we see . . . is bad work of man, not of Allah.’
‘Maybe you’re right,’ Mike sighed. ‘Us humans seem pretty good at screwing most things up.’
Andy turned to look at the American. That seemed like an interesting step for someone like him to take.
‘So Farid,’ said Andy, ‘where do you want to go?’
‘I have brother who go to Great Britain many year back. He is all my family now. I join him.’
Andy reached over again and rested a hand on his arm. ‘We’ll get you there old man, I promise you that.’
He looked around the truck. The lads were all asleep. And there was Erich, watching quietly. He nodded courteously.
CHAPTER 55
10.03 p.m. GMT Shepherd’s Bush, London
It was dark.
Oh God, where the hell are you Danny?
She’d put Jacob to bed as early as she could, after sharing another unappetising meal of cold pilchards in tomato sauce and a slice of buttered bread. When she had tried to pour them each a glass of water, nothing had come out of the tap. It rattled and gurgled noisily, and produced nothing but a few drips. She realised that from now on they would have to start using their bottled water.
It was another hot evening, stuffy inside again. She opened some of the upstairs windows whilst keeping all of the ones downstairs firmly closed and locked. She patiently reassured Jacob that all was going to turn out well, that Dan, whom it seemed Jacob quite openly hero-worshipped, would be back soon and then by torchlight, she found a Harry Potter book on Jill’s bedside table and began to read that to him.
But it was all done in a distracted, worried stupor, one ear constantly cocked and listening out for Dan, whom she expected at any time to come rapping on the front door to be let in. Even though she had, in effect, taken charge of things since they’d left university in Dan’s van, she hadn’t realised how much she had been relying on him for support.
Just me and Jake now?
Already, she could feel herself beginning to come apart, sitting downstairs in the lounge, in the dark, waiting and listening. She knew she couldn’t do this on her own for much longer.
The noises started just before eleven.
The gang of youths were back again. She watched them from the lounge window, concealed as she was, behind the blind. There were twenty, maybe thirty of them, some looked as young as fourteen or fifteen, others somewhere in their mid-twenties. There were one or two girls amongst them. Leona thought they looked a couple of years younger than her. The gang arrived in small groups, gradually amassing in the narrow street outside, over an hour, as if it had been some loosely agreed rendezvous made the night before.
A car turned up, bathing St Stephen’s Avenue with the glare of its headlights, and the sound of a pummelling bass that had the lounge windows vibrating in sympathy. They were drinking again, presumably more of their haul taken from the nearby off-licence. Their voices grew louder as the evening advanced, and by midnight she could hear and see that most of them were pissed out of their skulls. One of them staggered into the front garden, tripped over a paving stone and fell on to Jill’s small, poorly tended flower-bed. He lay there, quite content to look up at the stars for a while before turning to his side and retching.
There was a fight between two of the lads. She watched it brewing, it was over one of the girls; one of the ‘smurfettes’, as she’d decided to call them. She couldn’t hear exactly what was being said, but from the gestures she could guess that the older-looking one wanted some squeeze-time with one of the girls, and the younger one wasn’t too happy about it. The girl in question, of course, wasn’t exactly being consulted about this. Leona had seen countless fights like this brewing outside the pubs and clubs she’d been used to frequenting in Norwich. Always the same pattern to them, a lot of shouting, chest beating, finally pushing and shoving and then the first punch is thrown.
This fight, though, seemed to escalate far more quickly. She watched in horror as it progressed from punches being exchanged, to a knife being produced by the younger-looking lad. It was hard to make out what was going on amidst the frantic movements of both of them, but caught in the glare of the headlight, she soon saw