‘But . . .’ I raised my palms. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘There’s good places to get a bit of weed, Nick, and there’s bad places. The people Mia knows are too far up the chain. Smart money pays a little more and buys off a local pothead, way down the chain. Mia’s dealing with Sacks, and getting store credit.’ Elton shook his head as if this was madness of the worst sort. ‘And don’t say that name to anyone.’

‘I . . . I didn’t know.’ I hadn’t given it a moment’s thought. I’d never heard of a ‘Sacks’.

‘Well, now you know.’ Elton nodded. ‘She’s a nice person. Do her a favour and tell her you got another source. This ain’t her thing, man. Girl’s just trying to impress you.’

‘Me?’ I gave a hollow laugh and pulled off my hat. ‘Really?’

Elton shrugged. ‘I said she was nice, not clever.’

‘I . . . uh.’ I’d asked her to get me another slab of resin. ‘I need her number then.’

Elton fished his little black book from the back pocket of his jeans. ‘Phone boxes on the corner don’t work. And you’ll only get her crazy mother. Better to go over. She’s in the Miller blocks, building three.’ He took a pencil stub and wrote her number and address on a scrap of paper torn from his book. ‘Go past the tube station, left past the Red Lion. You’ll see the blocks from there.’

‘Thanks.’ I shoved the note in my pocket and blew into my hands to warm them.

‘I’ll watch your bike.’ Elton started back toward his door. ‘Better take it by tonight, though, or I’m selling the wheels.’ He paused. ‘Oh, and that trick with the dice. I’m going to need to understand that before next session. Can’t have you rolling whatever number you want.’

I walked to Mia’s place, limping by the time I got there. Whether my growing nausea was nerves or the chemo biting I couldn’t tell. Either way it wasn’t good.

The Miller blocks were four ugly towers, about fifteen storeys each. She lived on the eighth floor of the one furthest away. The plaza between the four sported two old sofas with their springs showing. Around the back of Mia’s building was a burned-out car that had been there long enough to rust.

The lift stunk of urine and wasn’t going anywhere. I took the stairs. They smelled slightly less and were still fit for purpose. Someone had sprayed their initials on the reinforced glass at every floor. The same person. I had to admire their egotism.

By the eighth floor I was winded and hurting. I hoped Mia liked her gentlemen callers pale and sweaty, because that was what she was getting.

Generally, I like to know what I’m going to say before I say it. I tried to picture Mia opening her door to me. Even in my imagination I stood there stuttering. I paused to catch my breath at the fire door from the stairwell to the main corridor. ‘Hello’ would be a good start.

The stairwell door sported a small rectangle of glass shot through with crisscrossed wires and badly fractured. It afforded me a partial view of the hallway beyond. I leaned in closer. A figure in a puffed-up black jacket was slouched against the wall about halfway down. It looked for all the world like Michael Devis.

CHAPTER 9

Fear is a strange thing. Along with its close friend, pain, fear is a vital part of the kit that evolution has furnished us with for keeping alive. Part of its effectiveness comes down to how hard it can be to overcome. If you have vertigo, then no amount of assurance that it won’t hurt will get you to step off the highest board at the swimming pool. If you’re scared of spiders, then ‘it’s a thousandth of your size’ and ‘they don’t bite’ are not going to make you pick one of the bastards up. Knowing that, in twenty-five years’ time, I would punch Michael Devis in the face and enjoy it could not remove the fear of confronting him alone there in that dimly lit hall. And so I stayed where I was, dry-mouthed, heart pounding, and watched. What the hell was he doing here? He should be in school. A sore mouth wouldn’t have got him off this long.

I waited a good ten minutes. It felt closer to an hour. Devis paced, kicked a can around, then scowled at an old man who opened his door until he thought better of complaining about the noise and drew back his grey head. Devis returned to can kicking for a while. Eventually, he went to the door at the centre of his pacing and pounded on it.

‘I know you’re in there! I’m not going away.’ He strode off, turned sharply, and took to pounding again. ‘I called him. I said I would. You want to be ready and waiting downstairs with me when he gets here. He finds you’re still hiding in your hole, and that shiner I gave you is going to seem like a love tap.’

I couldn’t see the number on the door, but it was obviously Mia’s. I had to step in. I had to do something. Instead I just stood there. Waiting. I tried to reach for the anger I knew should be inside me. Devis was the one who had hit her! And, at last, way later than my pride told me I should, I found the fury I needed in order to act.

The fire door squealed as it opened and somehow Devis heard it even above the racket he was making. He turned to stare down the corridor, not seeming to recognise me. I stood with my fists balled, wondering how badly he’d beat me before letting up. Rage and terror appeared to be two sides of the same coin for me.

In that moment, Mia’s door opened and she stepped out, white-faced even without her Goth makeup. She had a rounders bat in one hand and swung it hard at the back of Devis’s knee. He cried out, staggered, and began to turn while she landed a flurry of blows across his back. I started running toward them.

By the time I arrived, Devis had hold of the bat, at the cost of taking a nasty hit to his hand. I did my best impression of the flying kicks that Elton was always demonstrating and connected with his hip, sending him sprawling down the hall, the bat skittering away. I went down too, though a little less dramatically than Devis.

Both of them stared at me in astonishment. Devis from the floor, groaning and cursing. Mia from her doorway, wide-eyed. I got to my feet before Devis did and went to stand over him, panting with fury, fright, indignation, and all the other gifts a sudden surge in adrenaline gives us.

‘Get the fuck out of here!’ It wasn’t the cleverest of lines. A hero issuing it at the D&D table would be mocked. But Devis seemed to take it seriously and scrambled past me, limping toward the stairs. He wouldn’t have run from me on my own, but maybe Mia had really hurt him with her bat. Either that, or he was scared that Demus would show up to save me again.

He stopped at the fire door and looked back, mouth bleeding, the side of his face still bruised. ‘He’s coming. I told you that!’ He looked frightened rather than pleased at the prospect.

I took a stamp-step toward him and he vanished, footsteps echoing down the concrete stairs.

‘Christ.’ Mia went to get her rounders bat.

‘Uh.’ I stood there feeling awkward, and no doubt looking awkward. The corridor smelled of old cooking. Baked beans perhaps.

‘You should leave,’ Mia said.

‘I . . . uh.’ I looked back down the hall. ‘I’d rather come in. I had something I wanted to ask you.’

Mia still looked worried. She sighed and motioned with her head for me to follow.

‘Keep your voice down. Mum’s asleep.’ She led through her front door, into the unlit hall behind, pausing to lean past me and put the chain on.

I followed, wondering how anyone who could sleep through Devis’s hammering and shouting could be woken by mere conversation.

Mia took me into their living room. There was enough room for a sofa, armchair, and TV, with a small coffee table squeezed between, buried under copies of TVTimes. The room stunk of cigarettes, and their smoke stained the ceiling. Two empty quarter-bottles of whiskey lay on the floor by the chair.

‘Sit?’ Mia flopped bonelessly into the armchair.

‘Thanks.’ I sat on the corner of the sofa. The covers were stained, and I expected to find them sticky to the touch.

‘You shouldn’t have come.’ Mia hunched in on herself, looking suddenly very thin. ‘And you should definitely leave. You don’t want to be here when he comes.’

‘Who?’ I tried to manufacture some confidence and sound reassuring. ‘Sacks?’

She blinked at that. ‘Sacks wouldn’t come here. You get taken to Sacks.’

‘Who then?’

‘Some new psychopath on Sacks’s crew. Young blood starting to cut himself a name.’ She reached for a cigarette pack on the table and, finding it empty, crumpled it. ‘He made a move on these blocks a few weeks back. Everyone expected Sacks to stamp him out, but he signed him up instead.’

‘Stamp him out?’ I snorted. ‘It’s not like this is Chicago. If people were being murdered left and right, it’d be in the papers!’

Mia raised an eyebrow at me, unsmiling. ‘If a person goes missing, it’s not a murder; it’s a missing person. People run away from their lives every day. I think about it five times a week myself.’