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  A sign on the fridge read, Abandon hope ye who enter here. Fay braved the warning and was pleasantly surprised to find a bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice well inside its sell-by date. She gulped it as she walked down the hallway.

  At the bottom of the stairs she was alarmed by a gentle thumping sound. The bass line became something vaguely recognisable as she crept upstairs. After passing a bathroom that was better not thought about, and the closed door which was the source of the music, Fay checked out the other two bedrooms on the floor.

  One belonged to a guy who’d left his stinking rugby gear all over the place and whose idea of interior decoration was to hang a bright yellow Norwich City flag across his window. The third first-floor bedroom looked a lot more promising.

  Its owner was female. Judging by the clothes strewn about she was a borderline Goth, similar height and shoe size to Fay but a much heavier build. Fay undressed quickly, swapping her blood-spattered jacket and jeans for a black puffa jacket, black leather boots and striped black and green leggings.

  She swept a ten-pound note and a fiver’s worth of change off a small desk. Unfortunately, people take their smartphones with them when they go out, but there was a laptop on the desk, and Fay was delighted when she tapped the space bar and it came to life without demanding a password.

  After opening the web browser and noting that the laptop’s owner was called Chloe, Fay typed the name of the street she was on into Google Maps to work out where she was. Then she looked at the train routes back to London. Travelling from Manchester Piccadilly in the centre of town was too risky, but she worked out that she could get a bus from a nearby street to Stockport and pick up a London train from there.

  The bad news was that she now had about forty pounds, and the ticket to London was sixty-five. Dressed in her baggy Goth gear, Fay headed up to the second floor. This floor comprised a single room carved into the loft space.

  The occupants seemed to be a couple and Fay started going through the drawers looking for money. She found a few euros and a dead mouse between the wardrobes, but the problem was, students don’t have lots of money, and they take the money they do have with them when they go out.

  Fay was back on the stairs when she heard the first-floor toilet flush. She doubled back, but the guy who’d been listening to music in his room eyeballed her halfway down the stairs.

  ‘Who are you?’ the lad asked. This was a shared house, so his north-west accent sounded more curious than alarmed.

  ‘I’m friends with Chloe,’ Fay said airily. ‘She gave me the key and said to wait for her. We’re studying together.’

  Fay emphasised this by making a writing gesture.

  ‘Studying what exactly?’

  ‘Our subject,’ Fay stuttered.

  ‘You’ll have a tough time. She dropped out and works behind the till in Tesco’s. Now tell us who you are and why you’re sneaking around our house?’

  As the lad said this, he moved up the stairs and tried to grab Fay’s arm. He was well-built, so Fay’s only advantage was surprise. She let the hand grip her shoulder, but countered with a vicious palm under the chin. As the student stumbled back, Fay launched one of her newly acquired black boots at his stomach. Then she jumped down the stairs and knocked him cold with a knee to the face.

  ‘That’ll teach you to ask awkward bloody questions,’ Fay said, as she crouched down and started going through the student’s pockets.

  She found ten pounds in his jeans, but hit the jackpot when she got into his room and found a wallet containing fifty. That gave her enough to get back to London and grab something to eat along the way. There was also an iPhone, but it asked for a pin code when she turned it on, so she left it behind.

  5. EUSTON

  Fay expected cops every time someone came into the carriage, every time the train stopped and when she arrived at London Euston. It was 8 p.m., bitter cold and sleety. After scoffing a quick Burger King she took a bus to Islington.

  The studio apartment Kirsten owned there was at the top of a six-storey block. The lift was out and Fay got called a ‘skinny slut’ by random kids hanging out on the stairs. Once she was in, she switched the boiler on. She found a bin liner and placed the knife in it, along with everything she’d worn that day.

  After a shower Fay towelled off and opened a wardrobe. There were spare clothes, though she’d grown since they’d been left here so she ended up wearing some of her aunt’s gear instead. Once she was dressed, Fay pulled an armchair out of a corner, rolled back the carpet and lifted a floorboard.

  She felt slightly more secure when she saw the cache. There was twenty thousand in cash, two small bricks of cocaine, mobile phones and a selection of weapons and body armour, including two automatic pistols and a compact machine gun.

  Fay took out a knife and a couple of hundred in cash. The only place to sleep was a sofa bed, so Fay unfurled it and hunted around until she found a duvet and pillows in a cupboard off the hallway. As she lay in bed, part of her was tempted to turn her mobile on to see if there was any message from her aunt, but she knew it would give her location away.

  Instead she burrowed under the duvet feeling scared, trying not to see the knife slashing the cop’s face and hoping that her aunt was going to turn up with some sort of plan.

  *

  Fay woke early, but had nothing to do except hide. It was a grim December morning and the flat felt lonely so she reached out with her big toe and switched on an ancient portable TV. The signal kept breaking up, but Fay sat with her head poking out of the duvet watching a cosy interview with a bunch of kids from some new reality show, followed by Carol the weather girl.

  Then the seven o’clock headlines gave her a ten-thousand-volt shock.

  ‘Manchester police are hunting a girl of thirteen who left a police officer in a critical condition after a major drug deal went wrong.’

  Fay saw herself up on screen. The first image was blurry CCTV footage from the lobby of the Belfont hotel. The second was a full-resolution photograph, taken when she’d visited France the previous summer. The cops could only have got it by searching the apartment in St John’s Wood.

  The TV cut to a clip from a police press conference:

  ‘Following lengthy surveillance work, Manchester Police in conjunction with the Metropolitan Police staged an operation to break up a large drug deal. Several Manchester gang members and a London-based female were arrested. Sixteen kilos of cocaine and a large quantity of cash were also seized.

  ‘One of the suspects is believed to have brought her thirteen-year-old niece with her. When police tried to apprehend the girl, she assaulted two officers, leaving one in a serious but stable condition. I can’t emphasise strongly enough that this young teenager is extremely dangerous. So I must ask the public not to approach her, but to inform the police as quickly as possible if you think you’ve seen her.’

  The TV cut back to a correspondent standing outside the Belfont hotel.

  ‘Within the last few hours it’s become clear that a girl fitting the police description robbed a house in the Ardwick area of Manchester; following this, CCTV shows her boarding a train from Stockport to London.’

  As Fay sat up in bed, a dry heave rose from her stomach. Her aunt had been busted, the cop was on the critical list and her picture was on every TV screen in the country.

  ‘You are so screwed,’ she told herself.

  The flat was a refuge, at least. Fay had money and weapons, but when she padded through to the kitchen she realised that there was no food. She remembered passing a convenience store the night before and she reckoned it was best to go out while it was dark and the streets were quiet.

  The lifts were still out of order, so she buried her head in one of her aunt’s hoodies as she walked down six floors and crossed the street to Dinesh’s Food & Wine. She moved quickly, filling a
basket with fruit, chocolate bars, microwave rice and enough tinned stuff to last her a week.

  At the counter she felt sick, because her face was staring off half the morning newspapers. She wondered whether she’d have been better off going hungry for a day and hoping that her face dropped out of the news.

  Back in the flat, Fay started thinking long term. She had money and weapons. All she’d ever known was robbing drug dealers and she reckoned she could keep that up on her own. Maybe the heat would die down after a week or so. She’d be able to move around more freely. But realistically, could she live on the run, or was she just delaying an inevitable arrest and the consequences of what she’d done?

  Fay needed something to take her mind off things, but the apartment didn’t offer much. She made beans on toast, then she lay on the sofa bed, obsessively watching News 24. Every half-hour it was the same story about the cop in a critical condition and the correspondent standing outside the Belfont hotel getting colder but saying more or less the same thing.

  Sometimes Fay got upset, thinking about her aunt in prison. Sometimes she worried about the cop, knowing that the consequences would be a lot more severe if he died. Just after ten she started crying. She picked up her phone and thought about turning it on and telling the cops to come and get her.

  Then the front door exploded.

  ‘Police!’

  A blast of CS gas came down the hallway. Fay moved instinctively towards a sliding glass door that led out on to a balcony. As she threw the door open she breathed a mix that was half air, half gas, and felt a burning sensation in her lungs.

  Freezing puddles soaked Fay’s socked feet as she scrambled out on to the balcony. Cops were coming into the apartment, clad head to toe in black body armour and gas masks. She looked up, but the building’s flat roof was out of reach. She looked down at the chance of death, splattered over the street six floors below. The idea of jumping had a certain appeal, but one of the cops reached on to the balcony and grabbed her hoodie.

  He pulled her inside so hard that her neck clicked. The air inside the apartment was full of CS gas, and Fay retched and choked as she was ‘accidentally’ slammed against the apartment wall before a big boot kicked her legs away.

  Fay’s head caught the corner of the TV stand as a burly cop slammed her hard against the floor. The officer then ripped her arms behind her back and locked on a set of plasticuffs.

  ‘Fay Hoyt, you are under arrest on suspicion of attempted murder. You do not have to say anything, but anything you do say may be taken down and used in evidence against you.’

  The CS gas made Fay’s eyes stream as the cop shoved her towards the apartment door.

  ‘We don’t like people who attack our fellow officers,’ the cop growled. ‘You are in deep, deep shit.’

  PART TWO

  June 2014

  6. RANK

  CHERUB campus

  ‘Dammit, team Sharma!’ Instructor Speaks shouted, as he leaned into a changing room stained with the residue from thousands of paintball battles. ‘I’ve seen one-legged pensioners move faster than you. If you’re not dressed, equipped and lined up for inspection within two minutes, you can run five laps around the training compound.’

  There were two teams of four on the training exercise. Fifteen-year-old Ryan Sharma had been dragged out of bed ninety minutes earlier. He’d been given ten minutes to dress and eat breakfast, before being made to run out to the campus obstacle course. After three gruelling circuits over climbing nets, narrow poles and rope swings, his black CHERUB shirt was a soggy sheet of sweat that clung to his skin.

  Ryan’s team mates were his three siblings: twelve-year-old twins Leon and Daniel, and nine-year-old Theo.

  ‘We’re gonna boil running around in this lot,’ Leon moaned, as he zipped a padded overall over his running kit and started pushing his feet back into his boots.

  While Leon complained, Theo was having a meltdown because the zip on his overall was stuck. ‘This is so bogus,’ he shouted.

  Ryan already had his boots and face mask on and instinctively moved to help his youngest brother.

  ‘Calm down,’ Ryan said firmly. ‘How will you make it through a hundred days’ basic training, if you get flustered over a little zip?’

  ‘You’re such a wuss, Theo,’ Leon added unhelpfully.

  Ryan gave Leon a look of contempt as he stepped in front of Theo and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Let me try.’

  ‘It’s totally stuck,’ Theo blurted, as he tugged the zip with all his might.

  ‘You’re trying to force it,’ Ryan said. ‘You’ll just break it.’

  Instructor Speaks shouted through the doorway. ‘Thirty seconds.’

  Ryan went down on one knee. He took hold of the long zip running up the front of Theo’s overall and ran it back and forth a couple of times before successfully whizzing it all the way up to his chin.

  ‘There,’ Ryan said, as his little brother smiled gratefully. ‘Panicking won’t get you anywhere, will it?’

  Warm sunshine hit the four dark-haired brothers as they stepped out of the changing room dressed in matching army-green overalls, thick gloves and black paintball helmets.

  ‘Ahh, finally,’ Instructor Speaks said, as he made a clap with his giant black hands.

  The Sharma brothers’ rival team had already assembled on the tarmac ramp leading up to the paintball range. Its four members were all friends of Ryan: fifteen-year-old Fu Ning, his sometime girlfriend Grace Vuillamy and his two best mates Max Black and Alfie DuBoisson.

  ‘Gonna flatten you!’ Alfie threatened.

  ‘We may be younger and smaller, but we’ve got it where it counts,’ Daniel shouted, as he tapped his head. ‘Brainpower.’

  ‘Your team consists of two chubby chicks and a pair of cock heads,’ Leon added.

  Ning and Grace both reared up.

  ‘Say that to my face and see what you get,’ Grace shouted.

  Mr Speaks puffed out his muscular chest and cracked some knuckles. ‘This banter is all very entertaining, but I want to keep those hearts pumping, so listen good because I’m not going to repeat myself.

  ‘Spread around the paintball range you will find eight paintball guns, eight compressed air cylinders to make the guns work, and eight hoppers containing a hundred and fifty paintballs. You may also find shields and other equipment that will assist your efforts to get hold of these items.’

  ‘It’s like the Hunger Games,’ Theo said quietly.

  ‘The object of the game is to find and assemble the guns and shoot the four members of the opposite team. If you are hit by a paintball, you’re dead and must leave the compound.

  ‘If neither team wins within three hours, the game will be declared a draw and I’ll make you all run around campus holding large sandbags over your heads. Usual safety rules apply. No low blows, or eye gouging. Additionally, with paintballs zipping around, keep your helmets on at all times and don’t do anything to remove another person’s helmet.

  ‘Your individual performances will be assessed. Anyone not showing initiative or working hard throughout will be referred to the training department for a one-on-one refresher training course with yours truly. Any questions?’

  Max Black raised his hand and Mr Speaks pointed at him.

  ‘Three laps of the training compound after the exercise for you,’ Speaks spat.

  Max was incredulous. ‘What?’

  ‘I explained everything that needs explaining,’ Speaks shouted. ‘If you need to ask a question, it means you weren’t listening.’

  Max swore quietly inside his mask, but knew he’d only get more punishment laps if he argued.

  ‘The time is now eleven minutes past nine,’ Mr Speaks shouted. ‘So you have until eleven minutes past twelve. Get moving!’

  Mr Speaks opene
d the paintball compound gate and the two teams jogged through. A black bin bag stood on the grass about a hundred metres inside. Ryan caught sight of it first and broke into a sprint, but soon found Max and Alfie from the rival team charging up behind.

  Ryan grabbed the bag and instantly saw it was too light to contain paintball stuff. Max got a hand on it and ripped the plastic open. A bunch of brightly coloured ropes and climbing gear spilled out over the grass. Ryan bent down to scoop some of it up, but immediately got tackled by bulky fourteen-year-old Alfie.

  ‘Give it up, prom queen,’ Alfie ordered, as Ryan clutched a bunch of ropes to his chest. He wasn’t sure how useful the ropes were likely to be, but he was determined to keep hold of some.

  Ryan glanced over his shoulder, hoping that one of the twins would come and give him a hand. But apparently Grace and Ning had taken exception to being called chubby and – unable to tell which twin was which – had decided to go after both of them.

  After a tussle, Ryan found himself flat on the ground with Alfie sitting across his chest and Max holding a bunch of ropes.

  ‘Why don’t we tie him up?’ Max asked. ‘Then we’ll just have his three little brothers to deal with.’

  ‘No tying up,’ Ryan protested.

  ‘Says who?’ Max asked, as he prepared a large loop to hook around Ryan’s ankles.

  Alfie nodded. ‘We got the standard lecture about low blows and head shots, but I never heard nothing about tying up.’

  Ryan bucked frantically. ‘Damn your big fat arse, Alfie.’

  Alfie smirked. ‘Shut it or I’ll grunt on you.’

  ‘Exterminate!’ Theo shouted, as he jumped out from behind a tree holding a plastic dustbin lid.

  When he got close, he spun to avoid Alfie and barged into Max who was much skinnier. Theo was less than two thirds of Max’s weight, but he had enough momentum to knock him sideways.