‘Yes, to investigate what happened. We’ll have to interrogate everyone here, try to build up a picture of who was doing what and where on the night of the attack.’

Maxie had to admit that out on the street life had a certain simplicity to it. All you had to do was stay alive. To kill grown-ups. This was different. This was complicated. This was old school.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘But we have to go about it the right way. You’ve got a killer among you, remember.’

‘We don’t know Samira’s dead. Is she dead?’

Gordy came in, wiping his hands on his white lab coat. It was several sizes too big for him and he’d had to roll the sleeves up.

‘I took a look at that sample under the microscope,’ he said. ‘As far as I can tell, it’s blood.’

‘Even if it is blood,’ said Justin, ‘we don’t know it’s hers. And if it is … She must still be somewhere. She can’t have just disappeared.’

Chapter 32

32

So much blood. He’d never expected so much blood, especially as when he’d killed her she’d hardly bled at all. Once her heart stopped beating it couldn’t pump anything out of the wound. But when he’d opened her up it was like sticking a knife into a ripe peach. He’d had to quickly find some sheets of newspaper and had then rolled her on to them. Even so the blood had spread and spread and spread, a great dark pool of it, dripping down through the floorboards.

He had to hurry. He quickly hacked off a piece of fatty flesh from her side. It was somehow soft and chewy at the same time, and the raw skin was too tough to get his teeth through.

Suddenly he had an image of himself, crouching over Samira’s body, and he spat the grey, mashed-up gobbet out on to the floor.

What was he doing?

He retched. Held his mouth, trembling. And mercifully his mind flipped again. One second he was a boy, alone, sick, appalled at what he’d done, and the next Boney-M was screaming in his ears and he was a stone-cold killer, a sicko, hungry and ruthless, and then it flipped once more and threw him into a strange place. He was a half-naked, brown-skinned tribesman living in the jungle, butchering a monkey to feed his family.

He knelt there, slipping in and out of madness, and then he fell so deep into the pit, he imagined he was an insect, a flea or a tick, sucking the blood from Samira’s veins. The smell of her blood excited him and nauseated him and soothed him all at the same time. He tipped forward and stuck his face into the cavity he’d opened up in her body, and sucked.