Lone Wolf (18 page)

35. GEARS

The girls watched
Warm Bodies
on Ning’s MacBook and switched out the light just after eleven. An hour later, Fay lay on a floor softened with cushions and beanbags. It wasn’t particularly comfortable, but at least she couldn’t hear rats scuttling about like on the allotment.

Ning had a foot dangling over the side of her bed, and made a gentle whistle with each breath. Fay kept one eye on Ning as she sat up and began feeling for her things in near darkness. She slid on a T-shirt and jeans, but could only find one balled-up sock so she gave up and pulled her All Stars over bare feet.

After checking that her wallet and keys were in her pockets, Fay unplugged her phone from its charger and began creeping out. It was warm, so the door was ajar, but the hinge still squealed and Fay was relieved when she glanced back and heard Ning’s familiar whistle.

At this time in the morning, Nebraska House’s main door was locked and could only be opened by a button in the staff room. Fay crossed a hallway, entered a room that she knew was unoccupied and unlatched the window.

They were on the ground floor, but this side of the building was raised up, so Fay jumped off the window ledge and dropped a metre and a half on to woodchips. There were CCTV cameras, but Fay knew nobody watched them full time. She made a dash, before stepping on to a low wall and swinging her legs over a mesh fence.

Fay mixed doubt, excitement and the odd yawn as she walked briskly towards Kentish Town underground. She arrived twelve minutes later, finding metal grilles over the station entrance and a sign inside saying that the last train had now departed.

Feeling slightly dumb, Fay headed to a bus stop to work out which night bus would take her to Totteridge. The map at the stop only showed the local area, so she resorted to her phone and worked out a two-bus combo that would take her north to the allotment.

*

Ryan had spent his Friday night belly down on the flat roof of a day-care centre. The spot gave him a view over the ground-floor apartment where Ash lived with his mum and brother. Ash had been visited by a hot Year Eleven girl, and Ryan felt jealous as the pair spent an hour behind closed curtains.

The girl left just after 9 p.m. Twenty minutes later an elderly BMW coupé came by and blasted its horn. Ash and his ten-year-old brother got in the back carrying overnight bags, and Ryan figured that the man had to be their dad.

Once the boys had left, Ryan looked into the living-room. Their mum sat in a big armchair, surfing with an iPad and watching TV, with the window wide open and curtains billowing on a night breeze. Ryan willed her to go out or go to bed, but three hours ticked by, during which the scratchy roof felt dimpled his skin and he twice had to crawl behind an air conditioner and take a piss.

It was half midnight when Ash’s mum closed the window and switched off the TV. Ryan couldn’t see the windows out back, but he gave it forty minutes, by which time he felt fairly certain she’d be asleep.

Ryan would have preferred an empty house, but all things considered Ash and his brother spending the night with their dad wasn’t a bad result. He stifled a yawn as he crossed the street. There were two drunk couples walking arm in arm, so Ryan diverted around the block and headed back to Ash’s flat when the street looked empty.

His aim had been to get in through the front door, but Ryan was disappointed to find a good-quality mortise lock, and grilles that would stop him getting in if he broke the glass. A frosted bathroom window had been left open, but he’d have had to be a lot skinnier to crawl in through there.

This left the large living-room window as his best option. Ryan put on a pair of gardening gloves and gave the white plastic frame a shove, but a sturdy catch stopped it moving. He tapped delicately on the pane and the tinny sound left Ryan reasonably confident that the glass wasn’t toughened.

After a furtive glance up and down the street, Ryan took a roll of sticky-backed film from his backpack. It was a fiddle getting the backing off in the dark. The adhesive was really strong and he would have had a fight if he’d needed to reposition it. Once the square was in place, Ryan grabbed a strange-looking device which comprised a suction cup about the diameter of a coffee mug, attached by tube to a miniature version of a bicycle pump.

Placing the sucker against the glass, he worked the pump. The sucker was actually split into two parts, with suction on one side and pressure on the other. When the difference between pressure and suction grew high enough, the glass would crack in a straight line between the two halves.

There was a satisfying click as the pane cracked. Ryan turned a valve to release some of the suction, then he pushed the suction disk upwards, drawing a neat line of cracked glass behind it. He made a rectangle just inside the edge of the plastic film, then moved the suction cup to its centre.

The film was too strong to simply pull away, so Ryan sliced around the cracked glass with a craft knife, while keeping his left hand on the suction cup. When he’d cut three sides of the plastic, the glass swung outwards like an uneven door, with the strong plastic acting as a hinge and stopping it from hitting the ground.

‘Not too shabby,’ Ryan muttered to himself.

The sucker was an expensive piece of kit, so Ryan returned it to his backpack before reaching through the glass and releasing the catch. After he’d pushed up the window, his Nike got in a tangle with the curtains before he landed on the living-room floor with his leading leg slotted awkwardly between a mirror-topped table and an overstuffed magazine rack.

Ryan moved towards the living-room door, then leaned into a hallway. The door and hallway were wider than you’d expect and Ryan figured that the place had originally been built for someone with a disability.

The flat’s layout was confusing, but there were reassuring snores coming through an open bedroom door. There were three other doors off the hallway, but Ryan’s nose guided him through another door into a space whose smell reminded him of some of the grungier kids’ rooms on CHERUB campus.

There were bunk beds, and judging by the superhero posters behind the top bunk and
FHM
pin-ups below, Ash slept on the lower bunk. Ryan took a torch out of his pocket. The first thing it lit was a line of Lego sets built along one wall. Ryan recognised Ash’s school blazer, and his PE kit balled and stinking in a carrier bag.

Ash had celebrated the end of term by lobbing a bunch of tatty pens and school books in the bin, but there was no sign of his backpack. Ryan knelt down and started shining the torch about. There was nothing on the desk or chairs, so he knelt down and started looking under the furniture.

Ash’s school bag was under the bed, amidst shoes and sweet wrappers. But it felt light when Ryan pulled it out and the only things inside were two textbooks and a geometry set. Ryan knocked a few shoes out of the way and smiled when he saw what he was looking for.

Ash had pushed the clingfilm-wrapped package deep under his bed. Ryan crawled in until his shoulder got wedged between carpet and bed frame, but even at full stretch he could only get his fingertips to the edge of the package.

Ryan backed out and grabbed a couple of rulers off the desktop. He used the rulers like chopsticks, getting behind the package and flicking it forwards. He almost had it in his grasp when he heard a gentle sound on the carpet, and noticed a shift in the light.

‘MUM,’ a girl shouted urgently.

Clutching the package with one hand, Ryan pushed himself out from under the bed as he saw the spokes of a wheelchair coming towards him.

‘There’s a burglar in the boys’ room,’ the girl shouted.

Ryan was furious with himself. How could he have watched the flat all evening and not seen that Ash had a wheelchair-bound sister?

As he tried to get out from under the covers, the front wheels of the wheelchair hit Ryan’s legs, pinning them to a bedside cabinet. As he bucked and twisted, the girl raised a metal crutch up above her head and sank the rubber tip into Ryan’s stomach.

He moaned in pain, as he managed to twist around enough to get a proper look at the girl. She was only about twelve, but while her legs ended at the knee, her upper body was well muscled from playing sport.

Ryan braced his legs against the bedside cabinet as he took another whack from the crutch. He was trying to push the wheelchair back, but the brake was on and he only got free by hooking his foot inside the cabinet and violently kicking it over.

As Ash’s mum came into the room, Ryan had got all of his limbs free, but was still cornered by the wheelchair.

‘Sophia, be careful, he could have a knife,’ Ash’s mum warned.

But Ryan was on the wrong end of the crutch twice more before her mother wheeled a reluctant Sophia out of the way.

‘Go call the cops, sweetie. I’ll take charge of him.’

Ash’s mum grabbed the crutch off her daughter and held it up high over Ryan as he sat up.

‘You move a muscle and I’ll knock you for six,’ she warned.

Out in the hallway, Sophia was talking to the 999 operator. Her mother was a bulky lady, and Ryan hoped that would make her slow as he sprang up and scrambled on to Ash’s bunk. As he’d hoped, the swinging crutch hit the bed rather than him.

As a clonk rang through the metal bed frame, Ryan crawled up to the end of the bed. He threw a couple of pillows back at the woman and clutched the package to his chest with one hand as he slid off the end of the bed and stumbled out into the hallway.

Ryan went for the front door, but grabbing the handle didn’t help because it had been deadlocked. Sophia dropped the cordless phone in her lap and wheeled fearlessly towards Ryan. The chair’s front wheel skinned Ryan’s ankle, but the twelve-year-old made a much less formidable opponent without the crutch and Ryan managed to squeeze past and charge for the living-room.

Ryan ducked as Ash’s mum swung the crutch, but it caught the back of his leg, knocking him off balance and sending him stumbling towards a couch. The big woman swung again, but Ryan rolled across the couch as the crutch hit the sofa cushions with a
whump
that could have knocked him cold.

‘The cops are two minutes away,’ Sophia shouted from the hall.

Ryan’s leg buckled as he stumbled forward and somehow launched himself through the open window, going out the way he’d come in. Much to his own surprise, Ryan realised that he still had the package as he stumbled across a little patio and stepped over a low wall and on to the street.

At the same time, Sophia had got the front door open and began wheeling herself speedily towards the front gate. Ryan was hobbling, and Sophia was gaining on him as he set off down the street. He was relieved when Sophia’s mother yelled from the doorstep.

‘Sweetie, it’s not worth the risk. You get back here
right
now.’

Sophia looked dejected as she stopped pushing her chair and freewheeled to a gradual halt. Ryan felt relieved for about ten seconds, but just as he’d slowed down to a more comfortable jog his ears picked up the wail of police sirens.

36. DRIVE

Fay was a fast learner. She’d studied Ning and watched a bunch of YouTube videos about learning to drive, but getting the balance of clutch and accelerator pedals right was way harder than she’d imagined.

Frustration had whipped Fay into a fury when she finally got the right amount of pressure on the gas pedal and let the clutch up gently enough not to stall the engine. The van juddered, before setting off on the rutted gravel path between allotments.

As the engine raced, Fay pushed the clutch down and went for second gear. She hadn’t got a feel for the gearbox and by the time she’d found second, a bump had knocked the van off course and she was heading towards a greenhouse.

She slammed the brake, but had yet to work out that the engine would stall if you didn’t press the clutch pedal before stopping. The van came to a clattering halt, with a front wheel that had carved a rut through a line of cauliflowers.

‘Shit!’ Fay cursed.

An hour later she was doing better. Tyres crunched gravel as Fay switched deftly from second to third and corrected her steering when a bump threw her off course. The main paths through the allotment formed an uneven rectangle and she slowed for a tight corner, dipped the clutch and dropped back to second before accelerating away.

A bump she’d not previously encountered gave Fay a little jolt, but she smiled as she accelerated to twenty miles an hour and confidently selected third gear.

Two hours of intense concentration left Fay numb and groggy. She parked up by the shed, found a can of Red Bull inside and sucked it down as she squatted on her mattress playing with the maps app on her phone.

It was four miles from the allotments to an address in Finchley. Hagar tried to keep his living arrangements secret, but Fay had met a guy on the street who’d put her in touch with a heroin addict who claimed that she’d babysat Hagar’s sons. Fay had paid three hundred pounds for the address, and knew she hadn’t been ripped off, because Google Street View showed a black Mercedes she’d seen Craig driving parked out front.

Fay hadn’t wanted anyone to see her practising with the van, so she put the headlights on for the first time as she stopped at the allotment’s main gate, directly opposite the vast mound of three-pound-a-sack manure.

She had a key for the lock on the gate, but it had been in the shed for so long it had rusted badly and Fay had to fight to undo the lock and get the gate open. Once the van was on the outside, Fay closed the gate and felt queasy with nerves as she got back behind the wheel and pulled out on to the road.

She got into second gear OK, but then she accidentally selected first instead of third, making the engine race and the van lurch. A BMW coming up behind blasted its horn as the driver swung into the opposite carriageway.

The sat-nav spoke:
‘Three hundred metres, straight ahead at roundabout, second exit.’

Fay didn’t like the idea of a roundabout, and she stopped at a red light, directly behind the BMW that had sped past a minute earlier. Two more cars rolled up behind and Fay was alarmed to find that the van started rolling backwards when she took her foot off the brake.

An alarmed driver behind blasted his horn as the van almost rolled back into him. Fay frantically braked, which stalled the engine, and she got moving just as the light went back to red. She didn’t like the idea of starting on the hill again, so she jumped the light and clipped the middle of the roundabout before taking the second exit.

The rest of the journey was a similar mixture of anxious driving and near misses, but somehow she made four miles without crashing or getting stopped by the cops. Hagar’s road sloped steeply downwards and Fay had to keep squeezing the brake as the van skimmed past, clearing the cars parked on either side by less than thirty centimetres.

‘You have reached your destination.’

Fay sighed with relief as she stopped the van in front of number fifty-seven. Hagar’s house was a grand Edwardian job, built in honey-coloured Bath stone with massive sash windows. The left side had a modern extension. This mirror-glass box rose two storeys, with a steeply sloped driveway leading down to a quadruple garage at its base.

There was no way of knowing who was home, but it was likely Hagar had a permanent security guard, so Fay moved quickly. After turning out the headlights, Fay walked around the van and opened the sliding side door.

The black bags of marijuana plants gave off a pungent smell as she reached inside and grabbed a metal can filled with petrol. After unscrewing the cap, Fay sploshed petrol about until all the bags were coated.

She gasped for air as she stepped back into the street and left the sliding door open as she got behind the wheel for one last ride. After picking up her phone, which she’d been using for navigation, from the passenger seat, and patting a denim pocket to locate a letter and a lighter, Fay let out the handbrake and started the engine.

The road’s natural slope meant the van sped rapidly as it turned into Hagar’s driveway. Fay lined up the vehicle at the top of the ramp, which led down a steep slope towards two broad garage doors. Leaving the engine running and the handbrake off, Fay lit a piece of rag stuffed into a petrol-filled Coke bottle as she jumped out of the cab.

The van picked up speed as Fay ran around the side. Once she was a few metres clear, she lobbed the petrol bomb through the van’s open side and ducked instinctively. After a few anticlimactic seconds, a huge ball of fire erupted inside the van with enough force to throw open the back doors.

Fay wasn’t happy to see the van veering slightly off course, but there was nothing she could do to correct it. As the freewheeling vehicle gathered speed, she crouched low and posted a letter through the front door. It contained a single sheet of paper with the words:

Get out of the Marijuana business.
Going for your cars is a final warning.
Next time, it’ll be your kids.

Fay began a brisk walk out of the driveway, but couldn’t resist looking back to see the van hitting the garage. It had veered off course more than she would have liked, but although the van smashed into the brick post between the two big garage doors – rather than punching through a metal door like she’d planned – it actually had enough momentum to smash through the bricks.

The garage doors squealed and crumpled as the van tore through. Flames lit up the garage interior and Fay briefly glimpsed the silhouette of an expensive-looking sports car. Over in the house, two dogs started barking and a light came on.

Fay cracked a wary smile as she swivelled on the balls of her feet and set off down the hill at full pelt.

*

The cops got to Ash’s house three minutes after Ryan had scrambled out of the window. Luckily he’d been able to limp off into a housing estate full of alleys and elevated walkways and the cops showed no appetite to try and find him.

Ryan’s guts ached where he’d been jabbed with the crutch and the heel of his right sock was soaked in blood. He got a night bus home and James dabbled with the idea of sending him to hospital to see if he’d cracked a rib, before deciding that his bruising was too low down.

After a shower, Ryan went to bed with gauze taped over a stomach wound and heavy strapping around his ankle. He was relieved that he no longer had to think about getting the package from Ash, but it was an uncomfortably warm night and aches and grazes meant that he only managed bursts of sleep between fights with duvet and pillows.

In the early hours of the morning, Ryan reached for a glass and found it empty. His torso glistened with sweat as he refilled and dropped in a couple of ice cubes. He was about to get back in bed when he noticed a light flashing on the little Nokia that Craig had given him.

Ryan picked up the phone and saw that he’d slept through a message from an unrecognised number. It was written in capitals:
ALL HANDS ON DECK. GET TO THE HANGOUT ASAP
.

He jumped back out of bed. The window in the hallway gave him a view towards The Hangout. A man in a body warmer was running out of the door and there were several cars parked illegally on the grass behind the building.

‘James,’ Ryan yelled.

James didn’t stir until Ryan jabbed his shoulder.

‘Kerry, I’m too tired,’ James moaned, as he rolled on to his back.

‘Hey, lover boy,’ Ryan said sharply.

‘What?’ James asked, sounding half dead as he sat up rubbing his eyes.

Ryan held up the Nokia. ‘Message came through about half an hour ago. There’s a whole bunch of cars and people up there.’

‘What for?’ James asked groggily.

‘How should I know?’

‘Have you spoken to Ning? She might know something.’

Ryan shook his head. ‘I thought I’d speak to you first. Do you reckon I should go up there?’

‘Probably,’ James said. ‘We need to know what’s going on. You go put some clothes on. I’ll give Ning a call.’

As Ryan scrambled into jeans and a hoodie, over at Nebraska House, Ning woke up and grabbed her mobile out of its charging stand.

‘I’ve no idea what’s happened,’ Ning said, looking around her room as James explained. She flicked on a bedside lamp when she realised there was nobody asleep on the floor. ‘Fay’s gone. She’s taken her shoes and phone. So Christ knows what she’s up to, but I’ll bet she’s got something to do with it . . .’