Thicker Than Water

‘Because you don’t look—’

The penny started to drop as I was speaking, because my gaze had lingered on Bic and I finally saw what was staring me in the face. They were the wrong pyjamas: plain blue flannel rather than rampant superheroes. In a war zone? Someone had stopped to change him out of his old gear in the middle of all this? And not into outdoor clothes, but into another set of PJs?

‘I didn’t know,’ Trudie was saying, her voice high and strained. ‘They didn’t tell me.’

I stared at her in sudden, near-incontinent horror.

‘While - while Cheadle was making you change—’

‘Father Gwillam had Sallis plant a GPS pip on the boy. He didn’t tell me, Castor. When I said that you should trust me, I meant it. I never lied to you. I’ve told them I won’t stay in the order—’

I was already running. I had to get out past the police roadblocks and out onto a road where there was some traffic running. The Walworth Road: there ought to be some cabs there. But the crowds of onlookers seemed to stretch out to the crack of doom, and short of bludgeoning them to the ground there was no way to get through them at anything faster thanÛingloo an arthritic shuffle.

Coldwood. I turned and headed back towards the steps, caught sight of him almost immediately coming down them. I headed towards him, but someone grabbed hold of my arm. Trudie again, her face red with crying.

‘Let me come with you. Let me help.’

‘When I need your help,’ I snarled, ‘I’ll swallow a razor blade. It’s quicker.’ I pulled free with a savage wrench and yelled at Gary just as he was getting into the back of a big black cop-mobile.

He saw me coming and stopped.

‘I need to get to Peckham,’ I panted."

"‘Try walking for once,’ he told me coolly. ‘I’m about to get your brother off a murder charge, and then I’m back here all day dealing with the fallout from this shit-fest.’

‘Gary, I’m serious. I need to get to Peckham fucking now. It won’t wait.’

He gave me a quizzical look and opened his mouth to argue the toss some more.

With an agonised bellow of frustration, I grabbed his lapels and yelled into his face. ‘Asmodeus! Fucking Asmodeus! You remember St Michael’s church, in Acton? Abbie Torrington? The body bags at the Whiteleaf shopping mall?’

‘Get in,’ Gary said. And to the driver, ‘Take him where he tells you. I’ll scrape up an ARU and follow you.’

Amazingly, Trudie Pax was still with me. She got into the other side of the car at the same time as I got in myself.