Lone Wolf (3 page)

4. HIDE

Fay kept seeing the knife and the blood. She’d been running for ages, half expecting a helicopter overhead or squad cars to come and scoop her up. But she’d made it a couple of kilometres out of the town centre, to an area dominated by shabby low-rise housing.

Fay ducked between a side wall and an overgrown hedge. Her trainers squelched over frosty bin bags until she settled on a short row of steps leading to a boarded-up front door.

She checked her Samsung for messages, and there was nothing since the text from Aunt Kirsten:
Turn your phone off. Cops might use it to track you
.

She’d left the phone on, hoping for more information, but now she held the power off button until the screen went black. There was a lot to think about.
How had they been set up? Had Kirsten got away? Was the cop dead? Where to go now?

Fay realised there was no point losing her head thinking about the big picture. Right now she had to focus on getting as much distance as possible between herself and the scene of the crime. She started forming a plan, which began by taking a tissue out of her jacket, moistening it on a frosty handrail and using it to wipe her bloody knife.

After dumping the stained tissue and shaking off frozen fingers, she pulled a Velcro wallet from the back of her jeans. She had twenty-five pounds, plus a cash card which the police would trace in seconds if she dared to use it.

Fay reckoned the best strategy would be to go back to her home turf in north London. The police might know about the apartment in St John’s Wood, but Kirsten had a flat and a couple of lock-ups in less salubrious neighbourhoods and it was also where Kirsten would head if she’d got away.

The problem was, the police would have CCTV from the hotel showing what Fay looked like and what she was wearing, and they’d doubtless have people on lookout at the train stations. If it had been summer Fay would have considered spending a night or two in the boarded-up house until the pressure died down, but it was December and she’d freeze.

Fay decided she needed to get a change of clothes, more money and if possible a smartphone. Her first thought was to mug someone, but she’d only get clothes by ripping them off a victim so she decided to go for a burglary.

The area looked rough, but you can learn a lot about a house from the exterior. Net curtains and neat front gardens mean old people, who’ll probably be at home and won’t have the right kind of clothes or a smartphone. A people carrier in the drive means a family with kids and barred windows mean they’ve been burgled before.

Fay had almost lost hope when she found a house with old-fashioned sash windows and recycling bins stuffed with takeout pizza boxes and cheap supermarket-brand beer cans. It
had
to be students.

Fay peeked through the letterbox and saw bikes in the hallway. Then she crept around the side to a large window, which gave her a vista over a filthy kitchen with a week’s worth of washing-up in the sink.

She gave the back door a tug, just in case it had been left open. Unfortunately it wasn’t that easy, but the small window alongside was big enough to get through. After a furtive glance, she took a step backwards and gave the window a kick before ducking down.

When she was sure that nobody inside had heard, Fay put her arm carefully between the shards of jagged glass and reached across to the inside handle of the back door. Glass crunched underfoot as she stepped into the kitchen. The warm air was a relief but there was a god-awful smell, like old curry mixed with rotting vegetables.

A sign on the fridge read,
Abandon hope ye who enter here
. Fay braved the warning and was pleasantly surprised to find a bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice well inside its sell-by date. She gulped it as she walked down the hallway.

At the bottom of the stairs she was alarmed by a gentle thumping sound. The bass line became something vaguely recognisable as she crept upstairs. After passing a bathroom that was better not thought about, and the closed door which was the source of the music, Fay checked out the other two bedrooms on the floor.

One belonged to a guy who’d left his stinking rugby gear all over the place and whose idea of interior decoration was to hang a bright yellow Norwich City flag across his window. The third first-floor bedroom looked a lot more promising.

Its owner was female. Judging by the clothes strewn about she was a borderline Goth, similar height and shoe size to Fay but a much heavier build. Fay undressed quickly, swapping her blood-spattered jacket and jeans for a black puffa jacket, black leather boots and striped black and green leggings.

She swept a ten-pound note and a fiver’s worth of change off a small desk. Unfortunately, people take their smartphones with them when they go out, but there was a laptop on the desk, and Fay was delighted when she tapped the space bar and it came to life without demanding a password.

After opening the web browser and noting that the laptop’s owner was called Chloe, Fay typed the name of the street she was on into Google Maps to work out where she was. Then she looked at the train routes back to London. Travelling from Manchester Piccadilly in the centre of town was too risky, but she worked out that she could get a bus from a nearby street to Stockport and pick up a London train from there.

The bad news was that she now had about forty pounds, and the ticket to London was sixty-five. Dressed in her baggy Goth gear, Fay headed up to the second floor. This floor comprised a single room carved into the loft space.

The occupants seemed to be a couple and Fay started going through the drawers looking for money. She found a few euros and a dead mouse between the wardrobes, but the problem was, students don’t have lots of money, and they take the money they do have with them when they go out.

Fay was back on the stairs when she heard the first-floor toilet flush. She doubled back, but the guy who’d been listening to music in his room eyeballed her halfway down the stairs.

‘Who are you?’ the lad asked. This was a shared house, so his north-west accent sounded more curious than alarmed.

‘I’m friends with Chloe,’ Fay said airily. ‘She gave me the key and said to wait for her. We’re studying together.’

Fay emphasised this by making a writing gesture.

‘Studying what exactly?’

‘Our subject,’ Fay stuttered.

‘You’ll have a tough time. She dropped out and works behind the till in Tesco’s. Now tell us who you are and why you’re sneaking around our house?’

As the lad said this, he moved up the stairs and tried to grab Fay’s arm. He was well-built, so Fay’s only advantage was surprise. She let the hand grip her shoulder, but countered with a vicious palm under the chin. As the student stumbled back, Fay launched one of her newly acquired black boots at his stomach. Then she jumped down the stairs and knocked him cold with a knee to the face.

‘That’ll teach you to ask awkward bloody questions,’ Fay said, as she crouched down and started going through the student’s pockets.

She found ten pounds in his jeans, but hit the jackpot when she got into his room and found a wallet containing fifty. That gave her enough to get back to London and grab something to eat along the way. There was also an iPhone, but it asked for a pin code when she turned it on, so she left it behind.

5. EUSTON

Fay expected cops every time someone came into the carriage, every time the train stopped and when she arrived at London Euston. It was 8 p.m., bitter cold and sleety. After scoffing a quick Burger King she took a bus to Islington.

The studio apartment Kirsten owned there was at the top of a six-storey block. The lift was out and Fay got called a ‘skinny slut’ by random kids hanging out on the stairs. Once she was in, she switched the boiler on. She found a bin liner and placed the knife in it, along with everything she’d worn that day.

After a shower Fay towelled off and opened a wardrobe. There were spare clothes, though she’d grown since they’d been left here so she ended up wearing some of her aunt’s gear instead. Once she was dressed, Fay pulled an armchair out of a corner, rolled back the carpet and lifted a floorboard.

She felt slightly more secure when she saw the cache. There was twenty thousand in cash, two small bricks of cocaine, mobile phones and a selection of weapons and body armour, including two automatic pistols and a compact machine gun.

Fay took out a knife and a couple of hundred in cash. The only place to sleep was a sofa bed, so Fay unfurled it and hunted around until she found a duvet and pillows in a cupboard off the hallway. As she lay in bed, part of her was tempted to turn her mobile on to see if there was any message from her aunt, but she knew it would give her location away.

Instead she burrowed under the duvet feeling scared, trying not to see the knife slashing the cop’s face and hoping that her aunt was going to turn up with some sort of plan.

*

Fay woke early, but had nothing to do except hide. It was a grim December morning and the flat felt lonely so she reached out with her big toe and switched on an ancient portable TV. The signal kept breaking up, but Fay sat with her head poking out of the duvet watching a cosy interview with a bunch of kids from some new reality show, followed by Carol the weather girl.

Then the seven o’clock headlines gave her a ten-thousand-volt shock.

‘
Manchester police are hunting a girl of thirteen who left a police officer in a critical condition after a major drug deal went wrong
.’

Fay saw herself up on screen. The first image was blurry CCTV footage from the lobby of the Belfont hotel. The second was a full-resolution photograph, taken when she’d visited France the previous summer. The cops could only have got it by searching the apartment in St John’s Wood.

The TV cut to a clip from a police press conference:

‘Following lengthy surveillance work, Manchester Police in conjunction with the Metropolitan Police staged an operation to break up a large drug deal. Several Manchester gang members and a London-based female were arrested. Sixteen kilos of cocaine and a large quantity of cash were also seized.

‘One of the suspects is believed to have brought her thirteen-year-old niece with her. When police tried to apprehend the girl, she assaulted two officers, leaving one in a serious but stable condition. I can’t emphasise strongly enough that this young teenager is extremely dangerous. So I must ask the public not to approach her, but to inform the police as quickly as possible if you think you’ve seen her.’

The TV cut back to a correspondent standing outside the Belfont hotel.

‘Within the last few hours it’s become clear that a girl fitting the police description robbed a house in the Ardwick area of Manchester; following this, CCTV shows her boarding a train from Stockport to London.’

As Fay sat up in bed, a dry heave rose from her stomach. Her aunt had been busted, the cop was on the critical list and her picture was on every TV screen in the country.

‘You are
so
screwed,’ she told herself.

The flat was a refuge, at least. Fay had money and weapons, but when she padded through to the kitchen she realised that there was no food. She remembered passing a convenience store the night before and she reckoned it was best to go out while it was dark and the streets were quiet.

The lifts were still out of order, so she buried her head in one of her aunt’s hoodies as she walked down six floors and crossed the street to Dinesh’s Food & Wine. She moved quickly, filling a basket with fruit, chocolate bars, microwave rice and enough tinned stuff to last her a week.

At the counter she felt sick, because her face was staring off half the morning newspapers. She wondered whether she’d have been better off going hungry for a day and hoping that her face dropped out of the news.

Back in the flat, Fay started thinking long term. She had money and weapons. All she’d ever known was robbing drug dealers and she reckoned she could keep that up on her own. Maybe the heat would die down after a week or so. She’d be able to move around more freely. But realistically, could she live on the run, or was she just delaying an inevitable arrest and the consequences of what she’d done?

Fay needed something to take her mind off things, but the apartment didn’t offer much. She made beans on toast, then she lay on the sofa bed, obsessively watching News 24. Every half-hour it was the same story about the cop in a critical condition and the correspondent standing outside the Belfont hotel getting colder but saying more or less the same thing.

Sometimes Fay got upset, thinking about her aunt in prison. Sometimes she worried about the cop, knowing that the consequences would be a lot more severe if he died. Just after ten she started crying. She picked up her phone and thought about turning it on and telling the cops to come and get her.

Then the front door exploded.

‘Police!’

A blast of CS gas came down the hallway. Fay moved instinctively towards a sliding glass door that led out on to a balcony. As she threw the door open she breathed a mix that was half air, half gas, and felt a burning sensation in her lungs.

Freezing puddles soaked Fay’s socked feet as she scrambled out on to the balcony. Cops were coming into the apartment, clad head to toe in black body armour and gas masks. She looked up, but the building’s flat roof was out of reach. She looked down at the chance of death, splattered over the street six floors below. The idea of jumping had a certain appeal, but one of the cops reached on to the balcony and grabbed her hoodie.

He pulled her inside so hard that her neck clicked. The air inside the apartment was full of CS gas, and Fay retched and choked as she was ‘accidentally
’
slammed against the apartment wall before a big boot kicked her legs away.

Fay’s head caught the corner of the TV stand as a burly cop slammed her hard against the floor. The officer then ripped her arms behind her back and locked on a set of plasticuffs.

‘Fay Hoyt, you are under arrest on suspicion of attempted murder. You do not have to say anything, but anything you do say may be taken down and used in evidence against you.’

The CS gas made Fay’s eyes stream as the cop shoved her towards the apartment door.

‘We don’t like people who attack our fellow officers,’ the cop growled. ‘You are in deep, deep shit.’