was shaken, with black streaks of eyeliner down her face.
‘I’m really muddy,’ James said apologetically, as he walked towards the car.
‘All the boys are muddy,’ she said. ‘You’ll freeze out there in this cold.’
The spooked eleven-year-old on the front passenger seat had to climb out and squeeze in the back with his three friends.
‘I appreciate this,’ James smiled, pulling open the door and enjoying his first breath of heated air.
‘I’ve got quite a route dropping all these home,’ the woman said, as she pulled away. ‘Where do you need to go?’
‘The halfway house,’ James said. His socks were absolutely sodden and he peeled them off so that he didn’t trash the footwell. He was pleased to be in the warm, but the four lads behind him were eerily quiet and at least two of them had been crying.
The driver slammed the brakes as she pulled out of the turning without looking, almost flattening a motorbike parked at the opposite kerb.
‘Are you OK?’ James asked. ‘Maybe you should pull over until you’ve calmed down.’
‘I’ve got to get all the boys home,’ the woman said with determination. ‘If the parents hear what happened before I drop them back they’ll go out of their minds.’
‘But drive careful,’ James said gently. ‘It won’t do much good if you crash before you get there, will it?’
The woman nodded and gave James a tiny smile. But her hands were shaking and her eyes were blurred with tears.
‘I yelled at that referee,’ she sniffed. ‘He kept having a go at my Samuel and I called him a pompous tit. Two minutes later he went up over that car. I don’t know if he was killed or what …’
‘It’s over now, Mum,’ one of the kids said, trying to sound grown up as he pushed his muddy face between the front seats.
‘How can that happen?’ the woman sobbed. ‘How can you do something like that to another human being?’
31. BUGS
‘… There is some speculation that the savage assault was launched as part of a vendetta against notorious underworld figure and Mad Dogs FC chairman Sasha Thompson.
However, Detective Inspector Robert Hunt who is heading up the investigation has emphasised that none of the people attacked had criminal records or any association with Mr Thompson beyond the football club.
The victim, twenty-year-old Julian Pogue, was a first-year law student at the University of East Anglia. He’d recently returned home for the Easter holidays and had only been called back into the Mad Dogs team following an injury to a colleague. It is believed that Pogue became separated from his team-mates whilst trying to locate his twelve-year-old brother.
Pogue’s family issued a statement asking for privacy and describing their son as a ‘wonderful, caring boy who loved playing football and had a bright future ahead of him.’
The two other seriously injured men have been named as fifty-three-year-old referee Bert Hogg and opposition goalkeeper Leonard Goacher, thirty-one. School nurse Judith Maine was stabbed in the thigh as she tried escaping into nearby woodland with her eighteen-month-old twins in a double buggy. She was later discharged from hospital, along with eleven others treated for minor injuries and shock.’
BBC Radio Bedfordshire, Friday 30 March 2007
The care workers in the Zoo were supposed to be finding James and Bruce places at a local school, but they were taking their time and now the schools were about to break up for Easter anyway.
James couldn’t sleep and spent most of the night with a headphone in his ear, listening to the late-night phone-in and hourly news updates on the radio. By ten on Friday morning Bruce was up and showered, but James could see no reason to get up and he hitched his duvet over his face when Bruce opened the curtains to read his latest martial arts magazine.
James’ phone had melted in the blaze, so Wheels rang Bruce when he wanted to speak.
‘How’s it going?’ James asked. ‘Where were you hiding when the shit went down?’
‘Sasha yelled at me twice yesterday so luckily I gave the football a wide berth.’
‘Jammy git,’ James said. ‘So do you know anything, except for what I can hear on the radio?’
‘One of the Slasher Boys’ cars got stuck over the back of the playing fields. They torched it themselves before the cops arrived, but a couple of our boys caught up with one of them. The cops were swarming all over so they couldn’t do anything except put a tail on him. They followed him home on the bus and woke him