CHERUB: The Fall (17 page)

After going through the desk drawers, Lauren climbed up the ladder to Anna’s bed. A tiny picture caught inside a plastic key fob had been taped to the bedpost. The photograph had water damage around its edges and showed Anna in a photo booth. She looked eight or nine years old and was propped on the leg of a very young-looking mother. On the woman’s other knee was a stern-faced baby, with straight dark hair and a dummy in its mouth.

Lauren had seen an enlargement of the picture amongst the paperwork she’d read on the drive down, but seeing this tiny fragment of Anna’s past still made her feel sad.

She began a careful inspection of Anna’s bed, first holding up the pillows and looking to see if anything had been slipped inside and then working her way around the edges of the mattress. Besides dust, crumbs and a grubby sock, Lauren found a bunch of papers with Anna’s writing on them.

The sheets had been torn from lined exercise books. They had no drawings on them, just neat lists written in Russian with a purple gel-ink pen. Each list started off the same. Point one was always
keep identity secret
, and point two,
work hard in school and learn good English
.

After that the lists diversified. Some lists continued sensibly:

 
(3)
 
Get a well paid job.

 
(4)
 
Find Georgy and bring him to Britain.

 
(5)
 
Start my own business (Hairdressing or Car Dealer).

 
(6)
 
Become rich and buy a nice house.

 
(7)
 
Get married and have a boy and two girls.

While other lists were outpourings of Anna’s wildest fantasies:

 
(3)
 
Go to loads of clubs in London.

 
(4)
 
Make friends with rich and famous people.

 
(5)
 
Marry a hunky football star and move to Barcelona.

 
(6)
 
Find Georgy and buy him a house next to ours in Spain.

 
(7)
 
Start my own airline with my husband’s money.

 
(8)
 
After a difficult start, I become richest woman in the world.

 
(9)
 
Pay men to go back home and kill everyone I hate. Slowly!!!

Some of Anna’s lists were funny, while others made Lauren sad. Lauren had never actually written out lists like this, but she occasionally did something similar when she couldn’t fall asleep, lying in bed and plotting out her future.

Anna’s lists were vague, but they still told Lauren a lot. First of all, the police psychologists suspected that Anna hadn’t spoken about her past because she was traumatised. But the lists made it clear that that she was deliberately keeping her identity a secret. Second, Anna only ever mentioned rescuing Georgy, who Lauren guessed was the toddler in the photograph. This meant that Anna’s mother was either dead, or had no contact with her daughter.

It wasn’t the kind of concrete information that Lauren would need to unearth the traffickers, but she’d made a start.

CHERUB’s training instructors worked from a tatty prefabricated hut outside the basic training compound. James rapped on the metal door.

‘Come in,’ Mr Pike shouted.

The room had threadbare carpet, a few shabby desks and was littered with dirty sportswear and damp towels. The tang of old sweat and body spray hung in the air.

Mr Pike sat at the head of a long table, with his deputies Mr Speaks and Mr Greaves along the sides. James was surprised to see that Mr Greaves had his camouflage trousers rolled up and his feet in a bowl of water.

‘Pull up a pew, James,’ Mr Pike said, as he pointed to an insulated jug in the middle of the table. ‘Coffee?’

James nodded as he sat down. He felt extremely odd seeing the three powerfully built instructors off duty. Normally you only had close encounters with these men when you were terrified or exhausted, yet here they were at the end of a day’s training looking like three middle-aged blokes who just wanted to go home and fall asleep in front of the TV.

As James took a mouthful of his coffee, he noticed that the confidential files of eight red-shirts and three new recruits were spread over the table.

‘There’s a new session of basic training starting in a month’s time,’ Mr Pike explained. ‘This is our preliminary meeting. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate, try and pair them off into evenly balanced partnerships and also finalise the exact nature of the exercises we’ll be taking them on, without overspending on the travel budget.’

James was surprised. ‘I always thought you paired kids off at random.’

‘Quite the opposite,’ Mr Pike said. ‘CHERUB is always short of agents and the powers that be put us under a lot of pressure to get everyone through basic training.’

‘Without lowering our standards,’ Mr Speaks added, as he ran a length of grubby towel between his toes.

‘I want you to take a look at this young fellow,’ Mr Pike said, as he slid one of the folders across the table towards James. ‘You’re pretty confident on the height test obstacle these days aren’t you?’

James nodded. ‘I’ve been over it that many times now, I don’t even think about it.’

‘The little fella in that folder is having some serious problems.’

James flipped the file open and saw a black and white picture of a red-shirt boy who’d turned ten three weeks earlier. His name was Kevin Sumner. James didn’t know him, but he’d seen him around campus.

‘So he’s scared of heights?’ James asked.

‘Terrified,’ Pike nodded, ‘and he hasn’t got a hope of getting through basic training unless he combats his fear. Kev’s a tough young fellow, with a good head on his shoulders, but he went on a rollercoaster when he was seven years old. The emergency brake came on when he was half-way around a three-sixty-degree loop and he spent three hours hanging upside down before the fire brigade got him out. He’s been petrified of heights ever since.’

‘So, you want me to take him through it gently?’

Mr Pike shook his head. ‘We’ve been there, tried that and Kevin’s thrown up all over the T-shirt. I want you to use a different technique. Remember how you learned to swim?’

James would never forget. When he first arrived at CHERUB, he’d been terrified of water and a month of intensive swimming lessons had made no difference. In the end, it took two bullying sixteen-year-olds repeatedly throwing him in the deep end of a swimming pool to combat his fear.

‘You’ll have to be ruthless, James,’ Mr Pike said. ‘Pick one of your mates to help you. You can both take whatever time you need out of lessons and if you can get Kevin to go across that obstacle unassisted, I’ll make sure you get a passing grade in any subject you choose.’

‘You mean I get out of having to do my History coursework?’

‘I can set that up if that’s what you want,’ Mr Pike nodded. ‘But remember, the technique only works if that kid is more frightened of you than he is of plunging off a fifty-metre drop.’

James looked at the photo and wondered if he had the cruel streak necessary to become a CHERUB training instructor. But then again, it was totally worth it if it got him through GCSE History.

*

John Jones was staying at a guest house less than a kilometre away from the Aldrington Care Centre. When Lauren got bored of sitting around waiting for Anna and the other kids to get back from school, she arranged to meet John in a nearby café and told her carer that she was going for a walk.

The café was in the back of a baker’s and the smell of warm bread filled the air as Lauren and John drank mugs of tea and ate doughnuts.

‘I’m starting to wonder if young Anna’s as innocent as she seems,’ John said.

‘Why’s that?’ Lauren asked.

‘Those lists you read show that she’s determined not to reveal her identity. That’s a pretty smart move if you want to stay in England.’

‘How come?’

‘If Anna had revealed her name and told the authorities where she was from, she probably would have been deported back to Russia within a matter of days.’

‘But we know she’s Russian now,’ Lauren said.

John nodded. ‘Yes, but the rules don’t permit the authorities to simply stick a child back on the first plane to Russia. They have to know who she is, where she came from and that someone will look after her when she returns. We’ve checked with the Russian police and nobody has reported Anna missing. If she can keep silent for a year or so, she’ll be settled in Britain. Anna can say that she has friends and wants to stay here. The local authority will launch formal care proceedings, Brighton council will become Anna’s guardian and she’ll be given British citizenship.’

‘That sounds quite manipulative,’ Lauren said. ‘And she’s only eleven or twelve.’

‘But the lists demonstrate that she’s thinking about her future. I suspect that one of the other girls inside that boat had been trafficked before and told Anna how to behave if she was captured.’

Lauren gasped. ‘Trafficked before?’

‘That’s common,’ John explained. ‘Once a girl is captured, the criminal gangs who traffic the girls regard them as their property. Girls caught by the British authorities are usually deported straight back to Russia. With no home and no job, the gangsters frequently pick the girls up on the streets again and send them straight back to Britain.’

‘Doesn’t the government do anything to stop that happening?’

John shook his head. ‘It’s all to do with politics. A large proportion of the general public doesn’t like immigration. The government is more popular if it’s tough on immigration and any system the government puts in place to support these girls will be open to abuse. If they start giving special treatment to women who are forced into prostitution, then thousands of other illegal immigrants will start claiming that they were forced into prostitution.’

‘I guess,’ Lauren said weakly. ‘But how can they send girls home with no protection from the gangsters?’

John shrugged. ‘It’s just one of those horrible situations where there aren’t any easy answers.’

James wasn’t sure if he had what it took to become a training instructor, but he knew that Bruce Norris was the right person to help him. Bruce was fourteen years old and small for his age, but he was an expert in five martial arts and he had a ruthless streak a mile wide.

‘Remember,’ James whispered, as they crept down a dark corridor on the second floor of the junior block. ‘We’ve got to scare him shitless, but we can’t actually hurt him … Not badly anyway.’

‘I know,’ Bruce said. ‘I’m a peaceful person, James. I might have finished fifty or sixty violent brawls, but I’ve
never
started one.’

The two boys wore boots, combat trousers, black jackets and black gloves. The carer who’d let them into the junior block had told them that she didn’t want all the red-shirts woken up by screaming, so they had to take their victim silently.

As they stepped through an open door into the bedroom Kevin Sumner shared with his best friend, James and Bruce pulled furry werewolf masks over their heads.

‘On three,’ James whispered, as he stared down at the peaceful face of a sleeping ten-year-old. ‘One, two … three.’

As James swung his knee across and pinned Kevin to his bed, Bruce pinched his nose. The youngster’s scream was muffled as Bruce crammed a dirty sock into his mouth, but his eyes shot open wide, clearly petrified at being woken up by two wolfmen.

‘Time for walkies, squirt,’ James said, as he picked Kevin out of bed and slung him over his shoulder.

Kevin kicked and screamed into the vile tasting sock as James carried him along the hallway, down four flights of stairs and out into the night air. After a two-hundred-metre jog across muddy ground, James ripped the sock from Kevin’s mouth and dumped him into a deep puddle.

‘On your feet, scum,’ Bruce shouted, as he and James switched on head-mounted LED lamps.

Kevin sobbed as he scrambled up, barefoot and with nothing but a vest and pyjama bottoms to protect him from the cold.

‘Too slow,’ Bruce shouted, as he kicked the back of Kevin’s legs. He crashed face first into the puddle.

‘Get up again,’ James yelled.

‘Quickly this time,’ Bruce added.

Kevin was crying and shivering.

‘Look at the little baby,’ Bruce said nastily, as he pressed his boot down on Kevin’s bare foot.

James closed up behind, so that the shivering boy was sandwiched with the white lights blazing down on his sodden hair.

‘What do you want?’ Kevin asked weakly.

James didn’t answer the question. ‘You’re now the property of the wolfmen,’ he grinned. ‘Mr Pike has told us that you’re a little snot-nosed scaredy-cat. He says you’ll never make it through basic training because you’re afraid of heights and won’t go over the obstacle. Well, until you pull yourself together and stop acting like a pussy, we’re going to make your life a living hell.’

‘If you run away, we’ll catch you,’ Bruce said. ‘If you cry, we’ll laugh. If you even think about taking a swing at us …’

Instead of finishing his sentence, Bruce placed his black gloved hands around Kevin’s neck.

‘Leave me alone,’ Kevin screamed, as Bruce pressed down on his shoulders until his knees buckled.

‘Kiss our boots,’ James said.

‘Get stuffed, queers,’ Kevin shouted defiantly.

Bruce produced a length of nylon rope from his pocket and held it in Kevin’s face. ‘If you don’t start showing me some respect, Mr Sumner, I’m gonna tie this around your ankles, hitch you into the nearest tree and leave you hanging upside down until morning.’

They knew from the file that hanging upside down was Kevin’s worst nightmare.

‘
Noooooo
,’ Kevin squealed, as Bruce grabbed his ankles. ‘I’ll kiss your boots.’

‘Get on with it then,’ James barked. ‘And thank me for it.’