I weighed them in my hand. It was certainly a lot of money.
‘We can’t take that,’ Luke said suddenly, and we all looked at him.
‘Why not?’ Jeff said.
‘Because it’s stealing.’
I stood up. ‘Luke, this isn’t honestly earned money. The guy sells drugs. He trades in people’s misery. It’s not theft, it’s liberation.’
But Luke shook his head. ‘It’s still stealing.’
I felt frustration well up inside me. I needed to provide him with a logic for taking it. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Andy and Rachel are a couple, right? They share their lives. So, by rights half of this should be hers.’ I threw one of the bundles back into the trunk. ‘We’ll only take her half.’
‘Hey!’ Jeff protested.
But I never took my eyes off Luke. ‘It’s more than enough to get us to London, Jeff. What do you say, Luke?’
I could see the internal struggle going on behind his eyes. Whatever else those years of being dragged around the doors had done, they had instilled in him an unshakeable sense of morality, of right and wrong.
He nodded and said quietly, ‘Okay.’
Maurie and Rachel appeared in the doorway. She was wearing a black leather jacket now, and he was carrying her holdall.
‘We ready to go?’
‘We are.’ I thrust the notes at Dave. ‘Better stash this in your money belt.’
Luke leaned into the trunk and lifted out the plastic bag of white powder. ‘Not leaving him with this, though.’ And he pushed past the rest of us to get to the toilet, where he burst open the bag and emptied its contents down the pan.
Rachel’s voice was hushed and filled with fear. ‘Oh my God, he’ll kill us. He really will. He’ll kill us.’
Luke flushed the toilet.
We were all in the hall when the front door opened. A thickset youth wearing ox-blood Doc Martens and black drainpipe jeans lifted his head to look at us in astonishment. He had a chequered shirt beneath a navy-blue donkey jacket, like coalmen wore, with leather patches across the shoulders and on the elbows. He sported an American army-style crew cut, and had a scar that ran from the corner of one eye, through top and bottom lip, to his chin. His eyes were a dangerous blue, one of them substantially paler than the other, and he was as surprised to see us as we were to see him.
There was a moment of tense stand-off as we all assessed the situation.
His eyes found Rachel’s. ‘What the fuck’s going on, Raitch?’
Incongruously, I was aware that he didn’t have a northern accent. It was a London twang, like you heard on Steptoe and Son. But he didn’t wait for an answer. His right hand went around behind him, to pull a long-bladed knife from beneath his jacket. He held it out to one side, away from his body, tense and ready to fight.
The rest of us were frozen by fear. There might have been five of us, but he was the one with the knife. And whoever came up against him first was going to feel the cold, deadly penetration of its blade.
‘Put the fuckin’ chib away, pal,’ Dave said in his broadest Glasgow accent. ‘And you might just come oot o’ this alive.’
I flicked a quick glance in his direction. I knew Dave to be the gentle giant that he was, and I had never heard him speak this way before. He was trading on his home city’s unenviable reputation for gang warfare and violence, and the attendant sense of menace inherent in the Glasgow accent. It had its effect.
Doc Martens let a little of his tension go, and he took half a step back. ‘So what’s happening?’
Rachel’s voice was trembling. ‘Just some of Andy’s friends down from Glasgow, Johnno. No need for aggro.’
I saw his eyes pass quickly over each of us in turn, making a rapid appraisal, before his gaze turned towards the bedroom door, and I knew he must have seen the open trunk. It was pure instinct that made me reach for Rachel’s holdall and take it from Maurie. If one of us didn’t take the initiative, then Johnno would, and he was still the one with the knife.
‘Brought him some good stuff,’ I said, and Johnno’s eyes dropped for a moment to the bag.
I swung it at his head as hard as I could, surprised by the weight of it, swivelling on the ball of my foot and very nearly losing my balance. The bag connected full-on with the side of Johnno’s head and smacked it hard against the wall. I saw blood burst from his mouth and his eyes tip back in his head. His knife slipped from his fingers as he dropped to his knees and fell forward.
‘Bloody hell!’ I looked at Rachel. ‘What have you got in here?’
Frightened eyes darted from the bag to meet mine. She shrugged. ‘Nothing, really. Shoes mostly.’
‘Shoes?’ Maurie glared at her. ‘That’s the minimum that you need?’
‘Let’s get the hell ootie this bloody place!’ Dave stepped over Johnno’s groaning and semi-conscious body curled up on the floor.
And one by one we followed him down the corridor, moving as fast and as quietly as we could towards the stairwell.
We got as far as the first landing, the echo of our footsteps following us down, when we heard voices and stopped in time to see three youths coming round the bend on the landing below us. They stopped, too, looking up in surprise through the gloom and graffiti, and there was the briefest hiatus. Then the tallest of them, a pale, good-looking boy with blond hair greased back in a quiff, bellowed Rachel’s name. The force of it in the confined space of the stairwell was almost shocking.
‘It’s not what you think, Andy.’ Rachel’s voice seemed feeble by comparison, like the plaintive cry of a seagull against the roar of a storm.
But Andy’s eyes had found and fixed themselves on Maurie. ‘You?’
And I saw knives glinting suddenly in the light that came up the stairwell from below. We turned to run back up the way we had come.
‘Keep going,’ Rachel said breathlessly. ‘All the way to the top. We can get on to the roof.’
Then what? I thought.
And almost as if she had heard me, she whispered in the dark, ‘We can get down another stairwell.’
As we ran up to the next floor I could hear raised voices shouting below, Andy’s rising above the others. ‘Don’t worry. They’re not going anywhere. I want to check the flat first. Guard the stairs.’
Then the echo of footsteps running along the hall. I replayed Luke pouring the bag of heroin down the toilet, and I knew then that Rachel’s worst fears would almost certainly be realized.
Andy would kill us if he caught us.
Four floors later, lungs bursting, we staggered up the final flight of steps to the door that opened on to the roof. It wouldn’t budge.
‘Jesus, it’s locked!’ Dave’s voice exploded in the dark.
There was no light here and we could barely see a thing. Jeff and I put our shoulders to it. On the third attempt, we heard the splintering of wood and the door flew open.
We spilled out on to the huge, open expanse of flat curving roof. A combination of fear and oxygen-starved muscles very nearly stole away the ability of my legs to hold me up. I staggered, gasping for breath, and felt the cold rain mingling with the sweat on my face. I became aware of the almost eerie, yellow-misted cityscape that stretched off to the north, the occasional car or lorry passing seven floors below us on New York Road. On the other side, the lights of Quarry Hill twinkled in suffocating silence. For several minutes it was all we could do to catch our breath, and it took a blood-curdling yell rising up through the dark from the stairwell below to get us on the move again.
The roof was peppered with obstacles. Chimney cowlings, the openings to stairwells, square blocks housing lift gear for each stair. Rachel led the way, running between them, arms pumping, head thrust back, and I realized that I was still carrying her bag.