The next level down was more promising: a Renault Clio RS16 dwarfed by two larger, gleaming Land Rovers. The Clio would have a simpler security system, without an immobiliser or tracker. As he touched the handle, he felt the usual tingle on his fingertips. Like a static shock, it interfered with the electrical system.
There was always a buzz when Josh sat behind the wheel of someone else’s car: not because it was illegal but because it was like stepping into someone else’s life. For a moment he wasn’t himself; he could imagine what it was like to be them.
Every car had a unique essence, one that gave him a hint of the owner: the salesman with a glove box full of receipts and condoms, the meticulous old lady with potpourri scent sacks hanging from the rear-view mirror, or the student with the three-day-old McDonald’s wrappers festering in the footwell.
This one smelt of engine oil and damp; the seals must have gone under the wheel arches. He considered going for another but changed his mind when he touched the ignition and it started up the first time. It was a four-cylinder turbo with a decent 2.0-litre engine and a six-speed gearbox, a powerful rally car that could corner well and squeeze through narrower escape routes. The only thing that would be able to follow it would be a motorbike, and they could be stopped.
He drove the Clio slowly out of the car park, obeying the speed limit so as not to attract attention. He took it out of the town centre, and then made for the nearest A-road so he could test it properly.
Driving helped to clear his head — to focus his mind on something other than the crap life was dealing him.
Speed was his ‘obsession’ the prosecution had told the court, ‘one that could have easily ended his life or, at least, endanger that of others’. He had been twelve years old when the accident had killed Gossy — too young to be locked up. At the time, the words of the judge were nothing more than a series of sounds strung together. He wasn’t really paying that much attention to what the adults were saying. He was numb, lost in grief, trying to come to terms with the death of the nearest thing he had to a brother. He didn’t realise at the time that they were basically banning him from ever doing the one thing he was any good at.
As the world rushed by at 90mph, Josh felt the left front pulling slightly. The differential was slightly out as he cornered, the brakes were soft and third gear was not particularly happy below 3,000rpm. With a bit of TLC, it would’ve been a perfect little car, which was all the more saddening as by the end of this job it would be nothing but a burnt-out shell.
The petrol gauge was reading just over half, and he eased back on the accelerator — he didn’t want to be forking out for any more fuel. He took the next exit, the plates would need to be changed and Shags would need to give the brakes a once over.
11
Friends
Most of his friends, those who weren’t doing time, would spend their Saturdays hanging out in the abandoned industrial estate at the end of Dickens Lane. Once the home of a caravan factory, it had quickly fallen into ruin and was now nothing more than a dumping ground for random bits of household junk and industrial waste. They’d managed to create their own skate park from the discarded parts of abandoned mobile homes, and there was enough open ground for some decent car stunts, should you wish to burn off a few inches of rubber.
As he turned into the estate, he spotted the usual crowd collected around a pile of burning wooden pallets, at the top of which someone had dumped a badly dressed mannequin.
He swung the Clio into a tight circle, locking the wheel so he could leave a donut skid mark, balancing the clutch perfectly as the car’s back wheels drifted around behind him. The crowd stood frozen to the spot, their heads rotating like meerkats as their eyes followed the orbit of the car. He reversed the lock on the steering to weave a series of slick figure 8s that produced clouds of dust and burning rubber until he’d virtually disappeared, then slammed it into reverse and parked it with a handbrake finish between two rusting freight containers.
‘Yo, Josh. You still got it, bro,’ said Shaggy as he raised a can of Red Bull in salute.
‘Shags. Benny. Coz. Lils,’ Josh acknowledged each of them with a nod as he approached. ‘Where’s Dennis?’
‘Looking for something else to burn,’ said Benny, pointing to a scruffy-looking boy in a tracksuit digging through a pile of recently dumped fly-tippings.
Josh had known them all since they were in primary school, they were wasters with no real ambition, other than to score another high, get hammered or laid — whichever came first. Unlike the Ghost Squad, they were harmless, and they were all he had left of an ever-diminishing set of friends.
‘S’up?’ Coz asked Josh as he handed Shags a joint and started to roll another.
‘Will you give it a once over?’ Josh replied, nodding towards the Renault. ‘The brakes are soft on the left front, and I’m going to need it running sweet in a couple of days.’
‘No probs. You got a job on?’ asked Shags, who was one of the best mechanics Josh had ever met.
Josh sat down on what was left of an old car seat and told them about Lenin and what he’d done to the flat.
‘Shite. He’s out of control, dude!’ said Benny.
The rest of the gang nodded in agreement.
‘You got to disappear, J,’ added Shags, blowing out a copious amount of smoke.
‘And go where exactly?’ Josh replied. ‘It’s not like I can just up and leave mum, is it?’
They all agreed glumly.
Benny vocalised what they were all thinking: ‘It’s proper bollocks.’ The joint made its way round the circle until it reached Josh.
Lils, officially a girl, although she’d been treated like one of the boys since anyone could remember, had obviously been giving the matter a lot of thought, because she suddenly jumped up and announced: ‘You have to go, Joshy. You’re way clever. You could do anything if you put your mind to it. Take your mum and ... and ... go be a racing driver or —’ she pointed at the half-hidden Renault — ‘or test them or something. I don’t know just, like, get out there and be who you were meant to be.’ She sat back down again, exhausted by the effort. The others nodded their heads in agreement; they were all a little taken aback by her speech — no one could remember Lils saying that much ever.
‘Lils. I’m afraid that only happens in the movies,’ Josh replied.
‘Well, yeah, maybe, but you know,’ she muttered staring down at her trainers.
Dennis returned with a couple of boxes full of toys: discarded and broken Barbie dolls and other random parts of old board games.
‘Who wants to play dead-Barbie Monopoly?’ asked Dennis with a broad smile. He was obviously as high as a kite.
The others helped him unpack the various items as he described how the game would work. Josh sat and watched them as they each chose a severed Barbie head to act as their game piece, and Dennis handed out the scraps of paper that would serve as money.
‘What we gonna do for dice?’ asked Benny, taking the whole thing far too seriously.
Dennis looked about for something; then his eyes landed on a dented tin box, and he picked it up with one hand and scratched numbers on each side with a rusty nail. Josh thought the tin looked familiar — it reminded him of the ones in the colonel’s house.
‘There you go, Benny,’ Dennis said, throwing it to him. ‘You can go first.’
‘I hate going first,’ muttered Benny as he caught it.
‘Do you ever wonder where this stuff came from?’ asked Coz, picking up one of the eyeless heads, ‘like who owned it before?’
‘Before what?’ asked Dennis, rearranging the pieces on the board.
‘Before they chucked it away. These things came from somewhere, someone made it, someone played with it — it meant something to someone.’
‘Not any more,’ replied Dennis with a twisted smile that made everyone feel a little sorry for the toys.
‘Yeah, who cares? They chucked it out. Their loss,’ said Josh spinning one
of the heads round on his finger.
Lils was staring at Josh as she took the joint. He rarely smoked dope — he’s seen what it did to his mother.
‘You should go, Josh,’ repeated Lils.
‘Where, Lils? Where can I go?’
Her naive outlook was beginning to annoy him. She approached life in a very childlike way. There were times when he wondered if she wasn’t a little autistic.
‘I dunno. Do something different, have a night off. Your mum’s not going to need you for a while yet, is she? Go wild. Go be someone else for a night!’
She was right, of course, Josh was sick of his life. No matter how hard he tried, it never went his way. He knew he had to break out of this cycle somehow, start taking some kind of control of his life.
Shags took a large swig from a cheap plastic bottle of cider, the type where the sides caved in as you drank. When he finished, he belched so loudly that everyone laughed. It was contagious — even Josh in his dark mood couldn’t help himself. The drink reminded him of Caitlin’s invitation and he stood up.
‘You going?’ asked Benny.
‘Just remembered I was supposed to meet someone.’
‘What’s that? You got a hot date?’ said Lils with a wink.
‘Yeah. Something like that.’
Josh walked away, but before he reached the gates Shags caught up with him.
‘We had a whip round,’ he said, emptying a handful of coins into Josh’s palm — it was probably all they had. ‘Have one on us, yeah?’
Josh grinned his thanks and walked out of the gates, turning north towards the tube station. He needed to get to Highgate.
12
The Gig
The Flask was in Highgate, which was far outside of his usual territory — Josh tended to stay away from the north side of the Thames. There were rules and borders that needed to be respected between the various gangs; moving outside of Lenin’s sphere of influence made him vulnerable. If one of the Kurdish or Albanian gangs caught him out alone, it would end very badly.
The red bricks of the pub were turning orange in the warm evening sun as he walked up the street towards it. He could hear the happy chatter of people standing outside and slowed down, his resolve waning. The street was lined with very expensive cars, and his hand brushed instinctively along their paintwork as he considered his options. He could leave now in one of these fine motors and make it more of a business trip, or he could walk into a pub full of strangers to meet a girl he hardly knew.
The outer courtyard was packed with an eclectic mix of people: drinking, smoking and generally enjoying themselves. There was a bar strung with fairy lights and lined with impatient customers waving twenty-pound notes at the flustered bar staff. Josh tried to count the donated cash in his pocket. It was certainly not going to go very far in this place, but still something made him stay.
This was how the other half lived, he thought to himself, what people did when they wanted to relax while he was usually trying to break into their cars. Josh never bothered with the pubs on the Bevin estate. They had grilles over the windows and were guarded by doormen from the Russian mafia. Here he could be someone else, outside of Lenin’s world, at least for one evening. For one night he could forget about all the other shit.
There was no sign of Caitlin, but there were posters for ‘Infinitum 12.016’ on the side of the bar, and some of the drinkers were wearing T-shirts similar to hers. The more he studied the crowd, the more he realised there was something unusual about some of them.
Mrs B. would have called them ‘eccentric’, dressed in old-fashioned suits, with long coats and quirky beards. They were older than him, most in their late-twenties. As he admired their different styles, he began to wonder whether he should have made more of an effort with what he was wearing — there wasn’t a hoodie in sight.
He was just beginning to wonder if he’d been stood up when he spotted her, or rather she spotted him. Caitlin appeared out of the crush and walked over to him with a pint of Guinness in one hand and a shot glass full of some dark spirit in the other. She looked like something from another age: her velvet coat was so long it nearly touched the floor, and her leather boots stretched halfway up her thighs. She reminded him of a pantomime he’d seen once.
‘Hi, medal collector — or was it metal detector?’ she said with a half-smile, handing him the shot glass. It smelt like rum.
‘Josh,’ he replied, realising he hadn’t told her his name. He should’ve given her a fake one, but he hadn’t thought through his cover story. He would have made a terrible spy.
‘Josh. Cheers,’ she said, clinking her glass against his. ‘I’m glad you could make it. Come and meet the gang.’ She grabbed his empty hand, turned on her heel and ploughed back into the throng. He was dragged along behind, trying to keep up with her as she slid between the revellers towards the main entrance to the pub.
‘I love this place,’ she said, letting go of his hand. ‘But it’s getting too bloody popular these days.’ She pulled open the door. ‘It’s nearly four hundred years old — it’s like going back in time.’
As he stepped inside, Josh immediately knew what she meant.
The interior of the pub was dimly lit by low-energy bulbs; each one looked as if it had been taken from one of the many old radio sets his grandad used to keep in the shed. The low, sagging ceiling was supported by worm-eaten wooden joists, which separated the space into a random collection of odd-sized rooms.
Caitlin’s friends had commandeered a large side room, one that looked more like a Dickensian curiosity shop: two of its walls were made of bullseye glass panes, and the other was taken up entirely by shelves of old-fashioned glass bottles. Even the table that they were sitting round resembled something from a pirate ship that had been cut down to fit into the space.
When they walked in, everyone was deep in conversation. In the centre of the table was cluster of empty glasses, Josh realised he wasn’t going to be able to stand them a round.
‘Guys!’ bellowed Caitlin over the noise, pushing Josh forward into the room. ‘This is Josh.’
Some of them looked up and gave him a nod of acknowledgement; others blatantly ignored him.
‘Not another foundling, Cat?’ resonated a deep, well-spoken voice from behind them.
For some reason, this seemed to suddenly attract the group’s attention. Josh could see from the expectant faces of Cat’s friends that this was the overture to an argument.
‘Josh, let me introduce Dalton Eckhart. Possibly the most arrogant, infuriating man in England.’
‘Why thank you, my dear,’ said Dalton sarcastically, holding his hand out to Josh.
Dalton was a tall, handsome man, immaculately dressed in a dark tweed three-piece suit. He had a well-trimmed beard that made him look older than he was. Josh shook his hand firmly, trying to match the pressure that Dalton was exerting. There was a moment when something seemed to pass between them — he felt a tingling sensation creep along his arm like pins and needles.
‘Pleasure,’ Dalton added in a voice that was straight out of Eton. ‘One rarely ever gets to meet anyone from Caitlin’s charity work.’
His expression was hard to read, but his eyes were studying Josh keenly, in a way that made you feel instantly inferior. Dalton let go of Josh’s hand.
‘Hi, I’m Sim,’ said a small voice next to Dalton.
Sim was not much older than Josh and looked like a student, with a mop of shaggy blond hair. ‘Don’t take any notice of Dalton,’ he whispered as he placed a tray of drinks down on the table and shook Josh’s hand weakly. It was like holding a wet fish. ‘He has an innate ability to get under your skin. Thinks he owns the place.’
‘Well, actually, he kind of does,’ admitted Caitlin. ‘But that’s not the point. He’s still bloody rude.’
‘What did he mean by charity work?’ asked Josh.
‘Just ignore him. He’s a snob, trapped in the old ways. Still believes in a class system. Sim, I think a drink
would be in order?’
Sim handed them each a glass. ‘Dalton’s a total arse.’
He gave Josh a Jack Daniels and Coke, one of his favourites — never having been a big fan of beer. He was about to ask how Sim knew when he remembered the little money he had. Apart from the change rattling around in his pocket, he only had his mum’s credit card and there was a high chance that it would be declined — particularly with the size of this group: there were at least eight or nine of them squashed round the table.
‘I should pay for this.’
‘Not a chance, you’re my guest,’ Caitlin replied, holding up her hand. ‘Anyway, Dalton’s buying so I’d make the most of it.’
Caitlin pointed to each one of the group in turn and told Josh their names, but the combination of the dope and the alcohol was making it difficult for him to concentrate. Dalton came back with two helpers carrying trays loaded with more drinks, and before Josh knew it he was feeling rather merry. After they had finished the second round, Caitlin went off to organise a third, leaving him with a table full of strangers.
At first Josh had thought they all must be academics: they had that arrogant, carefree air of students and they all dressed strangely, as if they’d been to a vintage charity shop. He’d assumed it was all part of being a superfan of the band, since the pub seemed to be full of steampunks, but when he looked closer he realised how authentic Caitlin’s friends’ clothes appeared to be compared to the others.
‘So where did she dig you up from?’ asked one of the group, who Josh thought was called ‘Lisa’ or ‘Lyra’. She was very pretty, but had wild eyes that seemed to stare straight into your soul.
‘The library,’ he answered, still trying to think of a plausible cover story.
‘I bet they don’t see many of your type in there,’ she said with a grin — she was flirting with him.
The Infinity Engines Books 1-3 Page 6
