Bertie decided to have a talk with young Derek and see what he thought about the situation. If the boy got a tug, he didn’t want it coming down on them. The trouble was, the mood Vincent was in, he was liable to go outside for his work if they didn’t give it to him. Vincent was like all this generation, they wanted everything in five minutes, but they needed to learn that it took a long time and a lot of effort to bring off any decent job. Planning was the key, planning for every and any eventuality. That, unfortunately, was the bottom line. Haste meant mistakes, and a mistake on this lad’s part could get him a big lump inside, and another kid meeting their father only once a month.

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Two

James was squatting in Hoxton with three others – two girls in their late teens, and a man in his forties called Dougie McManus. As he looked at the three of them sprawled out on the floor, he wondered at how he had got himself in this mess.

Dougie was a hustler, a panhandler, and not a very good one. With his long straggly hair and beard, he resembled Christ in a good light. But he also looked like a junkie, and people either threw a few pence at him or told him to fuck off. But he could score anything from anyone.

The girls were relatively new, and would not last more than a week at most. They were runaways, drifters, and Dougie was already freaking them out; they were not interested in his sexual advances, and were already sick of his high stories. James had noticed that all junkies talked about was the last high, or a spectacular high from the past. Dougie’s tales always involved a stash he had bought once, or stolen from someone, or found the Holy Grail of skag, always the best high ever.

Normally, James just tuned him out, but now he was getting angry, because the money he had hidden in the squat had miraculously disappeared, and Dougie and the girls were stoned out of their tiny – emphasis on the tiny – minds. So, putting two and two together, he made the usual four.

He looked down on their sleeping forms and thought about how he’d ended up in this place. He had left his bedsit because he had wanted to. He believed that the woman in the next house could read his mind through the walls and he could feel her interfering with his thoughts day and night. She was very old, and she had a foreign accent, but he knew that was all just an act. She was working for his mother and reporting back to her.