CHERUB: Brigands M.C. - Robert Muchamore Page 0,22
claw grasped the handles on the Toys R Us bag. She picked it up and wheeled it backwards, down the driveway and into the middle of the street.
‘Arming,’ the sergeant said, before lifting the safety catch over a large red button with red and black hazard stripes all around it and flipping two switches marked danger. Dante thought it was exactly the kind of button he’d wanted to press his whole life.
Outside the female corporal told the dozen or so folks standing near the cordon to turn away in case of flying debris or in case the flushing operation went wrong.
On the lieutenant’s nod, Dante squished his thumb against the button. There was a deep thud, and the sound of rattling plastic and rain. The accompanying shockwave set off whoops, shrieks and neh-nahs from car and burglar alarms.
As Dante jumped out of the van to see the damage, Ricardo and the female corporal ran up the damp street and stood in the gutters trying to prevent valuable evidence from going down the drain. Inside the van, the lieutenant used Mabel’s cameras to survey the shattered pieces of plastic and metal. As he swivelled the camera he noticed the shattered faceplate of the cars’ radio control unit. It lay face down with a piece of plasticine-like explosive taped to the back.
After zooming in to make sure that the water blast had imploded the detonator he waved to the sergeant.
‘There’s your explosive,’ he explained.
The sergeant squinted. ‘That’s not even enough to blow the wheel of a car.’
‘Yeah but think how Dante would have been holding that thing when he was driving the car,’ the lieutenant said. ‘It was probably rigged to trigger after the unit had been used for a few minutes. The full force of the blast would have hit him in the face and chest.’
‘Pretty clever,’ the sergeant said, nodding reluctantly. ‘Someone sure wants the little guy dead.’
8. DREAMS
Dante spent the next two weeks living in Ross Johnson’s London flat, while Holly stayed with a new foster family a few miles away. Ross was divorced, but his university-aged daughter Tina was home for Christmas holidays.
Following the bomb attempt the police were taking no chances with the only witness to a quintuple murder. Dante’s third school in as many months was six miles from Ross’ home and it had been chosen for its location on a dead-end street.
An armed police officer drove him each morning and sat in his car making sure nobody suspicious came through the school’s only entrance. At lunchtime he’d swap with another officer, who’d take Dante home and stay until just before bedtime. A third officer kept guard through the night.
It was an isolated existence. At school Dante was known as Kevin Drake. There were a couple of boys he got on with, but the other kids had settled into their own cliques which were hard to break into.
Things other kids took for granted were complicated by bodyguards and security details. Boy Scouts was out of the question because the church hall had an unlit car park and exits on three sides. An invite to a Saturday afternoon birthday party required a change in shifts and Ross having to fill in forms and negotiate overtime payments with the Devon police force who were paying for Dante’s protection.
Dante had always been the kind of kid who terrorised the playground and wound up teachers. But now he withdrew, burying himself in wrestling magazines, wondering about death and dreaming up elaborate fantasies of killing the Führer. He seemed content to watch the world drift by, rather than to take part in it. He only livened up when he got to visit Holly. He always tried to bring her sweets, or make a paper windmill or do some little thing to get her excited. Holly’s foster mum would take them out to a local swing park and her oneyear-old innocence allowed him to be a normal big brother until he looked up and saw the plain-clothes officer walking behind with a bulge under his jacket.
Dante’s teachers didn’t know his background and thought he was just taking time to settle. Ross was a trained psychologist. He knew Dante was depressed but couldn’t do much about it.
He’d sent e-mails to a few trusted psychologist colleagues asking if they had any ideas, but their replies told him what he already knew: Dante needed to start a new life in a safe location with Holly. This wouldn’t be a miracle cure, but over time he’d