CHERUB: Brigands M.C. Read online

  Dante looked alarmed. ‘You’re saying I can never be completely safe?’

  Ross shrugged uneasily. ‘Dante, something has gone badly wrong and we underestimated the threat from the Führer and the Brigands organisation. We’ll have to be more thorough and give you a complete new identity. That will take a while to put together and while you’re waiting I’m going to suggest to social services that you move in with me.’

  ‘Presumably he’ll be much safer once the Führer is behind bars,’ Donald added. ‘I mean, they might hold a grudge, but nothing will get the Führer out of prison once he’s convicted.’

  ‘That’s him!’ Dante said, as he saw Doods standing in a crowd of full-patch bikers. They held beers and stared without interest at a stripper on stage in the background. ‘Photograph number eight-one-four. This guy, third from the right.’

  Ross grabbed a stapled paper index from his case before shuffling over the carpet on his knees so that he could see who Dante was looking at.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Ross asked as he looked up the index. ‘It says here that his nickname is Bolts. Real name Jonas Haarden.’

  Dante nodded. ‘My dad saved him after some bike crash. He’s got metal bolts in his legs.’

  Linda was impressed that Dante had kept his head together through a very upsetting morning. ‘So, Dante,’ she smiled. ‘These biker nicknames can change?’

  ‘Only if something big happens,’ Dante nodded. ‘Like if you were in a bad accident or you’re involved in some famous punch-up where you gouge out an eyeball or something.’

  While Dante explained, Holly headbutted a pile of wooden bricks and Ross had his telephone at his ear, asking a police colleague to e-mail him a copy of any information on Jonas Haarden and get a warning put out to customs and traffic police to try and arrest him.

  ‘He tipped us off though,’ Donald pointed out, when Ross ended his call. ‘He must have been trying to warn us.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Ross said, ‘but I still want him in for questioning. He’s our best link to whoever leaked Dante and Holly’s whereabouts. And if he just wanted to tip you off, why ride all the way out here? Why not pick up the phone?’

  ‘My dad saved his life,’ Dante said. ‘He wanted to buy me a present and make me feel nice.’

  ‘I hope that’s true,’ Ross said. ‘But I’m sensing something under the surface.’

  As Ross said this his mobile rang. Dante, Donald and Linda only heard Ross’ half of the conversation.

  ‘You’re kidding … No, wait. It’s sealed I think … Shit! OK, OK, I’ll call you right back.’

  ‘Something the matter?’ Donald asked, as Ross slid his phone shut.

  ‘Where are the toy cars Doods bought?’ Ross said urgently.

  ‘In the hallway,’ Dante said. ‘I was gonna open them, but the policeman told me to leave them in the box because you might want them dusted for fingerprints.’

  ‘We’ve got to leave the house, right now,’ Ross said.

  Linda was first to work out what was going on. ‘Are you saying there’s a bomb in my house?’

  ‘There’s a chance,’ Ross said, standing up. ‘Maybe only a slim one, but I’m not risking it.’

  Donald scooped up Holly as Linda led the way out on to the front doorstep. Always a mum, she made sure the two kids had warm coats as they skirted around Dante’s gift and walked between the two cars down the front driveway.

  ‘My colleague will call the local cops,’ Ross explained. ‘They’ll cordon off the road and bring in a bomb disposal team. They should be here within twenty minutes.’

  ‘Why do we think it’s a bomb all of a sudden?’ Dante asked.

  Ross explained. ‘Doods, Bolts, or whatever you choose to call him was a member of the Brigands’ Rotterdam chapter. They had a nasty little turf war with two other gangs, which ended when a clubhouse blew up and fourteen members of the rival gangs got blasted. Doods was implicated in the bombing. He’s on the Dutch police’s most wanted list and nobody’s seen or heard from him in over a year.’

  ‘But why go to the bother of a bomb?’ Donald asked, as Holly yanked his ear.

  ‘A bomb gives the killer time to put space between himself and the victim,’ Ross explained. ‘You can trigger a bomb by text message from the other side of the world.’

  *

  Donald and Linda Graves’ six-bedroom house was in one of the best streets in Guildford. The neighbours were mostly wealthy, with two nice cars on the driveway, two or three brats and breadwinners who paid their mortgages with well-paid jobs in London.

  This comfortable lifestyle jarred with the experience of most kids fostered by Donald and Linda. Over the years kids in their care had been blamed – usually correctly – for everything from vandalising street signs to lobbing fireworks at a show-winning chihuahua.

  However, in more than thirty years of fostering Dante was the first kid who’d led to the entire street being cordoned off pending the arrival of a four-man bomb disposal team. They came with sirens and orange lights. Two soldiers drove an army-green Land Rover, followed by a truck with riot mesh over the windscreen.

  Ross explained the situation, out of earshot of the gaggle of surprised pensioners evacuated from neighbouring homes and two sweaty women who’d arrived back from tennis. It was school time, so Dante was the only kid around.

  The driver of the Land Rover took his time strapping on an armoured suit and approaching the Graves’ home with a microphone-like probe held in a gloved hand.

  Dante had spent more time with the package than anyone else, so a female corporal kept him on hand and asked questions about whether he’d moved the package roughly since receiving it, whether it seemed heavier or lighter than he thought it ought to be and if the packaging around the cars looked like it had been tampered with.

  She seemed relaxed and let Dante ask questions back. ‘What does the thingy your friend’s holding do?’

  ‘Ricardo’s approaching the bomb with a sniffer,’ the woman explained. ‘It detects microscopic traces of explosives, rather like an airport security scanner. There’s also a video camera built into the tip. The lieutenant and sergeant are watching the video feed and telling him what to do.’

  Whilst Dante was captivated by the technology, Linda and Donald were staggered that they’d spent ninety minutes sitting within a few metres of a package that was now being approached by a soldier wearing titanium anti-blast armour.

  Ricardo moved slowly up the driveway. After two steps into the hallway, the soldier backed out as quickly as forty kilos of metal armour would allow. The sergeant came out the back of the van and yelled out: ‘Positive reading. Some kind of bonded plastic explosive. From the chemical signature I’d say C-4. We’ll need Mabel.’

  Dante had hoped the present had been a gesture of loyalty from a friend of his father. Only now did he believe that Doods had been trying to kill him.

  The female corporal who’d been speaking to Dante opened the back of the Land Rover and dragged out a ramp. Mabel was a compact bomb-disposal robot. She ran on four rubber tracks, each of which could pivot to enable the robot to climb stairs. Above the tracks were chemical sensors, a multiple jointed arm and a hose linked to four hundred litres of highly pressurised water.

  Mabel sped down the empty street as the female corporal helped Ricardo out of his armour. The bony sergeant working in the van noticed Dante hovering like a lost sheep and called him inside.

  Dante stepped warily into the van. It was filled with computer screens and keyboards. A handsome lieutenant sat in a padded chair manipulating the joystick that controlled Mabel’s tracks. Even with the back of the van open the heat from the electronics sucked all the moisture out of Dante’s mouth.

  ‘What do you think of our toy box then?’ the sergeant asked.

  ‘Aren’t you scared that the bomb will blow up?’ Dante replied.

  ‘If it does Mabel’s the only one that’ll get hurt,’ the sergeant explained casually. ‘I get nervous when I’m on a Lo
ndon building site, with some rusty old World War Two bomb in the middle of a waterlogged hole that’s too deep for Mabel. Or when I was in the desert, scratching at a piece of wire sticking out of the dirt and wondering if it was going to trigger a bomb, or if some Iraqi was going to shoot me up the arse when I bent over to take a look.’

  ‘So this is an easy bomb?’ Dante asked.

  The lieutenant answered: ‘Nothing makes us happier than finding a bomb in a dry, easily accessible space.’

  Dante managed to smile as he watched Mabel’s progress on the largest screen. The lieutenant positioned Mabel’s spindly arm above the handles of the shopping bag and looked at the nine-year-old.

  ‘Did you move this bag around much after you received it?’ the lieutenant asked.

  ‘Not that much,’ Dante explained. ‘My friend Ed wanted me to put them on charge so that we could race the cars as soon as we got home from school. So I took them into the play room at the front of the house, but before I got the box open the police came in and told me not to pull it about because Inspector Johnson might want to have it checked for fingerprints.’

  ‘In that case we’ll try to save Mrs Graves’ carpet,’ the Lieutenant said.

  Dante looked confused and the sergeant explained for him. ‘Mabel has eight nozzles, like a shower head, except if you stood under those nozzles when the water came out the water would cut through your body like a knife. When we open the tank, four hundred litres will be blown out in a quarter second. The water flushes the bomb, literally blowing the components apart before there’s any chance of detonation.’

  As the sergeant spoke, Mabel’s claw grasped the handles on the Toys R Us bag. She picked it up and wheeled it backwards, down the driveway and into the middle of the street.

  ‘Arming,’ the sergeant said, before lifting the safety catch over a large red button with red and black hazard stripes all around it and flipping two switches marked danger. Dante thought it was exactly the kind of button he’d wanted to press his whole life.

  Outside the female corporal told the dozen or so folks standing near the cordon to turn away in case of flying debris or in case the flushing operation went wrong.

  On the lieutenant’s nod, Dante squished his thumb against the button. There was a deep thud, and the sound of rattling plastic and rain. The accompanying shockwave set off whoops, shrieks and neh-nahs from car and burglar alarms.

  As Dante jumped out of the van to see the damage, Ricardo and the female corporal ran up the damp street and stood in the gutters trying to prevent valuable evidence from going down the drain. Inside the van, the lieutenant used Mabel’s cameras to survey the shattered pieces of plastic and metal. As he swivelled the camera he noticed the shattered faceplate of the cars’ radio control unit. It lay face down with a piece of plasticine-like explosive taped to the back.

  After zooming in to make sure that the water blast had imploded the detonator he waved to the sergeant.

  ‘There’s your explosive,’ he explained.

  The sergeant squinted. ‘That’s not even enough to blow the wheel of a car.’

  ‘Yeah but think how Dante would have been holding that thing when he was driving the car,’ the lieutenant said. ‘It was probably rigged to trigger after the unit had been used for a few minutes. The full force of the blast would have hit him in the face and chest.’

  ‘Pretty clever,’ the sergeant said, nodding reluctantly. ‘Someone sure wants the little guy dead.’

  8. DREAMS

  Dante spent the next two weeks living in Ross Johnson’s London flat, while Holly stayed with a new foster family a few miles away. Ross was divorced, but his university-aged daughter Tina was home for Christmas holidays.

  Following the bomb attempt the police were taking no chances with the only witness to a quintuple murder. Dante’s third school in as many months was six miles from Ross’ home and it had been chosen for its location on a dead-end street.

  An armed police officer drove him each morning and sat in his car making sure nobody suspicious came through the school’s only entrance. At lunchtime he’d swap with another officer, who’d take Dante home and stay until just before bedtime. A third officer kept guard through the night.

  It was an isolated existence. At school Dante was known as Kevin Drake. There were a couple of boys he got on with, but the other kids had settled into their own cliques which were hard to break into.

  Things other kids took for granted were complicated by bodyguards and security details. Boy Scouts was out of the question because the church hall had an unlit car park and exits on three sides. An invite to a Saturday afternoon birthday party required a change in shifts and Ross having to fill in forms and negotiate overtime payments with the Devon police force who were paying for Dante’s protection.

  Dante had always been the kind of kid who terrorised the playground and wound up teachers. But now he withdrew, burying himself in wrestling magazines, wondering about death and dreaming up elaborate fantasies of killing the Führer. He seemed content to watch the world drift by, rather than to take part in it. He only livened up when he got to visit Holly. He always tried to bring her sweets, or make a paper windmill or do some little thing to get her excited. Holly’s foster mum would take them out to a local swing park and her oneyear-old innocence allowed him to be a normal big brother until he looked up and saw the plain-clothes officer walking behind with a bulge under his jacket.

  Dante’s teachers didn’t know his background and thought he was just taking time to settle. Ross was a trained psychologist. He knew Dante was depressed but couldn’t do much about it.

  He’d sent e-mails to a few trusted psychologist colleagues asking if they had any ideas, but their replies told him what he already knew: Dante needed to start a new life in a safe location with Holly. This wouldn’t be a miracle cure, but over time he’d make new friends, develop new interests and begin to put distance between the grief in his past and his new life.

  But Dante couldn’t lead an ordinary life while the Führer was walking the streets. There wasn’t even a date for a trial because the Devon police hadn’t even charged him with the murders. Ross tried to sound upbeat when Dante was around, but privately feared that the boy might be stuck in limbo for two or three years.

  *

  Dante’s mind drifted as he pressed the light on his projector clock. It was one of the few items salvaged from his previous existence and despite a melted facia and a warped lens it still put a legible 00:17 on to the ceiling.

  For as long as Dante could remember he’d taken sleep for granted. He’d stay up as late as he could get away with, then crash out until he woke early the next morning. He’d either watch cartoons for an hour before breakfast, or if he’d stayed up too late he’d get shaken awake by his mum yelling at him to put his uniform on before she whacked him on the arse. Now he’d fight to get to sleep, then he’d wake up with nightmares.

  Dante pulled his duvet around his head and brought his knees up into a foetal position. He closed his eyes and imagined that he was in a concrete bunker deep underground. He was protected behind huge metal doors, with video cameras. He had weapons. He had huge muscles like a wrestler, and he was famous and had hundreds of bodyguards who’d batter anyone who tried to come near him.

  Dante’s fantasy got shattered by a deep belch from the policeman sitting in the living-room less than two metres away. Some of the bodyguards were nice and played video games and stuff, but Constable Fairport spent all his time studying his sergeant’s exam textbooks and looked like steam would vent from his ears if anyone made noise.

  Now that he’d stirred, Dante found his ear was itching. The pillow felt lumpy and he had to move because the position that had been fine twenty seconds earlier now seemed completely impossible. He pressed the button on the clock again: 00:19. He’d been in bed since nine and reckoned he’d slept for less than an hour.

  Dante’s brain ran in circles. Pressing the clock made him think about his mum again, and he
fondly remembered the way she always yelled at him with a half smile on her face and threatened to whack him, even though she never did apart from two or three times when he’d done something totally crazy. Like the time he’d got up in the night and filled Jordan’s school bag with mud.

  *

  Dante woke with a start, as if someone had poured ice down his back. In the dream he’d been locked in the cellar of the South Devon Brigands clubhouse and the men upstairs in the bar were about to set one of the guard dogs on him.

  He touched the clock – 01:07 – and couldn’t believe that he’d only slept for another hour. As his hand moved under the covers it dragged through a wet patch. He smelled the pee as he lifted the covers.

  ‘Stupid idiot!’ he cursed to himself, before gritting his teeth and punching his mattress.

  Dante had never wet the bed when his parents were alive, or even at the Graves’ house afterwards. But ever since Doods and the bomb threat he’d woken up wet every second or third night. Sometimes even twice.

  The first few times he’d been so upset that his crying woke everyone up, but even though Ross said it wasn’t his fault after all he’d been through, Dante was embarrassed and didn’t want lots of people waking up and making a fuss every time it happened. To ease the problem Ross had bought a mound of cheap duvets and sheets, along with a plastic mattress protector and loads of pyjamas.

  Dante quickly stripped off his sheets and carried them along the hallway to the bathroom. He locked the door and put everything in the basket before standing over the toilet. He peed a little bit and stood over the bowl for ages trying to make absolutely sure that there was nothing else there. When he finished he threw his pyjama bottoms on top of the sheets and wiped himself off with a warm flannel.

  Once he was done he pumped some spray disinfectant into the laundry bin and put the lid on tight so that the sheets didn’t stink out the bathroom. As he headed out he realised that he’d forgotten to grab clean pyjama bottoms. He’d have to run back to his room half nude, but it was only a few steps so he didn’t think it would be a problem.