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    ‘My shout then,’ Resnick said.
    ‘Shippos all round in that case,’ said the man to Waites’ left. ‘Skint, us, you know. Out on strike. Or maybe you’d not heard?’
    ‘Fair enough,’ Resnick said.
    One of the miners spat on the floor and walked away. The others stood their ground. Some banter, not all ill-humoured, and after another round bought and paid for, Waites and Resnick moved to a table in the corner, all eyes watching.
    ‘It’ll not work, tha’ knows.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘You and me, heads together. Makin’ it look like I’m in your pocket. Some kind of blackleg bloody informer, pallin’ up with a copper. That what this is about? Me losing face? ’Cause if it is, your money’s gone to waste an’ no mistake.’
    Resnick shook his head. ‘It’s not that.’
    ‘What then?’
    ‘More a word of warning.’
    ‘Warning!’ Waites bristled. ‘You’ve got the brazen balls …’
    ‘The way things are going, more and more lads coming down from South Yorkshire, swelling your picket line …’
    ‘Exercising their democratic right …’
    ‘To what? Put bricks through folks’ windows? Set cars alight?’
    ‘That’s not happened here.’
    ‘No, maybe not yet. But it will.’
    ‘Not while I’ve a say in things.’
    ‘Listen.’ Resnick put a hand on Waites’ arm. ‘Things escalate any more, pickets going from pithead to pithead mob-handed, what d’you think’s going to happen? Think they’re going to leave all that for us to deal with on our own? Local? Reinforcements enough from outside already and either you back off some or they’ll be shipping ’em in from all over. Devon and Cornwall. Hampshire. The Met.’ He shook his head. ‘The Met coming in, swinging a big stick – that what you want?’
    Waites fixed him with a stare. ‘It’s one thing to walk in here, show your face – that I can bloody respect. But to come in here and start making threats …’
    ‘No threat, Peter. Just the way things are.’
    Light for a big man, Resnick was quick to his feet. Waites picked up his empty glass, turned it over and set it back down hard.
    As Resnick walked to the door the curses fell upon him like rain.
    The church interior was chilly and cold: distempered walls, threadbare hassocks and polished pews; a Christ figure above the altar with sinewed limbs, a crimped face and vacant, staring eyes. ‘Abide with Me’. The vicar’s words, extolling a man who had loved his community more than most, a husband and a father, fell hollow nonetheless. A niece, got up in her Sunday best, read, voice faltering into silence, a poem she had written at school. The former miner who’d ridden with Resnick in the car remembered himself and Peter Waites starting work the same day at the pit, callow and daft the pair of them, waiting for the cage to funnel them down into the dark.
    Resnick had imagined Jack Waites would bring himself to speak but instead he remained resolutely seated, head down. With some shuffling of feet, the congregation stood to sing the final hymn and the pall-bearers moved into position.
    As they stepped outside, following the coffin out into the air, it was the dead man’s voice Resnick heard, an evening when they’d sat in his local, not so many years before, Waites snapping the filter from the end of his cigarette before stubbornly lighting up.
    ‘Lungs buggered enough already, Charlie. This’ll not make ha’porth of difference, no matter what anyone says. Besides, long as I live long enough to see the last of that bloody woman and dance on her grave, I don’t give a toss.’
    That bloody woman: Margaret Thatcher. The one person, in Peter Waites’ eyes, most responsible for bringing the miners down. After the strike had been broken, he could never bring himself to say her name. Not even when he raised a glass in her hated memory the day she died.
    ‘Says it all, eh, Charlie? Dead in her bed in the fuckin’ Ritz.’
    Resnick’s feet, following the coffin,