Some streets
never let you go.

The rain had been on Manchester for three days. By late afternoon Stockport Road shone under the buses, and water ran black from the kerbs. Rick watched it through the taxi window as they passed Longsight market, the shuttered shops and the red-brick terraces he had carried in his head for nine years.

The city had changed where money had reached it. New flats stood behind steel gates. Coffee shops occupied corners where bookmakers once took cash without questions. Then the taxi crossed another junction and nothing had changed at all: the same wet brick, the same overflowing bins, the same men smoking beneath shop awnings and watching every car that slowed.

Rick recognised more than he wanted to.

The newspapers had killed him at Gorton. The police had accepted what the fire left behind, and the men who divided his business had been happy to believe the same story. Rick had spent nine years letting them.

South America had kept him alive. He had arrived there with a bullet beside his spine, and it had given him new names in his telephone and enough patience to understand that coming home angry would only get him buried properly.

The taxi stopped outside the Empire Boxing Club. Its old sign hung crooked above the entrance. One upstairs pane had been replaced with plywood and rust showed through the paint on the shutter.

“This you?” the driver asked.

Rick paid in cash. “For now.”

The awning leaked down the back of his collar while he lit a cigarette. Wet brick, diesel and chip fat drifted across the road. Manchester had never needed perfume.

Inside, the fluorescent tubes hummed above a row of heavy bags. Mould marked one corner of the ceiling. Three lads worked the ring while an old trainer shouted at them to keep their hands up. Nobody paid Rick much attention. The beard, cropped hair and extra weight around his shoulders had done their work.

The office door stood half open.

Tommy Radcliffe sat behind a desk covered in membership forms, unpaid bills and a mug with a broken handle. He was bald now and heavier through the middle. The scar along his jaw had faded to a white seam.

“Tommy.”

The telephone slipped from Tommy's hand and struck the desk.

“Jesus Christ.” He came slowly to his feet. “You're dead.”