the cupboards for anything of value and rattled all the canisters to see if there was a hidden stash.
But the ground floor was a bust, so she walked back upstairs to the room belonging to her foster-parents. She opened the door quietly, then gave it half a minute to see if they stirred.
There was an encased radiator running along one wall and Fay saw her new foster-dad’s wallet and keys lying on top of it. A floorboard made a noisy creak as Fay stepped forward. She monitored her foster-parents’ breathing as she grabbed the wallet, keys and a travel card and tiptoed back towards the exit.
After backing into her room and making a relieved gasp, Fay was pleased to discover that she’d nabbed an Oyster season ticket that would let her travel around London. The credit cards in the wallet were of no use without the pin number, so she left them and took what she thought was a slightly disappointing haul of forty-five pounds.
Fay had prepared her escape the night before. She’d packed a lightweight rucksack with a couple of changes of underwear and some toiletries, and printed off a Google Map showing the fifteen-minute walk from the house to Elstree Station.
Fay slugged some orange juice and couldn’t resist grabbing a slice of Victoria sponge, which she crammed into her mouth as she opened the back door and walked down twenty metres of garden. Using her foster-father’s keys, she unlocked the shed and stuck her head inside, inhaling a mixture of cobwebs and creosote.
There was a tool rack against the back wall and she grabbed a shovel, plus screwdrivers and some other small tools that she thought might come in handy.
The first train south ran at 5:53 and Fay was keen to be as far from Elstree as possible before her foster-parents woke up. She called Ning on her mobile as she strode briskly towards the station, carrying her backpack and a garden shovel balanced on her shoulder.
‘Yeah,’ Ning said drowsily.
‘You sound tired.’
‘It’s twenty-five to six,’ Ning yawned. ‘What were you expecting?’
‘I looked on Google,’ Fay said. ‘The nearest underground to Nebraska House is Tufnell Park. You need to travel north to Totteridge and Whetstone. I’ll meet you by the entrance at about seven-thirty.’
‘What’s at Totteridge?’ Ning asked.
‘You just be there,’ Fay said firmly. ‘We’re gonna have a bit of fun.’
16. DIG
Totteridge was a moderately posh suburb, eight miles from the centre of London. Ning reached the underground station a few minutes before seven-thirty, bought a bottle of water from a newsagent and stared at rows of semi-detached houses for long enough to wonder if Fay was coming. She was about to send a where-the-hell-are-you text when Fay finally arrived.
‘Nice shovel,’ Ning said. ‘Makes you pretty identifiable if anyone searches for you on CCTV.’
‘True,’ Fay said. ‘I ditched Foster-Daddy’s Oyster card at King’s Cross because they can use them to track you. It’s been a while since I’ve been up this way, but I think we need to get a 251 bus from a stop at the top of the hill.’
They waited twelve minutes for the single-deck bus. It took them on a twenty-minute ride, passing golf courses and mansions before reaching the edge of London’s protected green belt.
‘This is definitely the middle of nowhere,’ Ning said, as they stepped off the bus on a road with no markings and hedgerows growing up past head height on either side. ‘What is this place?’
‘Not telling,’ Fay said, smiling, as they crossed the road.
‘For all I know you’re planning to whack me with the shovel and kill me.’
Fay raised one eyebrow. ‘Damn, you guessed.’
After a few hundred metres the pair reached a wooden gate crudely painted with Greenacre Community Allotments – Please lock after entering.
The dirt pathway inside was rutted with vehicle tracks. As they began walking, they passed a ramshackle shop which had two foul-smelling mounds of manure, on offer at £3 per bag. Beyond this, a network of paths lined with individual parcels of land stretched off in all directions.
Some allotments were beautifully kept, with painted sheds, neat rows of growing vegetables and greenhouses full of flowers. A few were tangled and overgrown, while the vast majority of plots fell somewhere between the two extremes. Even though it was early, there were already cars parked up and people picking fruit and hosing their plants.
‘The British make me laugh,’ Ning said, as she looked around. ‘In China families do everything they can to leave the land and go live in