‘It must have taken them longer than they thought,’ said Brooke, staring out through the doors. ‘They’re probably holed up somewhere for the night; it’s too dangerous to travel in the dark. You worried about them?’

‘Blue can look after himself,’ said Maxie. ‘Only we don’t know what’s out there where they’ve gone.’

Brooke put a hand on Maxie’s arm. ‘They’ll be back. Don’t stress, yeah. We need to close up, though. We’ll make sure the night watch don’t go to sleep, just in case Blue rocks up in the middle of the night. But my guess is they’ll be back when it’s light. Is a bare long haul to Heathrow Airport.’

Maxie gave Brooke a quick hug. Hoped she was right. She couldn’t stand the thought of losing Blue so soon after finding him. Just her luck, she thought, to have the only two boys she’d ever really liked die on her within days of each other. She tried to be strong, but there was a limit to how much she could take. She’d seen people crack before. People who had coped great for months, lost friends, killed grown-ups, survived … and then it was usually something little that did it. One of her old girlfriends, a girl called Lila, had found a cat with a kitten. She’d taken them in and fed them, made them a cosy sleeping place. But the mother had got some kind of cat flu. She died and the kitten couldn’t look after herself. Lila tried everything but couldn’t get her to eat and slowly the kitten starved to death.

Lila had been heartbroken, couldn’t stop crying and saying how unfair the world was, how mucked up it all was, how there wasn’t any God.

One day she threw herself off the roof. Didn’t die straight away, but had terrible internal injuries. In the end she drowned in her own blood.

Maxie didn’t want it to end like that.

‘We can close the doors,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to wait up. Stay down here. I can sleep in a chair if I need to.’

‘You sure, girl?’

‘Yeah. You go, Brooke. I’ll be fine.’

From way up on the roof, pressing his face to the dirty windows, Paul could just make out the silhouette of two figures in the open doorway far below. A dry voice croaked in his ear.

‘One?’ it said. ‘You’ve only got one in your pathetic collection?’

Paul’s stomach rumbled. He hadn’t been able to face eating any more of Samira and now he was hungry again. And when he was hungry Boney-M came back to him and his thoughts clouded over.

‘It won’t be done until you kill all of them,’ said the bird thing. ‘The night-time is your time and it’ll be dark enough soon to go hunting.’