Lone Wolf - Robert Muchamore Page 0,7
a night or two in the boarded-up house until the pressure died down, but it was December and she’d freeze.
Fay decided she needed to get a change of clothes, more money and if possible a smartphone. Her first thought was to mug someone, but she’d only get clothes by ripping them off a victim so she decided to go for a burglary.
The area looked rough, but you can learn a lot about a house from the exterior. Net curtains and neat front gardens mean old people, who’ll probably be at home and won’t have the right kind of clothes or a smartphone. A people carrier in the drive means a family with kids and barred windows mean they’ve been burgled before.
Fay had almost lost hope when she found a house with old-fashioned sash windows and recycling bins stuffed with takeout pizza boxes and cheap supermarket-brand beer cans. It had to be students.
Fay peeked through the letterbox and saw bikes in the hallway. Then she crept around the side to a large window, which gave her a vista over a filthy kitchen with a week’s worth of washing-up in the sink.
She gave the back door a tug, just in case it had been left open. Unfortunately it wasn’t that easy, but the small window alongside was big enough to get through. After a furtive glance, she took a step backwards and gave the window a kick before ducking down.
When she was sure that nobody inside had heard, Fay put her arm carefully between the shards of jagged glass and reached across to the inside handle of the back door. Glass crunched underfoot as she stepped into the kitchen. The warm air was a relief but there was a god-awful smell, like old curry mixed with rotting vegetables.
A sign on the fridge read, Abandon hope ye who enter here. Fay braved the warning and was pleasantly surprised to find a bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice well inside its sell-by date. She gulped it as she walked down the hallway.
At the bottom of the stairs she was alarmed by a gentle thumping sound. The bass line became something vaguely recognisable as she crept upstairs. After passing a bathroom that was better not thought about, and the closed door which was the source of the music, Fay checked out the other two bedrooms on the floor.
One belonged to a guy who’d left his stinking rugby gear all over the place and whose idea of interior decoration was to hang a bright yellow Norwich City flag across his window. The third first-floor bedroom looked a lot more promising.
Its owner was female. Judging by the clothes strewn about she was a borderline Goth, similar height and shoe size to Fay but a much heavier build. Fay undressed quickly, swapping her blood-spattered jacket and jeans for a black puffa jacket, black leather boots and striped black and green leggings.
She swept a ten-pound note and a fiver’s worth of change off a small desk. Unfortunately, people take their smartphones with them when they go out, but there was a laptop on the desk, and Fay was delighted when she tapped the space bar and it came to life without demanding a password.
After opening the web browser and noting that the laptop’s owner was called Chloe, Fay typed the name of the street she was on into Google Maps to work out where she was. Then she looked at the train routes back to London. Travelling from Manchester Piccadilly in the centre of town was too risky, but she worked out that she could get a bus from a nearby street to Stockport and pick up a London train from there.
The bad news was that she now had about forty pounds, and the ticket to London was sixty-five. Dressed in her baggy Goth gear, Fay headed up to the second floor. This floor comprised a single room carved into the loft space.
The occupants seemed to be a couple and Fay started going through the drawers looking for money. She found a few euros and a dead mouse between the wardrobes, but the problem was, students don’t have lots of money, and they take the money they do have with them when they go out.
Fay was back on the stairs when she heard the first-floor toilet flush. She doubled back, but the guy who’d been listening to music in his room eyeballed her halfway down the stairs.
‘Who are you?’ the lad asked. This was a shared house, so his