young, porcelain faces, eyes closed as if sleeping - they looked almost angelic lying side by side amidst a dark, almost black pool of blood that had spread during the night across most of the kitchen floor. Several of the MDF kitchen units sported jagged splintered bullet-holes. Under foot, shards of glass crackled and popped against the tile floor.
Jacob wandered in before she could stop him.
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘Jake, out . . . go on.’
Jacob didn’t budge, fascinated by the two corpses, ‘They’re dead aren’t they?’ a hint of awe in his voice.
‘Yes, Jake, they’re dead.’
‘Did someone shoot them?’
‘Yup.’ She counted a dozen jagged holes around the kitchen. Someone had fired off a lot of bullets in here. One of the dead boys was clutching a kitchen knife, beside the other one she spotted a baseball bat.
Hardly an even fight.
She recognised both of them as being members of the gang that had been preying on the avenue these last few nights. She had guessed that the fight last night must have been between the Bad Boys and some other group - perhaps a rival gang from White City.
But these other ones had guns.
She led Jacob out of the kitchen, literally dragging him away from the bodies, which he studied with an intense fascination.
And then she saw him, through the open front door, lying amongst the weeds in Jill’s front garden; caught the slightest movement.
‘Go into the lounge and stay there,’ she commanded Jacob.
‘Why?’
‘I’m just going to take a peek outside.’
Jake nodded. ‘Be careful, Lee,’ he whispered as he padded across the hallway and sat down in front of the shattered screen of Jill’s extravagant TV set and stared at it, willing it to come on.
She stepped out of the house, cautiously advancing on the body writhing slowly on the ground.
She recognised him.
50 Cent.
Closer now, she could see he’d been shot in the shoulder, his crisp white Nike shirt was almost entirely coloured a rich, dark sepia, and he lay on a bed of pebbles now glued together by a sticky bond of drying blood. He looked weak, he had lost too much blood during the night to last for very much longer. She would have thought the underlings in his gang would have returned for their leader.
Apparently not.
So much for the notion of gang loyalty - not so much this lifelong brotherly bond, as she’d heard many a rapper say of his homies - instead, more like a group of feral creatures, cooperating under the intimidating gaze of the pack alpha. When it came to it, they’d all scurried off, leaving the little shit bleeding out on the gravel.
In one hand he held a pistol, which he tried desperately to raise off the ground and aim at her, but he had only the strength to shuffle it around on the ground.
He looked up at her, recognised her face and smiled. ‘My honey,’ he grunted with some effort. ‘Help me.’
Leona knelt down beside him and reached out for the gun. He hung on to it, but she managed to prise it loose from his fingers with little effort.
‘I need help,’ he said again, his voice was no more than a gummy rattle.
This was probably an opportune moment.
‘You recognised me last night, didn’t you? You were the one who asked me for a fag up at the mall.’
The boy said nothing.
‘What did you do to my boyfriend?’
50 Cent shook his head almost imperceptibly. ‘He ran.’
And then she noticed the ankh pendant nestling amongst the stained folds of his T-shirt.
Dan’s pendant.
Leona knew right then that she didn’t need to hear the lie in his voice to know what had happened to Dan. With a movement so swift that there was no room for any internal debate, she aimed the gun at his head, closed her eyes and pulled the trigger.
There was an overpowering stench that hung in the warm midday air; a mixture of rotting cabbage and burning rubber. She noticed several thin wispy columns of dark smoke on the horizon. London wasn’t exactly ablaze, just smouldering in one or two far-off places. But that burning smell certainly carried. After a while, Leona decided she’d rather breathe just through her mouth.
They walked up Uxbridge Road, which was even more cluttered with detritus than it had been on Wednesday, the last time she had been out. She noticed one or two bundles of clothing amongst the piles of rubbish that turned out to be bodies. She made a point of distracting Jacob as they walked