He watched Marvel and Brady stride purposefully across the road, their coats flapping around them in the bitter wind.
‘Oi,’ one of them said – James couldn’t see who, and the sound was too muffled to tell from inside the car with the windows up.
Ang looked up at the two men bearing down on him, and even from the fifteen yards away, James could see the expression on his face turn from mild interest to fear as he scrambled to his feet, holding the bucket, and started to back away.
‘Shit!’ James yanked at the locked door again and then dived over the front seats in a desperate scramble to get out.
Even as he opened the door, James saw Ang hurl the bucket at Marvel.
Then he turned and ran.
If he hadn’t run, they wouldn’t have chased him.
Marvel and Brady had no reason to chase Ang Nu, other than getting a bucket of something thrown at them. They weren’t there officially and they weren’t there for him, and if Brady hadn’t been there too – hurtling after the kid like he was storming Goose Green – Marvel would have given up before they even reached the garage door.
But Ang Nu ran, and Brady was there.
Brady chased the kid and Marvel chased Brady – at a distance – through the garage, between cars with their bonnets open and under cars with their wheels off, past a tall, skinny man who observed them with unsurprised eyes, and a tubby man, yelling, ‘What the hell is going on! I’m calling the fucking police!’
‘We are the police!’ shouted Marvel.
‘I didn’t call you!’ the man shouted furiously after him. ‘Where’s my fucking phone?’
A radio blared pop as Marvel ran into a dead end where there was nothing but an inspection pit filled with junk and a couple of bins overflowing with old car parts and packaging.
‘Shit!’ He turned round and shouted into the face of a pale-skinned man with white hair and eyelashes. ‘Where’s the back door?’
The man took his own sweet time pointing and Marvel jabbed a finger at him and said, ‘I’ll be back for you, Whitey,’ like he was Terminator, not an out-of-shape forty-five-year-old, panting and blowing.
‘You’ll have a fucking heart attack first, fatty!’ shouted the man as Marvel banged his way through the back door and into the alleyway behind Northborough Road.
Brady and the kid where nowhere to be seen.
Thank Christ.
Marvel slowed to a brisk walk and headed past the back of Anna Buck’s flat. Walled yards on one side, high railway railings on the other.
Marvel stopped and leaned on the wall, and pressed a hand into his side to stave off a stitch. His head pounded and his mouth was dry in a way that reminded him of Anna Buck last night, curled on the floor …
He should really lose some weight. Debbie was killing him with culinary kindness. He should walk the dog. Get fit.
His breathing slowed.
A small electronic beep made him turn his head.
The Chinese kid was clambering out of the skip behind TiggerTime. While he still had one leg over the edge, Marvel rushed him.
He nearly got him.
At the last moment, the boy saw him coming and hurled himself backwards, away from Marvel and out of the other end of the skip. He hit the ground with a grunt but was up like lightning, and by the time Marvel had crossed the four paces between them, he was off and running again.
This time Marvel had to run fast. There was nobody else to rely on. He did his best to keep his arms moving and breath passing in and out of his lungs.
It was agony.
He could see that the alleyway ended fifty yards ahead. A merciful dead end created by the rising wall of Bickley Bridge, where he’d first met Anna Buck.
It’s all circles.
The boy reached the wall and stopped and turned to see how close Marvel was.
‘Hold it right there!’ shouted Marvel, and for one second he could see in the kid’s eyes that he just might do that.
Then Brady shouted and burst out of a yard somewhere behind Marvel, and the boy hurled himself at the steel railway fence and started to climb.
Marvel got there just in time to grab his foot, but the boy kicked out at him so hard that his phone fell from his pocket and his shoe came off in Marvel’s hand. Then he toppled over the top of the fence and dropped into the grass and brambles and litter on the other side. For a second their eyes met through the railings.
‘So sorry!’ panted the boy, pleading. ‘So sorry!’
Then Brady hit the fence beside Marvel with a rattle, and went over it, and the boy turned and ran again – this time along the steep bank beside the tracks.
Marvel got a bad feeling, a sudden dread. ‘Stop!’ he yelled. ‘Brady! Stop!’
Brady did, and so did the boy – he stopped and half turned to see what was happening.
Pivoted on one toe.
The overflow of momentum took him back a step.
The drop was steep, and when he put his foot down behind him, the ground wasn’t where it should have been.
One minute he was standing, looking at them, arms still swinging around his body with the energy of the chase.
The next, he had tumbled backwards down the bank and out of sight.
‘Shit!’
Marvel waited for the sound of a train to complete the horror, but there was nothing. He tested the railings in his fists and – with a deep grunt – pulled himself up and over them. Sweat sprung up on his face at the unaccustomed effort. He got his coat snagged at the top and half jumped, half fell on to the other side, accompanied by a loud ripping noise.
He got to his feet unsteadily.
‘Where is he?’ he yelled at Brady.
Brady turned towards him and pointed down the bank. ‘There.’
A few feet from the fence, the ground fell away steeply, so Marvel approached cautiously.
Ang Nu had not had that luxury.
At the foot of the embankment, abutting the brickwork of the bridge, was a wrought-iron fan of Victorian railings, made to keep children and the homeless out of the short tunnel.
Today its sharp points had broken a homeless child’s fall.
One had speared Ang Nu’s buttock; another protruded from his chest.