Read Online Angel Hunt by Mike Ripley - Free Book Online

and I should have walked away then and there. If I’m not more careful, I won’t live to see 30.
    Again.
    Â 
    â€˜I figure he went over the fence here,’ said Prentice when we were outside in the rain once more.
    â€˜Why not go out the front gate, the way they came in?’
    â€˜Perhaps there was somebody on lookout in a car or something. They must have had transport. I found some fibres here.’ Prentice pointed to the top of the fence. ‘Almost certainly from Billy’s jeans. And there was a rubber skid mark from his shoes.’
    â€˜And then where?’ I asked, adding: ‘Not that I’m interested, but you’re going to tell me.’
    â€˜Take a look.’
    I grabbed the top of the fence and pulled myself up until I could rest my forearms there, keeping myself about a foot off the ground by skidding the toes of my trainers – only cleaned the previous week as well – into the wet wood.
    On the other side was the back door of the first house in the Dwyer Street terrace, which ended down the road with Sunil’s at No 16. Although probably built as a row by some Victorian property magnate, all the houses were slightly different from the front and all had been built on to or extended differently at the back. This first one would be No 2, with odd-numbered houses on the other side of the road. Somebody at some time had converted the scullery and outside privy into a modern, one-storey kitchen. I leaned further over until I could see down the line of houses. Most of them had similar extensions.
    No 2’s fitted on to half the back of the house, leaving a downstairs and an upstairs window free. The extension’s roof sloped up at 45 degrees to within about four feet of the roof proper. The owner, wisely not trusting London tap water for his greenhouse, had installed a network of guttering to catch rainwater in a pair of large, aluminium beer barrels (worth over a hundred quid to the brewery and a thousand a ton to the illegal smelting operations over in Barking). The barrels had holes cut in the top to funnel the rainwater in, and plastic taps knocked into the side to let it out.
    It was perfectly possible to see how Billy could have vaulted the fence, got onto the kitchen roof via one of the barrels and from there onto the main roof and all the connecting ones down to Sunil’s house. If you were desperate enough, it was the only way to travel, but on a frosty night in the middle of December, you had to be desperate.
    â€˜The caretaker’s house?’ I asked.
    â€˜He didn’t hear a thing,’ Prentice said, nodding.
    Well, neither had I until Billy had either slipped or tried to open that skylight window.
    I lowered myself down off the fence.
    â€˜So?’
    â€˜So Billy Tuckett gets badly scared and starts running for where he thinks his old friend Lucy Scarrott lives.’
    â€˜I’d got that far. I meant, so what’s it got to do with me?’
    â€˜You knew Billy …’
    â€˜Like hell. Briefly and very much in the past tense, and I don’t mean ‘cos he’s dead. I knew him once, a long time go. I don’t see where I come into this at all.’
    â€˜What if Billy knew Lucy wasn’t there and it was you he was running to?’
    â€˜Impossible.’
    â€˜Sure?’
    â€˜He hasn’t seen me or thought about me for ten years, as far as I’m aware, and he couldn’t have known I’d be in that house. How many more times?’
    â€˜Okay.’ He put his hands in his pockets and walked off. I caught up with him halfway to the gates.
    â€˜You said Billy was your grass. Who was he grassing on?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’ Prentice didn’t stop walking, but he slowed. ‘We never got that far. He was worried about what the cell was planning, thought they were going too far, and he was almost ready to come over.’
    â€˜Cell? What are you talking