Mum’s state of mind was troubling him more and more. He groped for his mobile and found the battery flat. Then he picked up the landline and dialled Shauna’s number. It rang for so long he nearly put the phone down. Suddenly she picked up.

‘Mum? You OK there?’

There was a long silence. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said.

Jesus! He’d refused to kill two innocent women and now he was being given the cold shoulder over it.

‘You all right?’ he asked.

‘I’m fine now. Aysha’s been in to see me.’

‘Right.’

‘She took the gun, Connor. Which is more than you had the nerve for. She took it, and she is going to do it.’

147

147

Connor hung up straight away. Oh Christ. Aysha had been there in the Portakabin, she had heard Benedict giving out Suki’s whereabouts. He had to get there. But he knew he would never make it in time. Suki is walking round the pond in Kensington Gardens. Rush-hour traffic. The roads were crazy right now. His sister was about to commit murder and get herself sent down for life on their crazy over-controlling mother’s say-so, and he couldn’t get there in time to stop it.

Trying not to panic, he phoned Mad Dog.

‘Yeah?’ asked Mad Dog, yawning on the other end of the phone.

Connor told him what was happening.

‘Get over there, see if you can stop her,’ he said, though he knew Mad Dog lived in a shit-hole cellar squat in Hammersmith, which put him further away than Connor. But what else could he do? Phone the police? Connor debated with himself for long, painful seconds, then decided against. Aysha was carrying, and that was serious. The police would come down too hard on her. So he ran out to the Porsche, got in and drove like a fury.

He parked the Porsche in a back street and ran along the High Street and then into the park, feeling sick with fear for Aysha and red rage at Mum’s stupidity, his heart nearly bursting out of his ribcage as he ran like the wind.

There ahead of him was the pond. People. Lots of people, and that meant witnesses. For fuck’s sake. As he ran closer he was looking left and right. He could see Mad Dog coming past the statue of Queen Victoria, spotting him, slowing down, then stooping forward, hands on knees, trying to get his breath back.

Connor couldn’t see Aysha. Or Suki.

Christ! Where are they?

Frantically he scanned the crowds.

Old ladies with pooches on leads. A man practising fly-fishing. Kids screaming and yelling, out from school, on the loose at last.

Where the hell are they?

Then he saw Aysha. She was standing beside a bench, pacing back and forth, fury and nervous energy radiating from her like a furnace. Her mouth was moving and she was carrying a large holdall.