to the coal cellar. ‘Please don’t make me.’
‘It’s the only way you’ll learn,’ Williams shouted. ‘Now, sit on the edge and jump or I’ll throw you down.’
The coal was piled high at one corner of the cellar. Mason made the short drop on to the highest part of the mound and scrambled down over churning coal to an area of bare floor in the far corner.
‘Watch out for the rats,’ Tom teased. ‘They’ll gnaw your toes if you fall asleep.’
George was ready to shove Troy down into the cellar. ‘Hold up,’ Williams ordered. ‘Let’s have a look at him.’
Tom clamped a muscular arm around Troy’s waist. Williams moved up close and smiled, as Mason’s sobbing echoed out of the cellar below them.
‘I never did like Frenchies,’ Williams said, before slapping Troy hard across his right eye. ‘Throw him down.’
Troy’s head swirled from the blow as Tom let him go. George kicked Troy behind the knees, buckling his legs and sending him face first into the mound of coal. The wooden cellar door banged shut over his head, and Williams fixed a joist over the flaps to lock it.
‘Sleep tight, boys,’ Williams said nastily.
‘But don’t forget the rats,’ George added.
Mason stood with his back against an unplastered wall. It was pitch dark, his feet were in icy water and he shuddered, imagining bugs and spiders crawling all around him.
‘Troy?’ he said quietly, before erupting into a coughing fit as coal dust tickled the back of his throat.
Mason waited for the voices above to disappear before feeling his way back up the mound of freezing coal lumps. He sniffled as he rested a hand on Troy’s back, between his shoulder blades.
‘Troy?’ he said, tapping his hand warily. ‘What’s the matter, Troy? Are you dead?’
CHAPTER TWO
Air hissed and Marc Kilgour jolted as the hydraulically powered chair reclined, leaving a bright anglepoise lamp shining into his eyes. His fingertips dug anxiously into the leather armrests and his eyes watered as he studied the white ceiling and glass-fronted cupboards filled with sets of false teeth and scary dental implements.
Dr Helen Murray of Harley Street, London, specialised in child patients and serious dental injuries. She swung the light away from Marc and looked down on the twelve-year-old’s blue eyes and crudely cropped blond hair.
‘Nervous?’ she asked warmly, trying to put him at ease.
‘A bit,’ Marc admitted.
‘When did you last visit a dentist?’
Marc spoke with a French accent, but he had a gift for languages and you’d never have guessed that he’d been learning English for barely four months. ‘I lived at an orphanage in France,’ he explained. ‘The director would wind wire around your teeth and rip them out if you got toothache.’
‘We’re slightly more sophisticated here,’ Dr Murray told him. ‘I’ve got all the latest equipment from the United States. Now, show me those pearly whites.’
Marc opened wide, displaying a reasonable set of teeth with a missing front incisor.
‘I’ve seen much worse,’ Dr Murray said, as she took a highly polished sickle probe from her instrument tray. ‘But there’s a lot of decay at the back. You need to get in there with your brush and clean all the way to the back, otherwise you’ll end up with a mouthful of false teeth before you’re twenty.’
Marc shuddered with fear as the probe passed between his lips and gently touched his gum.
‘Curl your tongue back … That’s right. Now, does it feel numb when I press against it?’
‘Uh-huh,’ Marc agreed, as his mind flashed back to the Gestapo officer who’d ripped his tooth out the previous summer.
‘Do you remember the piece of root on the X-ray I showed you?’ Dr Murray asked, as she picked up an angled mirror with her other hand. ‘When that front tooth came out it was pulled so violently that the root snapped away near the base. The fragment has lodged in your gum and prevented the wound from healing properly. That’s why you’ve been getting discomfort.
‘Now I’m going to cut into the gum and take that fragment out. Unfortunately I’ve got to dig quite deep, but I’ll try to work as quickly as possible.’
Dr Murray’s assistant mopped sweat off Marc’s brow. The boy’s arms clenched as the dentist swung the lamp back towards his face.
‘Nice and wide then,’ she smiled. ‘I’m afraid this bit is going to be quite uncomfortable.’
Marc’s eyes streamed from the bright light but he managed to open them a fraction. His heart skipped as he saw the sharp edge of a scalpel blade hovering over tip