strip of bandage or a spare sock; praying it was only that one lock of blonde hair that she needed to find a way to explain away in her mind; to conjure up an acceptable reason for it being there.
She opened her eyes and stared at the small garment that dangled from her fingers.
‘Oh, dear God, no,’ she whispered.
A pair of sky-blue child’s underpants with a constellation of five dark spots of dried blood on the white elasticated waistband.
Oh, God . . . no. Not him.
Chapter 76
10 years AC
Felixstowe, Suffolk
Maxwell watched them dancing on the wharf; an impromptu party that had started only an hour or so after they’d tied up at Felixstowe and begun exploring the maze of stacked freight containers. Many of them had remained unopened all these years, their thick corrugated doors had obviously resisted earlier attempts by people to break in; scratches and gouges where levers and wedges had been banged into the gap between hatch and frame. A decade’s worth of corrosion later, their hinges gave far more easily.
Each one they prised open proved to be an Aladdin’s cave of treasures. Some of the boys had found a red Lamborghini in one and wheeled it out onto the wharf where they’d been pushing and shoving each other to take turns to sit in the front seat and pretend to drive the thing. The impromptu party, however, had begun shortly after some of them had stumbled upon a container filled with stacked pallets of alcopops and bottles of spirits.
A fire now shimmered in the afternoon light as the boys took turns in tossing on the bone-dry slats of broken pallets, throwing on bottles of brandy and vodka, delighting in the explosion of glass and rolling mini-mushroom clouds of blue alcohol-fuelled flames.
‘S’getting out of ‘and, Chief,’ muttered Jeff.
Maxwell looked at his pilot, sitting beside him on the foredeck of the tugboat. Even from here they could feel the wavering heat of the boys’ growing bonfire. ‘Relax. They’re just letting off some steam.’
Maxwell had smiled beneficently when a group of boys had emerged from the maze of containers to present Edward, Nathan and him with some of the bright orange and yellow coloured bottles of Froot-ka they’d discovered. The boys had already started opening and chugging away at them.
So he’d smiled and told them, since they’d all been such good boys, they bloody well deserved a party. The girlfriends had already been pulled out of their cots from the bowels of the second barge and plied with copious amounts of alcohol and were now, as he watched from afar, busy servicing clusters of boys. It had the look of a Roman orgy; a last-night bender before the end of the world. In fact, it very much had the look of the first few nights of the big crash. Maxwell wondered what would happen if he tried to flex his authority this second, right now - step ashore and announce that the party was over and it was time for them all to go to bed.
He felt the hair on his forearms stir and prickle.
They’d refuse, wouldn’t they? One of the older boys certainly would.
It would be an open challenge to his authority; a dangerously open challenge. He realised the answer to that question was that he daren’t step ashore. It wasn’t a sudden realisation, more a gradual clarification, a truth he’d half suspected for a while that was now, finally, sliding into sharper focus for him. He didn’t truly control these boys, not really. Sure, they were happy to follow orders, follow the schedules and routines that he’d assigned them over the years, happy to cheer his habitual party night opening speech, call him ‘Chief’ and knuckle a salute as he passed them by. But that was because he was the Chief, the guy at the top who made sure every one of them got their perks.
Another recurring, wake-up-sweating nightmare was that one day he was going to publicly give an order to one of the boys and the boy would turn round and tell him to fuck off.
That’s how slim your control is, Alan. You’re just one ‘fuck off’ away from a mutiny; from being lynched by these little thugs.
What kept the boys knuckling their foreheads and nodding politely as he passed was a residual deference to him as their school teacher, as the official authority figure put in charge of Safety Zone 4. But more importantly, he was the man who made the lights happen, the