Any normal person might be frightened in this district, especially at night, but the ex-nun was a familiar fixture here. The denizens of this wretched place didn’t just know her personally, they knew that she carried nothing of value.

And of course, even if that wasn’t the case, she’d said her protection prayer.

Just ahead, the road curved past a section of warehouse wall whose upper portion, having burned and collapsed, had created a slope of thorn-covered rubble. A footpath had been beaten through this, allowing access to the skeletally moonlit interior, and to Old Fred’s crib.

For all that she was confident in her safety, thoughts about Fred stirred a momentary unease in Sister Cassie. This was the place where he’d been abducted.

Forty yards on, just before Canning Crescent curved, there were two other thoroughfares. The one on the right was no more than a ginnel, a footway veering off between gutted outbuildings. That was the route she had taken the night he’d been attacked. On the left, some fifty yards from the sloped footpath to the warehouse’s interior, was the concrete ramp leading down into the subterranean section of the building, from which the dark-blue van must have emerged. That said, there was nothing down there now. Nothing she could see, except shadow.

At which moment a cat-like whimpering caught her attention.

Sister Cassie halted, surprised, but knowing instinctively that it wasn’t a cat.

She pivoted around, scanning the moonlit ruins. And immediately spotted the source of the sound.

A figure sat against the wall midway between the underground entrance and the sloping path up to Fred’s crib. It was huddled underneath a carpet, which had been folded into a cone, so that it covered everything except the face.

The ex-nun was thirty or so yards away but could already make out that it was a young girl, perhaps no more than a teenager. Her blonde head lolled as if she was half-insensible, but she was crying loudly. Sister Cassie started hurriedly towards her, already unfastening her satchel. She thought she had a few bits of plasters in there, and maybe even a squeeze of antiseptic ointment left in that old tube she’d found. And she’d need them, because even from two dozen yards off, the youngster’s features were visibly puffy and blotched.

She’d been badly beaten.

‘My dear child,’ the ex-nun said, shrugging her satchel from her shoulder and hunkering down.

When she tore the old carpet away, it was stiff with dirt and age, and hordes of woodlice cascaded off it. Used as she was to these woebegone backstreets, Sister Cassie shuddered with revulsion at that and threw it away gingerly, making as little contact with it as she could. As she did, she failed to notice the look of pain and misery on the battered face beneath split into a grin that was more like a feral scowl.

Chapter 25