunno. Cos... How do I know what goes on in his head, huh? I dunno, maybe he... maybe he's punishing me, you know? Maybe it's revenge, yeah, and all of this, it's been – "

"Punishing you for what? Oh, Bren, what have you done now? You haven't..?"

Brendan looks at her. What – does she think he's hit Steven? Is that what she's thinking?

"I've done nothing, Chez. Jesus."

His tie feels like a noose. He tugs at it but the knot only tightens, so he scrabbles at it with his fingers until it unties, and then he undoes the top two buttons of his white shirt. He twists the tie in both his hands, his knuckles whitening, until Cheryl tuts at him.

"Give it here, for god's sake Bren." He hands it over and she rolls it up and stuffs it into her handbag. "Look, why don't you phone him?"

"And say what?" Fuck it. "Let's go, Chez, I ain't standing here waiting if he's – "

"Look." Cheryl touches Brendan's arm.

The windows light up momentarily in the glare of headlamps as a car turns and pulls up outside.

~ Four months earlier

Brendan

Today I said Steven's name out loud for the first time in months.

My sister doesn't mention him any more. She used to when she first started coming to see me, after they lifted the ban on her visiting – she was the key witness so they made her stay away at first. When she came, she told me Steven had been over to stay with her in Ireland for a couple of weeks after it all happened, just to get away from the memories, I guess, and maybe because he wanted to be with people who knew the truth about what I'd done and what I hadn't. Steven liked it, Cheryl said, over there. I asked her, how was he, though? How was he? And all she said was, he'd been quiet.

Quiet: that's not like him. He can talk the back leg off a donkey, that boy, so when he's quiet, it's... it ain't right.

I used to ask Cheryl, in her visits or over the phone, after she'd given me the craic on her and Nate: I used to ask her, The kids okay? And she'd tell me whatever news she'd got. She keeps in touch with them, see, and Eileen has no choice in the matter, because when I sold my club I put a whole load of money in trust for Declan and Padraig, and made Cheryl and Nate trustees alongside Eileen. So she has to play nice or she'll be outvoted: I know what my ex wife is like with money, how it slips through her fingers, and it's meant for my sons and not for her. It's the one thing I can do for my kids.

Then after I'd asked, The kids okay? I used to ask, Everyone else? And it was code. Cheryl knew it and I knew it: Everyone else was Steven. There was no one else. And back in the early months, maybe the first year or so, Cheryl would have news to tell me from her chats with Steven on the phone. Big news, news I couldn't get my head around. Steven's mum had died, and then a while later, his dad had come out of the woodwork – I started sweating, thinking it was the stepdad who knocked him about when he was a kid, but it wasn't, apparently. Apparently it was his real dad; apparently he was a good guy, but still the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, because there was next to nothing that Steven had told Cheryl about this oh-so-interested-all-of-a-sudden father, and I wondered why the fuck not. And then there was more news, more relatives he had from this long lost daddy, and so instead of being on his own, Steven had a family of half sisters he never knew he had. That was good. It is – it is good, that he's got someone to look out for him now. He got Leah and Lucas back, too; permanent or not, at least he wasn't cut off from them any more.

Seems like I was right about Steven being better off without me.

Then Everyone else? stopped yielding any news; Chez would say, Spoke to Ste, he's doing okay, but then she would go on to the next thing. And then the next time, there was nothing about Steven but straight on to the next thing, and so I guessed. I guessed he had moved on, he'd got himself a boyfriend who meant something to him, and my sister was too scared to tell me. So I've stopped asking, Everyone else? in case I get an answer.

Just because I don't ask any more – just because I never hear his name and never say it either – it doesn't mean he's not in my head every day, because he is. He is the first thought in my head when I wake up in the morning, and I go to sleep thinking about him, and then he is in my dreams.

Today I said his name, though. I said it to Cheryl over the phone just before the call time ran out.

"If you talk to him," I said to her, "You know, if... if you talk to Steven, promise me you won't tell him I'm getting out. Promise me."

There was a pause, and I thought maybe she was going to say she'd already told him – I thought maybe she and Steven had talked about me, said my name to each other – but then she said, "He might hear about it anyway, Bren. What if it's in the papers?"

"It won't be in the papers. He don't read the papers anyways, so."

I remembered him in the mornings when we sat at that two-man table in the flat with our breakfast and our coffee, and I'd be reading the paper and he'd be talking like he was in a competition with the Chester Herald for my attention. If he was a cat, he'd have stalked over and sat his furry backside on the page I was looking at till I gave in and scratched his chin for him. I figured out that the only way I'd get to read it was to read it out to him, you know, the news stories or whatever, and he was interested then. But if it was my turn to do the washing up and I got up from the table and left the paper for him, he never touched it; he never read voluntarily, except to the kids.

The fact is, it wasn't much in the papers in the first place. Some of them sniffed around when it first happened, my solicitor said, when they got the whispers that a serial killer had been caught, but when it turned out there was only one murder, and my guilty plea meant there didn't have to be a trial, they found juicier meat to feed on and left mine alone.

One murder. Yeah.

It took me a few days to decide to fight – a few days when I exercised my right to remain silent, just to give me time to think. I don't know, maybe I was in shock, but for those few days I genuinely considered lying down and taking it. Dying of old age after decades in prison wasn't what I'd had in mind when I made my confession – what I'd had in mind was going out in a hail of bullets like Butch and Sundance – but I knew I deserved it, not for what I'd done to Danny and Mick and Walker and my nana, but for what I'd done to... to other people. In the end, though, I didn't have the balls to face a lifetime inside. Believe me, when you're looking at never seeing the light of day again, if there's any chance you can get away with just one conviction and a fifteen year stretch, you'd have to be a better man than me not to take it. I've changed, sure I have, but I ain't stupid.

Fifteen years: I wouldn't yet be fifty, and he'd –

They tried, the police did, I'll give them that. Questioned me and questioned me, and came back and questioned me some more. They wanted to know why I'd stood on the balcony of Chez Chez and confessed to five killings but then denied all but one of them once they'd got me in custody. I told them it was because I'd wanted them to kill me: that much was true. What I told them was that I reckoned they wouldn't shoot to kill if they thought all I'd done was kill one man; I told them I needed them to think they had a psycho on their hands so they wouldn't take any chances. I told them I'd made it up, that list of the dead, but now that I was facing life not death I was better off telling the truth. The fact was, I had to start lying when I didn't die. Dying is easy, but serving time is hard and by then I was clinging on to the chance of that fifteen year term.

So then it was down to them to try and dig up some evidence without my help, and they got nowhere. They had no more evidence about Danny Houston than they had the first time they pulled me in for his murder two years before, so that was a dead end, so to speak. Then, with Michael, they hadn't even heard his name right when I shouted it out under the noise of the fucking helicopter, and when they eventually remembered that I'd been questioned about a Michael Cornish six months before, I just point blank denied it like I did then. There was no body, no one to point the finger, nothing to say he was even dead, and Joel and his mother wouldn't be begging for justice to be done, because it already had been. I'd done them a favour getting rid of him.

My grandmother's cause of death was certified by a doctor. Lung cancer took her, with a side order of emphysema, and there was a two inch thick file of medical records to back it up. Her wish to be cremated was in her Will in black and white, so the fact that there was no body left to be exhumed wasn't down to me. They had nothing without my confession.

When they found Simon Walker's body I had a few sleepless nights, I'll admit. They worked out he was hit by a train but he must have been carried along by it; he'd rolled down an embankment and didn't get discovered for a week or more, by someone walking a dog. It's always dog walkers that find bodies, seems like. Dog walkers, or people fishing. Anyhow, they couldn't put me together with his death. They knew I had a motive, but there were no forensics. I was worried that they'd find his bike where he'd left it and piece together some CCTV footage of my car chasing it down, but knowing Simon, the bike wouldn't be traceable to him, so maybe I owe him a thank you. Or maybe not: he liked his games, Simon did, and he liked to win them, so it was a long time before I stopped wondering if that USB home movie wasn't the only timebomb he'd planted before he caught his train. I'd be lying if I said I don't still worry about that, when I let myself think about it.

In the end they had to settle for charging me with just the one murder, and I wasn't arguing. I killed Seamus Brady, that's what I told them and that's what they believed. And that's when the procedure kicked in: no trial, no jury, no cross-examination, but an interview with the woman from the parole board who had to write the pre-sentencing report for the judge.

She liked me.

She was meant to be independent – that was her job – and I thought she'd just be after the cold facts, only she was... This Mrs Sharma, she was better than that.

She had the police reports in front of her as well as a statement from my solicitor. My version of events was that I was alone in the club (true) and I'd had a drink or two (true) and my dad came in, and he was drunk (true). And he pulled out a gun (lie) – the gun which the police agreed was the one belonging to Walker, which he'd left behind after he'd held me and my dad hostage two nights before (true). So my dad had put this gun down on the bar (lie) and we'd argued (true) and he'd got aggressive, started mouthing off at me, and I'd held off because he was my dad, so it was him that landed a punch, it was him that got me on the floor (true, true, true, true, true).

Everything else was a lie. That he picked up the gun, started waving it around, and I got to my feet. That I grabbed it off him and I backed away. That he dared me to fire, and he turned his back, and that I must have pulled the trigger because he fell to the floor, and that that's when my sister walked in and saw us: me with the gun in my hand; our father, shot in the back.

The thing about Mrs Sharma was, she wanted to know why. Why didn't me and my dad get along?Why was I stonewalling when I was asked – by the police, by my lawyer, by her in this meeting – what my dad said to me? Why would my dad dare me to shoot him?

"You understand how important this is, Mr Brady?" she asked me. "The judge will look at all the papers we've got here, but so far there's very little offered in mitigation. This is your chance to tell me anything that I should know before I write my report. It's a very unusual thing, for someone to kill their own father but as far as I can see, the prosecution isn't offering any suggestion as to motive here, am I right?"

She looked at the police officer beside her.

"No. I mean yes, you're right." He didn't look happy.

"So if there's anything you can tell me, Mr Brady, that might shed some light, now would be the time."

I didn't do it: there's my mitigation, but I couldn't say that. And I didn't see the point in spewing out a whole load of Poor me, my daddy didn't love me, victim shit: there's a mandatory life sentence for murder, I knew that, so what was it going to get me, telling a bunch of strangers what my dad was to me? You've got to remember, this was a month or so after it happened, and I'd seen no one except the police and my lawyers and prisoners and prison staff. Cheryl was still being kept away, and the last person I'd seen who gave a fuck about me was Steven, and my last sight of him was of his face twisted with the pain I'd given him. So my head was a mess.

"My head was a mess." I didn't mean to say it, because I knew it wasn't an answer – it was an invitation to ask me why.

"You and your father had been through an ordeal – you'd both been held at gunpoint. Your sister and your partner had been kidnapped too, by the same man. Were you offered help after that? Any sort of debriefing from the police at least?" She looked again at the officer, who flicked through his notes.

"No," I said. "Nothing."

"And prior to these events, you'd been accused of actual bodily harm and sexual assault on another man, which – "

"I never did it. I wouldn't – I wouldn't sexually assault someone, okay? I never would, not... Not that. I ain't a..."

I stopped when I saw the way Mrs Sharma was looking at me. It was intently, you know? Like she was curious. Then she looked down at the papers in the file in front of her on the table, and she read for a long time, and when she was done reading and she looked up at me again, I got the feeling she'd worked something out.

"It's in the police notes, Mr Brady. It says those charges were withdrawn at the request of the police, because the alleged victim admitted that he'd accused you falsely – "

"I know, that's what I said, I never would'a done it."

" – under duress. He told the police – it's in the notes – that he was pressurised by Detective Walker into making those allegations against you. Specifically, to accuse you of sexual assault." She looked at my solicitor this time. "What I'm concerned about is that just from a cursory look at the lead-up to this shooting, there are a lot of things that would've had a bearing on Mr Brady's state of mind, and yet I can't see any psychiatric assessment on the file – "

"I ain't crazy, alright?"

"My client refused to speak to a psychiatrist," my solicitor said, and I guess he was remembering, like I was, the terms in which I refused: Fuck off. Fuck that. Fuck you.

"Okay, well, I'm sure you've made Mr Brady aware that these things aren't black and white – that mitigating factors such as his mental health can make the difference between murder and manslaughter."

She didn't look sure at all, and neither was I. The guy was the same half-arsed duty solicitor I'd been given when I was arrested, and maybe I should have hired a better one, but when you're dead set on making up your own mind and ignoring the advice you're getting, it makes no difference if the advice you're ignoring is the dog's bollocks or a pile of crap.

"I'm going down either way, so."

"The outcomes are different though. The sentences. If you were sentenced for manslaughter not murder, you might be back with – " Mrs Sharma paused to check her notes – "Back with your children years earlier. Back with your partner. Look, it's my duty here to make sure the judge has possession of all the facts. I can't write my report on this case without a full psychiatric assessment, and so I'm ordering one. It's in my remit to do that, Mr Brady, and it's in your interest to cooperate. It really is."

She shook my hand before they took me out, like she reckoned I was still a person.

Back with your children years earlier. Back with your partner.

I stopped in the doorway, turned back.

"If you wanna know about my dad and me, ask my sister for the video."

The video. Walker's parting gift. I'd kept quiet about it because I didn't want the whole fucking world to know about me, about that. I'd imagined the cops gathered around a computer screen, watching me describe what my dad did to me, watching my dad deny it then admit it; watching me scream at him; watching me cry. They'd be lapping it up like something juicy in the Sunday paper – and it would be in the papers, wouldn't it? It would be the x-factor that my dull little nightclub murder lacked, something to sex it up and get people reading. And when you're in jail, you can't be weak, and you can't be seen to be weak, or you'll be crushed like a cockroach. If you're seen as a victim you'll become one, simple as.

I'd said it now, though, and there was no going back, and that was when things started turning around. They got the USB from Cheryl, and it was out now, the truth about my dad. Out as far as the criminal justice system, that is, but no further: victims of sexual abuse have their identities protected from being splashed all over the press, even if said victim shoots the perpetrator in the back. Who knew? So the Sunday Sleaze still wouldn't get its story, and it was one less thing for me to be scared of in prison.

They let me watch the video, but I couldn't get through it without throwing up. There it was, him asking me – ordering me – to kill him a couple of days before he died, and me refusing to do it. There I was, a gun pointed at me, not knowing if my life was about to end. There it was, my story of years of abuse, and him admitting in the end that every word I said was true. And once it was all out, I had nothing to lose by talking to the shrink, and once I started I couldn't stop. The whole truth about my childhood spewed out of me, and I didn't have to be careful, not this time, not like when I told Steven and I'd had to edit what I said because I was breaking his heart. This time I left nothing out.

I had to stop myself when it came to talking about the day my father died. I had to stop telling the truth then, and I felt the lies attaching themselves to me like parasites, and I realised for the first time how a lifetime of lying had eaten away at me. I'd got no choice on this one though. I had to protect my sister.

The psychiatrist's report said I had probable post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of sexual abuse in childhood, aggravated by what happened when Walker held me hostage with my dad. Bottom line was, at the time that Seamus was shot, the shrink reckoned the balance of my mind was temporarily disturbed.

Sounds like psychobabble bullshit, don't it? You get well versed in psychobabble when you're on the receiving end of it, believe me. So yeah, it sounds like psychobabble and it sounds like a good excuse.

Funny thing is though, I reckon it was true.

When I changed my plea to guilty of manslaughter due to diminished responsibility, it was touch and go for a while. If the police had got their way and the charge had still been murder, it would have had to go to trial as I wasn't admitting it any more, and god knows what would have happened then. But the wind had changed, and they had to give up.

I got five years for possession of a firearm. I'd said it was Seamus that brought the gun to the club, but it wasn't him that used it, so if it was me that fired it, that was enough to count as possession. Possession is nine tenths of the law, they say, and sometimes it works for you, sometimes it works against you I guess. I still haven't worked out what the other tenth is – must look that up.

For the manslaughter, the judge took on board what the pre-sentence report said, the mitigating circumstances, the diminished responsibility. And the fact that I'd pleaded guilty earned me a third off my sentence, so I ended up with five years for manslaughter, to run concurrently with the five for firearm possession.

Five years. I'd be out in two and a half.

That's why I've said to my sister, Promise me you won't tell him I'm getting out. That's why I've said his name out loud for the first time in months: because it's September now, and I'm getting out, and I don't know what the fuck I'm going to do.