to him?’
‘I had a dead call,’ Hassam said. ‘But he’s not used to that phone, so he probably just nudged the redial or something.’
Fahim hoped his father had forgotten the threatened beating and was happy to let his little cousin drag him through to the kitchen where she had a card game set out on the table. But Hassam called him back.
‘Upstairs,’ Hassam growled.
Fahim was slow turning around. Irritated, his father grabbed a handful of his tracksuit top and shoved him towards the staircase.
‘Why are you going?’ Jala asked.
‘He’s been a naughty boy,’ Hassam explained, before making Fahim walk up the stairs and into an unfurnished room.
‘Bare your back and lean forward,’ Hassam ordered, smiling nastily as he ripped his belt from his trousers. The only object to lean on was the fireplace, and Hassam placed his son’s chubby hands on the slate shelf.
Fahim looked over his shoulder and saw that his father was preparing to use the buckle end of the belt. The pain would be bad, but it was his father’s coldness rather than outright fear that brought him out in goosebumps.
‘Look at the wall,’ Hassam shouted, before taking a run-up and lashing Fahim’s bare back. ‘You’ll suffer like this until the day you learn some respect.’
The metal tore a huge gash in Fahim’s flabby back. His legs buckled and his knees hit the bare boards with a thud.
‘Stand,’ Hassam ordered, as he loomed over his son. ‘On top of everything else you’re a weakling. If I’d made that much fuss when your grandfather whipped me, he’d have started again from scratch.’
‘Please,’ Fahim sobbed, holding his hands over his eyes as Hassam crouched down and punched his son between the shoulder blades, before spitting in his face.
‘You’ll have to be in a fit state to travel,’ Hassam grunted, as he reluctantly threaded the belt back through his trousers. ‘But you wait and see what’s in store when we get to the Emirates.’
*
‘Mac,’ Lauren gasped into her phone as she squatted on the dusty warehouse floor. Rat stood with the stun gun poised while Asif bit down on a handkerchief to stop his tongue bleeding. ‘We’ve got a trace on Fahim’s location. It’s less than eight kilometres away, on a golf course off junction three of the M1.’
Mac was at the wheel of his Peugeot. He’d finally made it out of the traffic around the supermarket and was belting along a dual carriageway. He glanced at the sat-nav screen, as Jake tapped in a postcode Lauren had texted him seconds earlier. The device took about twenty seconds to calculate a route.
‘If there are no jams on the motorway I can reach the safe-house in under ten minutes from here,’ Mac said. ‘But we don’t know what we’re up against and I came straight from the supermarket so I’ve got nothing except my phone and a penknife. We’ve still got no idea what Asif and Hassam are up to, but we can arrest them for what happened to the cleaning woman, so I’ll get the local cops to come in as backup.’
‘Do you want us to head over?’ Lauren asked.
‘What’s the situation with Asif?’
‘He’s in a daze, but he overheard more than we’d have liked and I’ve got a nasty feeling the cops are on the lookout for our wheels. It’s a dirty great Bentley. I had a bit of a prang and a couple of near misses, so someone must have called the cops.’
‘Right,’ Mac said, before pausing as he negotiated a busy roundabout. ‘Call the control room on campus and get them to try swatting off the cops.’
‘Already did,’ Lauren said.
‘The most important thing is that Asif doesn’t get a chance to blab about you guys. Have you got any knockout drops in your equipment pack?’
Lauren nodded. ‘I should have a couple of phials of Ketamine. That should take him out for a few hours.’
‘That’s the stuff,’ Mac said cheerily. ‘Give him the jab to knock him out. We’ll send a medic across from MI5 headquarters, they can give him a psychotropic to scramble his short-term memory.’
‘Gotcha,’ Lauren said. ‘And while we’re waiting for MI5 I’m gonna have a rummage through Asif’s bags and see what I can find.’
‘No harm trying,’ Mac said. ‘I’m just pulling on to the motorway, so I’d better break off and call in the cops.’
*
The house was bare and Fahim had no change of clothes. He sat on the lid of a newly installed toilet, bare-chested. His face was twisted with pain and