Rhea shook her head and held out her hand. 'Tenner.'

'We said five,' Leon noted.

'Unilateral renegotiation,' Rhea said, waggling her fingers. 'Seven minutes to curfew.'

'Bloodsucking leech,' Leon said cheerfully, wishing he didn't have to leave her as he grabbed two crumpled five-pound notes from his jeans and pa.s.sed them over.

'Pleasure doing business,' Rhea said, as Leon gave her a quick kiss, then grabbed his school pack and followed the others down the hallway towards the office.

Gurbir heard the three boys coming towards the exit and stepped out of his office, theatrically tapping the face of his watch.

'No, no, no.'

'It's before curfew,' Oli said. 'We're just going over to Morrisons. They're doing Jaffa Cakes for a pound.'

'Three of you?' Gurbir said, as he reached around and thumped Daniel's backpack. 'With luggage? How stupid do I look?'

Oli smirked. 'You always look pretty stupid, Gurb.'

Gurbir smiled and raised one finger. 'One of you can go over to Morrisons. And you'd better run. Ten past nine at the latest.'

'We're allowed out before nine,' Oli moaned. 'You're violating our human rights.'

'You must think I'm some sort of-'

Before Gurbir could finish, Rhea made a piercing scream from inside the TV room. 'They're fighting. They're fighting! Jono's been stabbed!'

'Stay,' Gurbir said, eyeing the three boys firmly before darting off in a jangle of keys.

The instant he was out of sight, Leon dashed into the office and hammered a green b.u.t.ton to unlock the exit door. By the time Gurbir reached the TV room, where a smiling Rhea told him that she was only joking, Leon, Oli and Daniel had vaulted the stairs and made it down the long corridor and out on to the street.

'Nice,' Daniel said, as outdoor air hit his lungs.

'Ten more minutes,' Leon moaned, as they started walking towards the main road. 'I was that close to getting Rhea's shirt off.'

'h.o.r.n.y toad,' Daniel sneered, as Oli led the way towards a battered Honda saloon with a phone number along the side. The driver looked suspicious as the three boys jumped in the back.

'I booked you,' Oli told the driver, waving a twenty-pound note, as Leon and Daniel looked out the back for any sign of Gurbir or one of the other Nurtrust staff. 'Drive.'

It was a ten-minute ride in the dark. The destination was a little row of shops beneath offices and eight storeys of student accommodation. The twins' eyes followed tattoos and a miniskirt into a busy Chinese takeaway. A convenience shop also seemed to be doing a good student trade, but the third shop in the row was boarded and the final shop was a dry cleaners'. Shuttered for the night, but with a couple working inside.

'There's a side gate,' Oli said, as he led the way around.

The gate was locked from inside, but the brick post alongside had a ledge that made it easy to clamber over and drop into a narrow courtyard. All the trash from the student accommodation dropped down chutes into four giant wheeled bins, and the smell tangled with a sickly aroma venting out the back of the dry cleaners'.

'Does that door even open from outside?' Leon asked, as he followed Oli up a flight of metal stairs.

'I've been here before,' Oli said triumphantly, as he turned a k.n.o.b and stepped into a hallway. 'Did some errands for Trey in the summer holidays.'

The lights blinked on with a motion sensor, showing off a bare concrete hallway with pipes and ductwork along the ceiling. The rumble of the dry-cleaning machine below mingled with thumping music from a student party above. Oli seemed to know his way, and pulled a key from his pocket as they approached a plain grey door. A cheap plastic sign read Sunray Travel Agents.

'Trey gave me the key,' Oli explained. 'He knows the building manager.'

Oli took half a minute to figure that you had to turn the key one way, then the other to open the deadlock. A burglar alarm chimed as the door opened, but Oli silenced it by tapping a plastic fob against the control plate inside the door.

There was a bank of lights, but Oli just flipped one switch, as Leon crept across the carpeted floor and peeked through a Venetian blind at the street out front.

'What's our job?' Daniel asked, as he studied three desks set up with MacBooks and a fourth with a giant hi-res monitor connected up to a Mac Pro. There was a toilet and kitchenette off to one side, and a gla.s.s part.i.tion, behind which stood a huge Xerox printing machine, and metal racking stacked with packets of large-format printing paper.

'Guess they print holiday brochures and stuff,' Leon said, as he leaned into the print room.

There was a stack of A2-sized posters just inside the door, depicting the Arabic alphabet along with the logo of a local mosque. Another poster showed ill.u.s.trations of Muslim prophets, printed for the same organisation.

'So Trey wants this place trashed,' Oli said. 'I'm gonna bung up the sinks in the kitchen and bathroom and run the water full blast. You guys smash up the big printer. I'm told it's worth over fifty grand. Then we throw all the papers and s.h.i.t on the floor so they get soaked.'

'Can we steal stuff?' Daniel asked, as he eyed a sw.a.n.ky Wacom graphics tablet and a shuttle controller used for video editing.

'Steal it or smash it,' Oli said, as he headed for the kitchen. 'That's what Trey asked.'

To emphasise the point, Oli picked a wilted spider plant off a desk, spewed soil over a desk top and then lifted one end of the desk so that everything slid on to the floor. As Daniel stuffed MacBooks and computer gear into his backpack, Oli started blocking the kitchen sinkhole with a bin-liner weighed down with a packet of paper and Leon went for the printer.

He didn't fancy getting electrocuted, so Leon ripped the plug out of the wall. The printer was a metre deep, shoulder height and almost three metres from where paper got sucked in to the point where it shot out the other end. He opened a bunch of plastic flaps around the machine and launched a couple of kicks, but it was a st.u.r.dy beast so he went to the kitchen.

'Quicker and quieter if we just pour water over it,' Leon told Oli.

Leon made several trips, pouring buckets of water over the printer, before pulling all the toner cartridges and paper off the shelves. Daniel had fun flipping desks and tipping the contents of drawers out over the floor. Oli seemed to have expertise in flooding, and not only got the kitchen and bathroom sinks overflowing, but also removed the lid of the toilet cistern and wedged the inlet valve so that water kept running into the blocked toilet bowl too.

A dozen minutes after they'd entered, the office was trashed and the puddles emerging from kitchen and bathroom had merged into one and were working their way across the carpet tiles.

'Someone's gonna be p.i.s.sed when they get to work in the morning,' Daniel said, as he wedged the cylindrical Mac Pro into Leon's backpack.

'Half-ten,' Oli said, as he headed back out into the hallway.

'What about the stolen gear?' Leon asked. 'Will Trey give us cash?'

'Trey won't want anything that links him to this,' Oli said, as the trio set off back towards the rubbish chutes. 'I know a dodgy p.a.w.n in town that'll probably take most of it.'

'But where will we keep it overnight?'

'Stop worrying, you chicken,' Oli said. 'Gurbir will have finished his shift. It's all agency staff on nights, and none of them give a s.h.i.t.'

15. GAMES.

Last lesson the next afternoon was Games. Leon pulled his blazer over his school football shirt and headed out of the changing room in shorts and muddy hooped socks. Daniel had decided to put tracksuit bottoms over his kit and came out a few seconds behind.

'Nice goal, man!' a big kid told Daniel. The twins had only been at the school for a week, so they barely even knew names of guys in their own cla.s.s.

'Cheers,' Daniel answered.

Changing meant they'd emerged from school after kids in regular lessons had cleared off. The twins crossed a paved yard with nothing but a few Year Eight girls standing around an outdoor ping-pong table. As they moved through a gate on to the pavement, they were surprised to spot the old man who'd beckoned Oli into the taxi office the previous afternoon.

'You boys,' he shouted, beckoning them towards a seven-seat VW parked across the street. 'Get here.'

The twins were curious as they waited for a break in traffic before jogging across. If they'd had their com units inside their ears they could have alerted James, but they'd taken them out before playing football in a soggy field.

The car was arranged so that the front pa.s.senger seat had been swivelled to face in towards the rear seat. 'You know who I am?' a stocky, olive-skinned man asked.

The old dude urged the boys to climb through the van's sliding door, but the boys stood their ground.

'What's this about?' Daniel asked.

'I'm Trey,' the stocky man said, as an even bigger dude in the driving seat turned around to eyeball the boys. 'Been looking for your smarta.s.s friend Oli. He got detention or something?'

The twins shrugged and exchanged nods before Leon said, 'He's not at this school. He goes to Fresh Start, over somewhere ... I don't know exactly.'

'Got expelled from here,' Daniel added.

The old guy kept urging the boys into the van, but Leon knocked his arm away when he gave him a shove.

'Don't touch me,' Leon growled.

'We're outta here,' Daniel added.

But as he took a step back, Trey pulled out a pocket revolver and c.o.c.ked the trigger. 'In,' he ordered.

Leon wondered if there was some way he could get his com from his backpack and alert James as he settled on a rear bench with stained blue covers stretched over it. The old guy slammed the sliding door, and didn't get a chance to jump in before Trey signalled his driver to pull out.

'What do you know about my print shop?' Trey asked, pocketing the gun as the van accelerated. 'I'm told Oli left Nurtrust with two older boys last night. Must be you, right?'

Trey clearly had a source, so the twins both nodded. 'Sure.'

'What in the name gives you the b.a.l.l.s to think you can rip off my print shop? You think you'd get away with it?'

'Little dirt bag stole that key from under my nose,' the driver added.

Leon and Daniel's jaws dropped. 'The print shop was yours?'

'My father's,' Trey said. 'How dumb are you?'

'Oli told us you run a protection racket,' Leon explained. 'Said we had to trash the joint. Owner hadn't made his payments or something.'

'I paid that weasel Oli four hundred,' Trey said, looking at his driver. 'But he threw a strop 'cos I said the pink phone wasn't worth much because it's a couple of years old.'

'Four hundred,' the twins gasped.

They'd searched Oli's pockets, but money could have easily been stashed inside his underwear or down a sock. 'He gave us sixty each.'

Trey leaned right to the edge of his seat as the VW took a corner. Close enough for the boys to catch garlic on his breath.

'You'd better not be lying,' Trey warned. 'Got a nice wrench for breaking thumbs back at the wood shop. But I'll go easy if you help us find golden boy. You got his number?'

Leon had few qualms about dropping Oli in it. He grabbed his mobile from his blazer and explained that it had to be switched off in school. In actual fact, his phone was modded and he swiped in using a special combination that meant all calls and messages would also be relayed via campus to James.

'Oli man, where you at?' Leon began. 'You bunked school ... ? Right ... When's your bus get in? You wanna meet up, get fish and chips or something ... ? You know the car park behind Morrisons? Come round there when you get off the bus ... ? I've got something to show you.'

Trey scowled as Leon ended the call and took a breath. Back at his flat, James got an emergency alert on his phone and listened in, impressed that Leon had the presence of mind to fix a meet right on his doorstep.

'Twenty minutes,' Leon said.

Rather than risk being seen with binoculars, James leaned out of his bedroom window and positioned a couple of tiddly wireless cameras so that he got a clear view over the car park. He grabbed a Taser and a Glock semi-auto pistol before heading downstairs to the car park and moving the Focus into a disabled bay with a decent view.

As James listened to m.u.f.fled audio coming via the monitoring function on Leon's phone, an attendant in an orange vest started writing him a ticket.

'Hoppit,' James growled, as he opened the driver's window and flashed a police ID.

The VW van came into the lot a couple of minutes later and parked a few s.p.a.ces down. James zoomed one of his remote cameras so that he could see in the vehicle's back window. The twins looked OK. Trey and the driver were having a conversation about a birthday present.

Daniel was allowed out of the car, and gave James a slight wave as he crossed into Morrisons' rear entrance, presumably to go out front and meet Oli as he got off the bus. James hopped out of the car, followed him through the back door of the little supermarket and quickly caught up.

'OK, mate?' James asked.

'Trey's got a gun, but he's not waving it around or anything. Says Leon will get it if I don't come back.'

'You're sure?' James asked, as the pair kept walking towards the street exit at the front of the shop. 'I can move in and get Leon out if you want.'

'Trey just wants to get hold of that lying b.a.s.t.a.r.d Oli,' Daniel explained. 'Wouldn't mind knowing what he's up to myself. Little rip-off merchant ...'

'Take this,' James said, pa.s.sing over a lipstick-sized tube of pepper spray. 'Bear attack formula,' he warned. 'Don't stick around if you spray it in the car, 'cos the fumes alone can blind you.'

'Nice one, Q.'

'Keep safe.'

As Daniel headed out the automatic front door to a bus stop right outside, James grabbed vitamins off the nearest shelf and paid at the self-checkout so that he looked like a regular shopper as he strolled back into the car park.

16. STAPLES.