OUT OF TOWN

( the ballad of Young Billy Young)

by

Ryan Lee

It was a market town up north somewhere, that much they knew, but the historical significance of Ritchmire's ancient cobbled streets and ruined Norman fortress were lost on them. They were here to rob a bank, not to buy tea towels.

"This is the one," Jones said. He glanced over his shoulder, his dark, malevolent eyes challenging one or more of the occupants to raise an objection. Neither of them did. Warren McClintock and Billy Young had fallen in with bad company, which, considering the outfits they had run with in the past, was really saying something. About now, the only thing keeping them from telling Daryl Jones where he could shove his sawn-off shotgun was knowing precisely where Daryl Jones would shove his sawn-off shotgun. Both had known hard men in the past but Jones was worse than all of them.

Evil, Warren had said that night in the Green man. Jones hadn't even been with them yet still they spoken in low, conspiratorial voices. It struck Billy that evil was a perfect word to describe Daryl Jones, because aside from being a lunatic, Jones was the most seductive character he had ever met. Jones had BAD NEWS stamped all over him in shocking great headlines and yet despite that - or maybe because of that - Billy and Warren had been strangely drawn to him. And strangely unable to escape him, too.

But to give the devil his due, so to speak, Daryl Jones knew a thing or two about robbing banks. More to the point, he knew a thing or two about evading capture, which is where Billy and Warren had tended to go wrong in the past.

"Drive round again," Jones told Colin Hodges. "And don't go staring at the front of the building either. If a camera clocks your clock you'll be waving at yourself on Crimewatch next month." Jones leered at Billy and Warren. His shaggy black hair, long slim face and black, bullet-hole eyes gave him the look of a storybook wolf. "Alright back there, ladies?"

"All right," Billy said absently. In fact it wasn't all right. In fact he had a horrible crawly kind of stage-fright. He knew that Warren would be feeling the same way. It wasn't uncommon for Warren to spend the entire train journey from London locked in the toilet with a couple of old football programmes. However things soon changed once they were inside a bank. Come kick-off time both of them were transformed into whirling dustballs of aggressive energy, which is why they weren't too concerned about their own personal attack of nerves. They were concerned about the driver, however. Colin Hodges didn't look too good at all, but the crucial difference between him and the others was that this was Colin's first real job. Like Billy and Warren, he was here because he had accepted a compelling stranger's offer of a drink. More to the point, he was here because Jones had hospitalised Dave Hastings, the regular driver, because Dave had expressed misgivings about the way that Jones was selecting targets - namely at random from an AA map of Great Britain. In hindsight it had been a mistake to tell Colin about what had become of his predecessor, but Billy had only been trying to prevent him from ending up in the next bed.

The stolen Golf GTI made another circuit of the busy little town centre. Jones wanted to check out those mysterious little rooms about the shops and offices, as he did on every job. The Other Rooms, he called them, as if he was talking about the Twilight Zone or something. Most of the rooms were nothing more exotic than flats or offices, or empty flats and offices if the town wasn't a particularly prosperous one, but they also made perfect observation points for coppers planning to spring an ambush. Billy couldn't really see how this was possible, given that Jones never decided on the target until the last minute (and only decided on a particular town the night before, sometimes as late as the morning of the job), but he wasn't stupid enough to point this out to Daryl Jones.

They came to a set of traffic lights about a hundred metres back from the branch of the Midland Bank that Jones had singled out. The road the bank was situated on was the main thoroughfare through the busting little market town. Trollish buildings of dark, ancient stone crowded in from both sides of the road. It was a little after eleven on a cold Tuesday morning but already the streets were buzzing with Christmas shoppers, jostling one another and streaming over the pedestrian crossing like ants across a twig bridge.

"We go this time," Jones said, and Billy and Warren were suddenly sitting bolt upright in their seats, hearts pounding.

The lights changed. Colin remained frozen behind the wheel, the blood draining from his face.

"What do I do?" he whispered dryly. "I don't know what ter-"

A horn sounded impatiently behind them.

"Move it!" Jones hissed. "You fucking well move it!"

The car lurched forward. Colin drove his foot down and raced away in first gear.

"Get in lane!" Jones barked, thumping Colin hard on the temple. Colin was so pumped full of fear and adrenaline that he barely jerked against the force of the blow.

In the back of the Golf, Billy and Warren were hurriedly checking their weapons. Billy had his trusty old Webley; Warren was carrying the Star pistol that Jones claimed to have won from Robbie Casey in a card game.

The car swerved across the road. Billy looked up worriedly to see that Jones was forcing the wheel over to the right.

"I've got it!" Colin protested with something like tearful indignity.

"You will fucking get it," Jones growled back, releasing his hold on the wheel.

The car came to a halt outside the Midland bank. This was the worst part of any job, Billy had lamented to Warren on many occasion. The panic and fear hit you the hardest at this point, as did an overwhelming sense of personal danger and the basic urge to flee before it was too late. If only they could get this part of the job under control they would be on their way to being a reasonably competent team of bandits.

The rapid growth of violent energy inside the car triggered an explosion that blew open the doors and hurled out shrapnel in the form of three masked men brandishing guns.

They raced into the bank, Jones in front almost barging the door off its hinges. The door swung back and crashed against Warren's shoulder with the force of a charging rugby forward. He felt nothing except a dull thud but the impact sent him reeling five or six feet to the left.

Billy was the last to enter. He remained by the door while Warren kept an eye on the scattered customers and Jones did what he did best - namely terrifying bank cashiers and screaming orders at the top of his voice.

There were nine customers in all - six women and three men, none of whom were about to cause any trouble. They were too stunned to do anything other than stand and stare. Billy had always wondered how he would react if the shoe were on the other foot - or if the gun was in the other hand, to be more exact. Not that such a situation was likely to present itself; Billy never went near banks unless he was robbing one.

Billy looked out through the glass doors. People outside hurried about their business, oblivious to what was going on only a few feet away. The glass was a tenuous divide between the two worlds but it held all the same.

"In the fucking bag!" Jones screamed, making Billy jump. He looked over and saw a young male cashier hurriedly stuffing notes into a plastic carrier bag that Jones had bought in York a couple of hours earlier. They never made much money, Jones's fucking Away Team. The most they had ever made from a single blag was three and a half grand. The spoils always fit comfortably into a carrier bag of some description.

"Pass it on, pass it on!" Jones screeched in that strangled sergeant-major's scream of his, and the young cashier almost shot through the roof.

The door opened. A wave of icy air rushed inside. Billy spun round, his revolver raised.

"Stand…"

Still, he had meant to add, but the word just stuck in his throat like a spiky chunk of food, solid and immovable. The young policeman in the doorway was similarly rendered.

It might have remained that way until police reinforcements arrived had it not been for Warren, who alerted Jones with a single horror-stricken cry.

"COPPERS!"

Jones turned his head, quick as a snake. If Billy didn't know better he could easily have convinced himself that there was no face at all beneath that black ski mask. It suits you, Warren had said that night Jones took them back to his flat in Islington and showed off his collection of guns and masks. The remark had been a flippant one, a nervous joke to crack the threatening atmosphere that Jones loved to create, but now Billy could see exactly what Warren had been trying to say.

"Shoot him," Jones said coldly. He started to walk slowly to where Billy and the young policeman were standing, bringing the shotgun up to firing position. The policeman yelped and covered his face instinctively, knocking his helmet askew. Somebody in the bank - one of the customers - laughed at that, a single humourless squawk.

Billy heard everything. He heard Jones's softly thudding footsteps on the carpet as he broke into a clumsy sprint. He heard a man sniff back a wad of snot. He heard a mobile phone with a jaunty little ring-tone. For a second or two everything around him suddenly sharpened in clarity, the sounds, smells, the lights and colours. It was like the bite from a snort of good coke only fifty times stronger and more startling.

"Shoot him!" Jones screamed. He was running towards them, fast, graceless. The young policeman turned and bolted and crashed face-first into the glass door. He made a funny sound - "oof!" and buckled to his knees, his fingers clawing at the glass.

Jones was already on him. He grasped the policeman by the scruff of the neck (Billy heard a whimpered, "please," and briefly saw a comprehending terror in the policeman's eyes) and yanked him away from the door. Then Jones planted the shotgun stubs into the hollow at the base of the policeman's skull and fired.

Ooof, Billy thought senselessly as something slapped against his mask. He glanced at the glass door and saw that it was splattered with blood and brains and tiny fragments of wet bone.

That's when everyone began to scream, Billy and Warren included. Everyone except for Jones that is. Jones sprinted back to the counter (for the cash, Billy thought distantly, though he wasn't watching. The bastard's gone back for the money). Then Jones came running back, leapt over the policeman's body and pulled open the door.

The noise of the traffic filled Billy's head with more confusing babble. Car horns, screeching, people yelling and screaming around him…he felt floaty and unreal, but just as his legs were about to give way a hard shove in the back sent him flying out into the street.

It was cold outside, bitterly cold, and so disorientating that Billy found himself facing the bank instead of the road. When he turned around he saw people scattering away from him in alarm. He saw Warren staring dumbly ahead, and he saw Jones running back and forth like a man on fire, screaming and ranting and jabbing his shotgun at an imaginary enemy.

The one thing he didn't see was the getaway car.

**

Jones had gone his own way. That suited Billy and Warren just fine. Perhaps disassociating themselves from him now would favour them at the trail. On the other hand, people involved in the murder of a police officer rarely received favours from the bench unless they…

"We've got to grass," Warren said.

They were hiding in a walled cemetery not nearly far enough from the bank to consider safe. Buenos Areas would not have been far enough from the bank at this point in time, but the cemetery was as safe a sanctuary as any until they could decide what to do next. Billy had spotted the ugly little church as they had raced through Ritchmire town centre's labarynthic back alleys, and successfully navigating a path to it had been a matter of sheer luck rather as much as anything else. One wrong turn could have taken them into the arms of the law.

Warren was laying on his side, cursing a stitch. Billy was kneeling beside him, peering vigilantly through the tangle of wild blackberry bushes that grew around the wall; it was the only cover between themselves and the open ground where any second someone might come along to put flowers on the grave of a loved one. At the moment there was nobody around except themselves and whoever rested below the cracked and leaning black headstones.

"Billy…"

"I'm not grassing," Billy said quietly. His voice sounded rational enough but his pulse was racing and his heart was beating heavily in his chest.

"This is different," Warren persisted. He winced and pressed his hand against the pain in his side, as if stemming blood from on open wound. "Fuck, Billy, we'll get life!"

"Oh yeah?" Billy turned to his friend. Both of them had removed their masks and their faces were pale and strained and frightened. "What do you think we would have got for two dozen armed robberies then? Grow up, Warren."

"He shot a copper," Warren repeated with a kind of stoical disbelief. He let his hand rest against the cold earth. "The bastard shot a copper…"

That much Billy couldn't argue with. He slipped onto his backside and let his head fall into his hands. For a few minutes the despair was so total and consuming that his only comforting thought was that he still had a gun in his pocket with which to bring about a swift end to the situation.

"Then we've got to get back to London," Warren said. He struggled into a sitting position and shook Billy roughly by the arm. "We've got to get back to London, Billy." Warren gazed up at the cold dirty-white sky and felt the season's first snowflakes settle gingerly on his face. "We're lost here, we're fucking lost, Billy."

Billy didn't respond. Warren went on staring at him with the distressed confusion of a very young child. "Billy? Say something, Billy…"

More sirens, police arriving from all over town - soon from all over the county as news that one of their own had been gunned down in cold blood spread from station to station. All leave cancelled. Let the world go to shit until the men who killed a copper were brought in.

At last Billy raised his head and looked appraisingly at his friend. "This is big time trouble, Warren."

Warren nodded tearfully.

"You know what they do to find cop killers?" Billy didn't wait for an answer. "Everything. Anything," he went on grimly. They shake the tree, Wazza; they turn over every fucking stone and stamp on whatever crawls out from underneath. Remember when that DI got shot in Fulham?" Billy spat between his feet. "They shook every face down that weekend. If the beating didn't work they offered bribes instead. Remember that?"

"Yeah, but that was Flying Squad!" Warren said, trying to inject some hope into a situation clearly lacking any. "This is the sticks, Billy. It's not like London up here. They won't have the muscle for it."

"Not yet. But give it a couple of hours and see what happens. They'll shut this fucking county down, I'm telling you."

"But that's why we have to get back to London!"

Billy nodded soberly. "If all three of us get back to London - four if you count that fucker Hodges - there's a chance we might ride this out." He laughed shrilly, a mirthless sound that stung Warren's ears and made him flinch. "It's a fucking fat chance, mind."

"So what do we do?" Warren asked. "Nick another car?"

"You can if you like," Billy said quietly, gazing down at the ground beneath his feet. "I'm not telling you how I'm getting home."

Warren stared at Billy, not quite certain that he understood the implication of that last comment. "What do you mean?" he demanded eventually. "What do you mean, Billy?"

"I mean we've got to split up." Billy lifted his head and shrugged apologetically. "They're looking for three men dressed in black. Some people are stupid enough to do just that. Jones had the right idea by taking off like he did. I should have done the same."

Warren stared a moment longer, hurt and indignity sagging his face. "Well fuck you, Billy," he said hoarsely. "Fuck you and fuck your fat sister, because I did!" Suddenly he shot to his feet like a cork from a champagne bottle. Too frightened to leave the cover of the bushes he simply stood there, fists knotted, seething silently.

"Listen," Billy began, rising to his feet. He put a hand on Warren's shoulder but Warren shrugged him off.

"I thought we were mates," Warren said sullenly.

Billy sighed. "We are mates. I just don't want to be your cellmate, that's all."

Warren rubbed the back of his hand across his lips to hide a smile. He didn't want to smile now - fuck, there really wasn't anything to smile about - but Billy had always been able to make him laugh, even at the most inappropriate of times.

"I'll get caught, Billy. I'm not like you."

This was true. Billy was the resourceful one of the pair - not particularly clever even by his own admission, but the one whose streetwise survival instinct had more or less kept them out of serious trouble until this morning. By contrast Warren was out of his depth in any situation where common sense was required in preference to, say, a sawn-off shotgun.

"We'll get caught in no time if we stay together," Billy said regretfully. "Sorry, Warren, but I'm only doing what's best." H dug into his pocket and brought out a wad of crumpled notes. "We've got a ton-sixty. I'll give you half."

"Where's all the money from the bank?" Warren asked pointedly. All of a sudden he didn't seem quite so anxious about being involved in the murder of a police officer, or about being left to fend for himself.

"Jones took it."

"Bastard!"

"Yeah, well…" Billy counted out eighty pounds and handed it to Warren. They avoided any eye contact. "Don't go back to the flat, and stay away from the Green Man. Meet me on the Caledonia road tomorrow night at nine, down by that Greek minicab place. Alright, Warren?

"Fuck off," Warren said flatly, stuffing the money absently into his pocket. "You won't show up even if you do make it back to London."

Billy met his friend's wounded eyes. There was nothing left to say now. He had to get moving soon; his toes were beginning to freeze inside his trainers.

Billy broke through the dense bushes and walked slowly along the cemetery path, his hands in his pockets and his head bent low. He had gone no more than twenty yards when Warren called his name. Billy stopped and looked over his shoulder. He could see where they had trampled the bushes but his friend was well hidden.

"I didn't really shag your sister," Warren said, now just a floating petulant voice. "It was your mother."

Billy sighed and walked on. At some point he took the gun from his jacket pocket and threw it away.

**

The numbness wasn't isolated to Billy's toes; his whole body felt strangely anaesthetised, sent to sleep by the shock of what he had done. Yet at the same time, on another level, he was experiencing a queer kind of heightened awareness, like that he had felt during that timeless period inside the bank. It was like being prostrate inside the world's most advanced virtual reality machine.

Except there was nothing virtual about this reality, not really. He had murdered a police officer -

"Jones," Billy muttered hotly to himself. "Jones shot him"

- and that was about as real as it came.

Billy walked on, relying on nothing but his instincts to land him somewhere safe. He passed through an estate of modern detached houses, most of them trimmed with festive lights and holly wreaths. The snow was now falling with lazy, gently consistency. Billy paused for a moment and stared longingly into someone's front room. There was a huge tree festooned with tinsel and brightly coloured lights, and at its base were a cluster of tempting-looking packages wrapped in Christmas paper and tied with gold and silver ribbons. A woman came briefly into view. She was young and pretty and well dressed like the women that Billy occasionally saw shopping in Marks and Spencer's, those hated and desired middle-class young mums who drove jazzy little jeeps and smelled of fresh soap and apple fabric softener.

The woman was gone. Billy shook himself and walked away briskly, putting all thoughts of cosy fires and Christmas dinner with fresh young women as far out of his mind as they would go. There would be time a plenty for daydreaming once he got to Parkhurst - that was unless he organised himself and stopped acting like he was beaten already. If surrendering had been the best option he would never have left Warren. Instead he would have accompanied his friend to the nearest police station and told the bobbies how it was all Daryl Jones's fault. But Billy was made of stronger stuff than that. How else could he have made it this far? Escaping from the bank and finding the quiet little church cemetery might have felt like a lucky accident but in truth Billy had been thinking on his feet the whole time, only he hadn't known too much about it because thinking on his feet and trusting his instincts more or less amounted to the same thing. Ditching Warren had been more of a considered action - the stirring of a plan- and Billy was convinced that the decision had been the right one despite it being a difficult one to make. It was just one of those tough decisions a survivor has to make from time to time, like deciding to cut off your foot when you're snagged in a snare.

So now he was only half as likely to get caught. The odds were better but still not heavily against him. He needed to further strip himself of anything likely to hinder or betray him. The gun had gone, and now he needed to get rid of the clothes he was wearing. By now the police would be looking at the bank's security video, no doubt using all kinds of High-Tec gadgetry to enhance the film. On one hand they might not possess the technology which would enable them to zoom-in on the tiny Fila motif on the zip of Billy's hooded parka, but on the other hand they might, and it was safest to assume the worst at all times.

There were a few other assumptions he ought to make whilst his thinking was sharp.

1. It was very likely that Colin Hodges had been stopped after a short pursuit and was this very second sitting in an interview room singing like the proverbial.
2. As a result of Colin's capture, the identities of the other bandits were known to the police.
3. Knowing that the killers were from out of town the police would effectively shut this (where was this place again? Ritchmond? Ritch…something or other) place down. Nothing gets in or out without being given the once over.
4. It was only a matter of time before his face was plastered all over this (Richmarch? Ritchtea?) crappy little northern poke-hole.
5. Bill were bill, crappy little northern poke-hole or not. Just because he was out in the sticks didn't mean that he was up against some bumpkin Mr Plod preoccupied with the latest case of ferret rustling. Bill were bill, as sure as eggs were eggs.
6. He couldn't ever go home.

**

It was Ritchmire; the town was called Ritchmire. It still didn't mean anything to Billy (Unibond League runners-up, maybe? FA Cup third round defeat away to Orient?) but thanks to the poster in the newsagents window he was at least certain of the town's name. He was also aware that one of the local schools had failed some sort of government test - again, thanks to the poster - but he was still pretty much in the dark about it. The only thing he knew for sure - apart from the name of the town and its standing in the education league tables - was that in a few hours time that meaningless poster would be replaced by an altogether more shocking and dramatic headline.

Billy went inside the shop, fighting hard to keep himself in check. He appeared to glance idly through the magazines and papers before selecting a pocket road atlas of the town and surrounding district, which he took to the counter. The shopkeeper was serving a dithery little man who was counting out pennies onto the counter with fussy precision. The shopkeeper, who was tall and plank-like with cropped greying hair and a thick muscular neck - a retired marine if Billy had ever bought a local atlas from one - looked past the dithery customer and rolled his eyes. Billy gave a slight smile of acknowledgement. When the dithery customer had left the shop with his purchase, the retired marine leaned forward and begged Billy's confidence.

"I've got you all worked out," he whispered.

Billy stiffened. He felt his legs go suddenly weak. "What?"

"I said I've worked it all out," the retired marine said. He drew himself up and smirked. "He come in first thing in the morning and buys a Daily Sport. Then, about dinner time, he comes back in and buys one of the free ads papers. And I'll bet you a thousand quid he's back in here at tea time for a Chronicle. What do you make of that then?"

Billy just shook his head.

"Sauna and massage," the retired marine said with a sly wink. "All three papers have a whatsit, you know, a sauna and massage column. That's three ninety-five, by the way."

Billy dropped the atlas on the counter and dug into his pocket for some cash. "And twenty Marlborough and a box of Swan."

The retired marine turned away from Billy to get the cigarettes and matches. "Been summat gone on up town way," he said conversationally.

Billy squinted. Who the fuck taught these people to talk? "Come again?" he said. He mimicked the retired marine's northern accent with surprising accuracy (at least it had sounded that way to his own ears). He had done it purely out of contempt and derision for the northern race but felt suddenly inspired.

"I said there's summat going on up town. Someone's shot a bobby or summat."

"By 'eck!" Billy intoned.

"Aye." The retired marine put the cigarettes on the counter and took Billy's money. "They want hanging if you ask me."

Billy hummed agreement - no need to push his luck with anything more elaborate - and left the shop with his goods. He stood with his back to the small parade of shops and tore the cellophane wrapping from the cigarette box with his teeth. Just then a police patrol car cruised by, its headlights on and its wipers working to shift snow from the windscreen. It was past before Billy had time to fully register its presence.

I taut I taw a puddy tat, he thought distantly. He had frozen up like a tin man in the rain, the cigarette wrapper dangling from his mouth, completely helpless until a passing Dorothy came along with a drop or two of oil. A few people hurried past him, hunched inside overcoats or shielded behind protective umbrellas.

Billy drew in a breath and let it out again, slowly and carefully, as if the very sound of his breathing might give him away. There was a telephone kiosk across the road - a proper one with four sides instead of something that looked like a urinal on a pole. He nipped inside and smoked the cigarette greedily, scanning the street with eyes that were too animated and vigilant.

The small parade of shops was located on a street appropriately called The Parade. Billy looked it up in the atlas. It was only two pages from the scene of the crime - whatever that meant in real money.

It means you're a fucking long walk from Copacobana beach, young Billy Young, he thought grimly.

The map showed a large area of open playing fields and a school close to the shops. It would be Christmas in three days time, which meant that the school was bound to be empty. Locked up, sure, but empty. He looked up thoughtfully, considering his options, and noticed an old lady in a bobble hat eyeing him impatiently through the glass. Billy closed the atlas and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

"Did you take out that copper?" the old lady inquired as Billy opened the door of the telephone kiosk. She was smiling not quite sweetly and her eyes were screwed up against an attack of snowflakes.

Billy squeezed past without reply. He needed a drink to calm his frayed nerves and so headed straight back to an Indian grocers at the end of the parade. He bought a bottle of Jack Daniel's and carried it under his jacket as he made his way through a run down housing estate and out onto the open fields beyond. He felt immediately more secure on open ground. Nothing could sneak up on him, no old ladies with silly questions or retired marines with even sillier theories about why certain cretins chose to read certain periodicals.

***

Getting into the school didn't prove too much of a problem. Schools were nearly always easy to break into, even in these disturbed times, and especially so if you happened to have spent your formative years diving in and out of other people's property. This one was a primary school - small buildings for small people, low roofs except for one building that probably served as a main assembly hall or gymnasium or both. The structure - a series of squat little boxes linked by short corridors - was old and poorly maintained, which suggested any number of possible entry points. However Billy wasted no time circling the building to find the easiest way in - and out again should the caretaker or the bill catch him at it - as his experience had taught him. He was functioning on instinct now, one that was raw and cunning and maybe a little bit crazed. It was telling him to get inside the building as fast as he could and keep his head down for a few hours.

So he climbed onto the most accessible roof to hand, located a skylight, and tugged it off; it came away like a piece of rotted carpet. Then he dropped inside the building and rested a moment, tense, listening. When he was satisfied that he was alone in the school (or in the immediate vicinity at least - meaning that nobody was about to step out of the nearest classroom with a mop) he relaxed, sagging against a wall with a loud sigh of relief. A brightly coloured painting slipped to the polished floor. Billy glanced down at the picture, which showed an obscenely happy face grinning like the cat that got the canary.

Billy walked down the corridor, his fingers lightly brushing the smooth glossy walls, smelling disinfectant and, faintly, something else too, a smell that was there but not quite there. Was it nostalgia? He thought, bemused. It was something like that anyway, something ghostly and indefinable, something that made him think of white glue and tepid milk in little bottles, powder paints and boiled cabbage.

It wasn't until he located the lavatories that he felt the urge to go. He went inside, caught off guard by the scaled-down sinks and urinals. He sat down on one of the tiny pots, feeling faintly ridiculous, touched all of a sudden by a draining sense of misery and regret. He sought solace from old JD, a good friend with a sympathetic ear, and thought about a little boy with a grubby face and bright, friendly eyes, a boy who was a bit cheeky but so good-natured with it that you couldn't help but love him, a boy who would kill a police officer just as soon as his backside was big enough for a proper shitpot.

Not me, I never killed him.

Ah, but you might have done, Billy, he heard another part of him say. He didn't argue with this other voice. It spoke with calm, parental assurance, and he resented it with the sulky arrogance of a stubborn child, but he knew that it spoke the truth. Sooner or later he would have killed someone, and more than likely that someone would have been a police officer. He could never say for sure that if Jones hadn't pulled the trigger the dubious honour would have fallen on himself. Probably not, at least not on this occasion. But the occasions were becoming too frequent of late and the laws of probability were shortening every day. When carrying a gun is as natural as wearing a watch, sooner or later you end up shooting someone. Armed robbery was no longer a way of making a decent living: It was a way of life.

He wondered how close they had been to getting caught before today's little disaster. He didn't even know if the police had yet to connect a series of seemingly unconnected robberies scattered throughout the country. Jones seemed to think they had. Jones was paranoid about it. A few weeks ago they had aborted a trip to Leeds as they had been about to board the train at Kings Cross. Jones had said that a group of men were acting suspiciously. That'll be us, Billy had joked, and Jones had turned on him like a cat that has its tail stood on. Other men!, he had hissed. Billy had seen no other men but Jones insisted they were there. Shadow men wearing baseball caps and denim jackets, men reading newspapers and wandering among the crowd, men Going About Their Normal Business. In other words, Flying Squad officers getting ready to pounce.

And there was that time that Billy himself had thought he was being watched by three men in a dark red Rover on the Severn Sisters road. It might have been nothing but his imagination, or a routine undercover mugging patrol, but there again Billy was an armed robber not a used car salesmen, and the police did tend to keep an eye on people like that.

It didn't matter really, not now. Sooner or later their luck would have run out.

Billy laughed hollowly into the throat of the whiskey bottle. Today in fact. Today everyone's luck had run out, including that poor bastard lying on the carpet of the Poke Hole branch of Midland bank.

Billy finished his business but didn't flush the lavatory for fear of alerting someone. It was prudent to assume that the caretaker would make the occasional patrol of the building, maybe to check on the pipes or whatever it was they did to earn their crust. He left the toilets and quietly wandered the deserted school until he eventually settled in the library, a tall, dark room with no outside view. Once again he was struck by the scale of everything, the diminutive bookshelves and the little tables with chairs stacked neatly on top. He felt like Goldilocks in Baby Bear's room, and more like an intruder than ever before in his life.

Billy found a comfortable armchair - Big Bear's chair, probably the one the teacher sat in when she told fantastic stories to the fidgeting, goggle-eyed little monkeys scattered around her feet. Billy sank into the chair's welcoming depression, nursing the bottle of whiskey and a wretched kind of anguish and home-sickness. He sipped moodily from the bottle, savouring the fire the liquid made in his belly, and the slowly ebbing feelings of misery and distress. Soon he grew numb and sleepy; he dozed fitfully, his dreams fraught and senseless and occasionally terrifying, jumbled fragments of madness and shocking lucidity. Something in his dreams was looking for him.

**

He woke with a start, his heart pounding rapidly, certain he could hear the police chopper circling overhead.

Dreamed it, he thought, only half-convinced. He sat back in the chair and allowed his head to clear. He looked at his watch but it was too gloomy to see. Maybe it was dark outside. He stood up, still clutching the Jack Daniels bottle as if it were a powerful talisman, and made his way carefully to the door. His fingers located the bank of light switches but he flicked on just one. A fluorescent in the middle of the ceiling flickered hesitantly before bursting on. Billy tugged up the sleeve of his jacket and squinted blearily at his watch. It was nearing three o'clock in the afternoon. Not late enough to venture out yet. He wondered if the police had by now decided to concentrate their search for the killers on derelict buildings and other possible hiding places. They would be more organised by this time, all witnesses de-briefed and all the evidence analysed. It would not have taken them long to discover where they had legged it to immediately after the killing. Plenty of witnesses saw them haring through the town, and maybe a few of them even saw Billy and Warren entering the church cemetery, though at the time they probably knew nothing of the robbery or that a policeman had been murdered. But those witnesses would have been quickly traced and interviewed.

And Warren, what about him? Perhaps the police were closer to their tails than Billy had first imagined, perhaps close enough to have picked Warren up only minutes after Billy had left him.

And where did Jones go?

Billy found that he really didn't care. In fact he hoped that Jones was stupid enough to duke it out with bobbies and get himself sent back to Islington in a pine box.

Billy paced the room, examining the books on the highest shelves with little interest. Not much here to keep his mind busy unless he wanted to read all about the exploits of Meg the fucking Hen or the girl with two dads. His eye came to rest on a store cupboard at the back of the room. It had a painted sign on the door which said DRAMA CUPBOARD. Sipping from the bottle he went over to the door and tested the handle. It was open. Billy peeked inside, found a light switch and flicked it on. A rack of costumes took up most of the floor space while the shelves were filled with large cardboard boxes each with its own identifying label.

An idea briefly lit up his eyes. What if he disguised himself using some of this stuff in here?

Yeah, great idea! A sarcastic voice spoke out. The coppers'll never recognise you dressed as a fucking shepherd or Roman soldier.

The disappointment burst his heart and depressed him far more than it should have done. The futility of what he was doing dropped onto his shoulders like some fat old vulture. He went inside anyway.

The clothes on the rack were naturally all too small for his adult frame. Except, that is, for a tatty old tartan bomber jacket with a fur collar which at one time would have been white but which was now a manky grey colour.

"I'm not wearing that," he sniffed, and giggled in spite of himself.

He reached for a box marked HATS and had a quick rummage through the contents. The tiny policeman's helmet was a sick joke, but there were other possibilities here. Absently he stuffed a blue and white baseball cap with the Ritchmire Town FC badge on the front into his coat pocket.

( Ritchmire Town, beat Gateshead in the FA Trophy final at Wembley a year or two ago, memorable only because the Ritchmire goalkeeper...did something or other, and then vanished after the game, never heard of since.)

NOSES...Billy giggled and reached for the noses box. He slipped on a Groucho Marx disguise and entertained himself with a passable impersonation:

"Okay, lady, this is a stick up. You drop your knickers and I stick it up." He gestured with an imaginary cigar. "Say, why don't we take the girls out for a foursome - if they don't want to we'll force 'em. Nurse, nurse, I need a doctor - if I could walk that way I wouldn't need a doctor."

He put the Groucho disguise back in the box with the clowns noses and other assorted hooters.

I'm doing this, he thought with vague amusement as he reached for the box labelled HAIR. I'm actually going to do this.

**

It wasn't quite dark yet but the schoolyard had already begun to retreat into the gloom of its own seclusion. Beyond the fields a sprinkle of lights warned of early nightfall. The snow had fizzled away to rain and now something icy and stinging surfed the brisk wind.

Billy walked unhurriedly across the damp playing fields, his hands thrust into the deep pockets of the tartan bomber jacket. The bottle of Jack Daniels and the pocket atlas of the town were inside a plastic Safeway carrier bag looped over his wrist.

Anxiety nibbled away at the edges of his confidence with every step he took, and by the time he reached the paper shop on The Parade a full-blown attack of doubt almost made him turn away. He paused at the window and stared at the headline poster with a weird sense of disembodied recollection.

POLICEMAN SHOT DEAD IN BANK RAID

- KILLERS STILL SOUGHT

He heard the chilling voice of Daryl Jones swish through his memory - Shoot him, Jones said, Shoot him - and his mind was suddenly filled with shocking flashes of a buried trauma, a long ago forgotten nightmare now raised like screaming ghosts.

Hours ago, it happened only hours ago and yet it felt like years, felt like the memory of a bad dream.

He went into the shop and plucked a copy of the Ritchmire Chronicle from the stand, reading the first paragraph as he walked towards the counter, absently rummaging for change in his pocket.

"Twenty eight pence."

Billy looked up into the eyes of the ex-marine. He searched them briefly for a sign of recognition but saw none. And why should he? A few hours ago he served a cocky looking young soccer thug in designer jeans and jacket, and now he was serving someone completely different. Now he was serving someone who looked as though he spent a lot of time sitting around his one-room flat watching kung-fu films in his underpants, someone who had a lot of expensive computer equipment but never enough money to buy himself a decent coat, someone who frequently visited Terry Pratchette's web site but rarely visited a barber. A nerd, a pratt, a sadsack. Someone who appeared to have bad eyesight in spite of the Ronnie Corbette glasses.

Billy paid for his paper and pocketed the change on his way out. In the doorway, he pulled the black-rimmed spectacles down the bridge of his nose and read the rest of the report. There were three photographs to accompany the dramatic text. All of them had been taken by the bank's security camera, and all of them were as grainy and blurred as Billy would have expected them to be. They could take pictures of distant suns but as yet they had never managed to take a clear still of a bank robbery in progress. The three photofit pictures drawn from eyewitness discriptions were little better. Billy surmised that all of the eyewitness must have been drunk at the time of the robbery. The photofit of Jones was macabre and disturbing, and while they hadn't manage to capture his image they had somehow managed to capture the spirit of the monster. As for the pictures of himself and Warren, they were almost comical. They could have been anyone. And yet there was a vague, almost surrealistic likeness.

If we had mongolid brothers they would look like this, he thought without humour.

Billy folded the paper and pushed his glasses up. His vision was affected but not significantly. It was like looking at the world through a glass of water. The Rod Stewart wig was itching like a bastard though but he was wary of scratching his head. It might slip; there was only the Ritchmire Town FC baseball cap anchoring it down.

A woman in a sheepskin coat smelling of patchouli passed him in the doorway. She didn't give him a second glance. In fact she didn't even give him a first glance. Billy allowed himself the luxury of a smile. Without the expensive designer coat he no longer looked like a twoccer or an ecstasy dealer or someone who was on holiday from Manchester, or from London come to that. He was...

"I'm a wanker," he muttered under his breath. It was true - he looked just like a first class wanker.

But now it was time to get the fuck out of this poke hole wanker's paradise once and for all. Billy's time in the school had not been idly spent. There was the disguise for one thing, and he had also spent time studying the pocket atlas. He thought he could easily navigate his way to the bus and rail stations without having to ask for directions. Of course he couldn't steal a car and drive out of town, because if he did that he was likely to get himself arrested. No, once inside a vehicle he was effectively contained, which meant that he had to be absolutely certain of escape before he decided on a method. He had considered stealing a car and driving all the way back to London, however. He had considered it with great temptation, but in the end he had talked himself out of it. How far would he get before the owner of the car reported it as stolen, and how far down the A1 would he be before some eagle-eyed bobby spotted him? Besides, if the law had set up roadblocks and shit he might not even make it into fourth gear.

Ridiculously ( or perhaps typically, for a northern poke hole like this one) the rail and bus stations were at opposite ends of the town. Billy headed first for the bus station. To get to the rail station he would need to walk through the town centre and he didn't feel quite confident enough about his disguise to try that just yet. He didn't see too many people at all until he came to the sinisterly named Dagger Lane in the heart of a grimy industrial area. Cars were parked along the full length of the street and huge, hulking dark buildings with tall chimney pots loomed over them. Dark arches between the buildings looked dangerous and forbidding and their innocuous little signs displayed below cheesy yellow lamps - DISCOUNT CARPETS, GARAGE, WROUGHT IRON GATES - seemed like lies, sweet temptations to trick the innocent into entering.

The steady trickle of people seemed all one way, probably workers returning from their jobs in other towns. Billy walked in the direction they all seemed to be coming from, and in no time at all he was at the bus station. If he hadn't been concentrating he might have walked straight past it. He had been expecting something along the lines of the Victoria coach station, not a rusty green iron cricket pavilion built by the Victorians, but that's pretty much what the guide book didn't say about the bus station. There was a bus waiting in the centre of the tarmac ring, an antique rust bucket with a cantankerous engine. It looked a few weeks short of being retired to Colombia or Pakistan, where people with boxes of live chickens and piglets under their arms would cram inside a hundred at a time. Right now it was empty and none of the passengers huddled on the iron benches seemed in a particular hurry to board it. Billy went to get a closer look at the destination sign on the front of the bus ( although he wasn't hopeful of it reading Golders Green or Marble Arch ) and that's when he noticed the policeman standing motionless among the seated passengers. This policeman was wearing a bullet-proof vest and a lethal sub-machine gun hung from a strap over his right shoulder, indicating to Billy that he probably wasn't here to see the buses safely into the road.

Billy went hot and cold at the same time. A sickening wave of fear shook him. He wet his lips and scanned the line of passengers, seeing another policeman with an unfriendly looking German Shepherd sitting erect at his feet. Billy turned and walked quickly away from the bus station. Panic bubbled inside him like boiling water rattling a saucepan lid. He couldn't think straight, couldn't think of anything except running and running and runn-

He caught hold of himself only moments before breaking into a sprint. He took a single mincing leap, stopped, almost toppled onto his face, and then carried on, pulling his chin into the smelly fur collar around his throat. Headlights blazed at him, gleaming psychotic lights bearing down on him. A car...a van...a police van driving towards him with the deadly smooth slowness of a sliding snake. Billy's heart stopped between beats. You can't take much more of this, Billy, a weak, distressed little voice inside him wailed. Give yourself up, man, don't put yourself through this ordeal.

But he wouldn't give himself up. Couldn't. Somehow he held himself together until the danger had past.

"They don't know who you are," he reminded himself. His thoughts sounded breathless and scared. "They don't know who you are so just keep your head down and they'll never know who you are just keep walking don't stop don't look at them don't give them a reason to-"

"Fucking nutter," someone to his left sniggered, and Billy's cheeks glowed with embarrassment.

"Noth-"

Nothing. He glanced surreptitiously to his right. Two teenagers had moved into the road to overtake him. They were staring at him unabashed, grinning stupidly.

Better a twat than a cop killer, he thought, and almost giggled out loud. Oh boy he needed to talk with that old robber's friend Jack Daniels, and pretty darn quickly at that. The hostile dark tunnels between the buildings on Dagger Lane suddenly looked warm and safe and inviting. Billy slipped into one - the gateway to an electrical repair workshop, according to the sign bolted to the wall - and found a comfortable spot between two huge refuse containers, sat down on the cold cobblestones and took the bottle of Jack Daniels out of his carrier bag. He sipped moodily from the bottle, his strange new face softly lambent in the cheesy glow of the wall lamps. A man coming from the direction of the electrical workshop gave him a cursory glance as he picked through a bunch of keys. Billy eyed the man flatly and the brief meeting ended there. There was nothing unusual about a scruffy man in a dark alley drinking whiskey from a bottle, not even in Poke Hole, North Yorkshire. Billy was no different now from all those cursing Jocks slumbering in West End doorways. He was lost and desperate and hopeless, and a long, long way from home. He had a better quality brew, that was all the difference there was.

An hour went by, during which time Billy thought plenty and drank plenty. When he emerged from the tunnel he found that a long winter's night had stolen over the town. The traffic was heavy on Dagger Lane, surely too heavy for a small market town such as this.

Not on the day a policeman gets murdered, Billy reminded himself. Police spot-checks were slowing the traffic down. They were all over town, guarding the main routes in and out of town like customs officers guarding a port. Patrol cars sitting at roundabouts and busy junctions, the faces of every passing driver and passenger closely scrutinised. Bobbies at the bus station. Armed bobbies and bobby dogs, and no doubt at the train station also. This town was closed under marshal law.

As if to confirm Billy's paranoid suspicions a police helicopter buzzed low overhead. It circled the Dagger Lane area - which was off the Cromwell Road, where Poke Hole united played their home games, Billy remembered from his atlas - lights blinking urgently, and started to move across town. It seemed to hesitate at the very last minute, as if one of the observers thought he might have spotted something. Take a look at him down there, Bob - the wanker in the smelly coat and obvious disguise.

Billy was attracted by an old man in a long fluorescent orange coat standing by a cart with his hands in his pockets. He wasn't so much attracted by the strange sight as what the old man was squawking at the top of his strangled old voice.

"FINAR PAR!" the old man squawked. "FINAR PAR! FINAR PAR!" He sounded like a senile parrot. "FINAR PAR! FINAR PAR!"

Final post, Billy decided, and went across to buy a late paper, which he took to the nearest streetlamp to read.

Man hunt...Billy shivered as something slithered down his spine. And worse, it got worse. Below the headline was a clear photograph showing Billy and Warren racing through the centre of town. The photograph had been taken by a CCTV camera shortly after they had discarded their masks. Dazed, Billy began to walk away, still transfixed by the photograph on the front page. That's me, he thought rationally, and yet he couldn't for the life of him associate himself with the figure in print. He couldn't even remember running from the bank. He knew he had done it, but part of his mind was like a zeppelin or a police helicopter floating above himself as he and Warren had run for their lives, and the other part remembered nothing but the policeman's face ( Constable Allen Foster's face, Constable Allen Foster,24) as Jones dragged him away from the bank door and put the muzzle of that stubby shotgun against the base of his skull and-

Billy looked up from the newspaper just in time to avoid colliding with a refugee from a Mad Max movie, a tall, brutal looking bone-head in a long black mackintosh.

"Fuck off!" the bone-head rapped, and shoved Billy hard in the centre of the chest. Billy put his head down and carried on walking. He risked a glance over his shoulder, half expecting to see the psychotic bone-head following him, but apparently he had lost interest. Billy blew out a breath. This town was more dangerous than the casual eye perceived. What's more, he was effectively trapped here.

Unless he carried on walking that is, carried on walking all the way to London. Well okay, not as far as London perhaps ( because not even London is safe anymore is it, young Billy Young? They know who you are. This is your life, Billy, this is the rest of your miserable life) but he could certainly walk out of town. Quickly he fished the atlas out of his bag and flicked through the pages, peering squintily over the top of his glasses. There was an awful lot of empty space around Poke Hole, whole pages of the stuff marked with nothing but contour lines and meaningless little triangles. Field and fountain, moor and mountain. Indian country. Face it, Billy, you're out of town and out of your league, my son.

A powerful smell suddenly snatched his attention away from the atlas. It was the rousing aroma of fish and chips. All at once he was ravenous. He walked a little way on until he came to a small, brightly lit fish bar called Derek's, and went inside.

"We're waiting for chips, cock," a jolly-faced fat woman behind the counter told him as he joined a queue of four. She turned to watch the television that stood on a wall shelf above her head. She had a bald patch. The man frying chips next to her looked a bit like Robin Williams with grey hair. He was also watching the television while absently chasing potatoes around the fryer with his net. Billy sighed impatiently. His mouth was watering. He couldn't remember ever being this hungry in his entire life. He was staring greedily at the golden, battered fish waiting in the hot cabinet when the elderly man standing in front gave him a hurried nudge.

"Eh up," he said keenly.

Billy looked up uncomprehendingly, staring firstly at the old man and then finally at the television screen. Everybody was watching. The jolly fat balding woman stretched up a podgy hand and turned up the volume.

"-orkshire correspondent Cathy Flint reports..."

It was Look North or Look Poke Hole or something, the regional news programme you get after the main news in any case. The studio shot cut to a location report of this afternoon's big happening in Poke Hole. Sleet pouring past the drab stone buildings in the colourless town centre, shoppers hidden inside umbrellas going about their business, sombre policemen in groups of three and four allaying the fears of shocked pensioners in rain bonnets and flat caps, the Midland Bank cordoned off, a bunch of flowers on the wet pavement, slow traffic like a funeral procession. Billy heard interested murmurings from the people in the fish bar as familiar sights appeared on the magic box. They seemed less concerned with the death of a police officer than they were with spotting Shoe City and the Bargain Book Basement.

"I was exactly there," the jolly fat balding woman said, and stood on the tips of her shoes so that she could pinpoint to the others exactly where she had been standing when the crime had occurred. She was on the zebra crossing, on her way to Mister Keys to get those black shoes heeled.

"I should have been home at three," a man in a boiler suit and donkey jacket grumbled."All the bloody buses were late 'cos of this."

Cut to a press conference. Two stony-faced detectives and a senior officer in uniform squashed behind a desk in what looked like a draughty church hall. A brief statement was issued condemning the cold-blooded ferocity of the murder. Appeals to the public and criminal fraternity alike. No questions at this point.Cut to a police helicopter hovering precariously in a vast steel-grey sky.

"Extra police have been drafted in to comb the surrounding countryside and moorland, and more are expected to join the hunt for the killers in the morning."

Cut to the church where Billy and Warren had rested, a policeman with tired eyes and a cold red nose, his arms folded across his chest, behind him more police in boiler suits with rubber gloves on rooting through the bushes.

From the corner of his eye Billy caught sight of a figure in the doorway. He slipped his glasses down the bridge of his nose and turned his head surreptitiously. It wasn't a policeman standing there but the belligerent bone-head he had narrowly avoided getting a thumping from only minutes before. He's following me, Billy thought irrationally, but the bone-head was more interested in what was on the television. He was looking up at the screen with fixed concentration, his hands in his pockets pulling the black mac close to his chest. There was something odd about him that Billy couldn't put his finger on, something strange and compelling, something-

"And the latest news is that police have positively identified two of the men they wish to speak to in connection with today's incident."

Billy shot a panicky look at the television screen and saw his own face staring back at him. It was a police photograph, taken after his last arrest. The screen had been split so that a photograph of Warren could also be shown. Warren looked drawn and bewildered but Billy looked like...well, like someone who would shoot an unarmed policeman in cold blood.

Cut to Cathy Flint reporting live from the Midland bank on Poke Hole High Street. Cathy Flint was young but of an indeterminable age, pretty and natural as a student yet mature and professional. There was an excited shine in her eyes as she introduced the detective superintendent heading the murder inquiry, one of the two detectives from the press conference. He had a quiet, calming manner and appeared to be holding up well.

Billy had seen enough. He wasn't hungry anymore. In fact the cloying, fatty stench was making him feel sick. The heat generated by the fryer was wrapping itself around his face, choking him. He turned away from the television and headed out. At the same moment the tall bone-head, distracted by Billy's sudden departure, also looked away from the television screen. Their eyes met. Recognition dawned on both of them.

"Wotcha, Billy-boy," Daryl Jones whispered.

**

Billy did precisely what he should have done the night he first met Daryl Jones - carry on about his business. Pretending he hadn't recognised the bone-head, he dropped his eyes and hurried out of the door. A bitterly cold wind lashed his face with invigorating droplets of cold sleet. Billy paused only briefly to get his bearings before marching on his eternal way. It wasn't long before he detected a rapid set of footsteps behind him. Increasing his speed did nothing to deter the follower.

"Hold on, Billy!" Jones hissed, his trainers swishing across the wet pavement. "I just want to sort something out."

The money, Billy thought, and his pace faltered just enough for Jones to catch him.

"I've got you," Jones said, leering wolfishly. He put a hand on Billy's shoulder and brought his smooth head close as if to whisper a secret. "What do you look like, Billy?" His forehead dropped on Billy's shoulder and he shook with mad, cackling laughter. "I thought mine was a bit drastic but-"

Billy jerked his shoulder. Jones stopped laughing and fixed Billy with a look of aggressive surprise.

"What did you do it for?" Billy asked. "What sort of bastard shoots a copper over a few hundred quid?" His voice was full of disgust and loathing. The expression on Jones's face slipped naturally to one of murderous intent.

"It wasn't about money, you fucking loser," Jones growled."It was about twenty-five to life, Billy. I'm not going down for anyone, let alone a fucking wooden top from fuck knows where we are. That's what I told Warren."

Billy was unseated at the mention of his friend."Warren? Where is he, have you seen him?"

Jones smiled distrustfully, a nasty smile full of slyness and cunning."I've seen him."

"Where?"

"On his way to hell," Jones said darkly. He slipped his hands into the pockets of his mackintosh. The amputated end of his shotgun poked out between two of the buttons and jabbed Billy in the gut. "One way ticket, Billy, just like you."

Jones instructed Billy to walk on as if everything was cool. He had been involved in the murder of a police officer and now he was about to be executed on a freezing winter's evening three hundred miles from home, but everything was cool. He didn't want to die like this, not in a dark alley wearing some ridiculous disguise. He threw a stricken glance over his shoulder and saw Jones's bald skull grinning dementedly at him. He looked like the reaper himself.

"Up there," Jones said, pushing Billy up an unlit alleyway."Go on, right to the top."

They picked their way across a surface littered with broken glass and smashed bricks. A cracked guttering was spilling a continuous stream of water onto a pile of garbage bags. To Billy it sounded like a drumroll.

"I killed the barber," Jones said with chilling matter-of-factness."He cut my hair off and I cut his throat with an open razor." He chuckled with deranged amusement."I cut Warren too. poor old Wazza was shitting himself."

Jones gave Billy an encouraging shove in the back. As he stumbled Billy wound his hand tightly around the plastic bag with the Jack Daniels bottle inside. Any second now he was going to knock that lunatic's grin into the middle of next week.

"Don't you fret though, Billy-boy," Jones babbled on."I won't cut you. I'll use the shotgun and make it quick. I always liked you."

Billy stopped and looked over his shoulder with utter disbelief."Then why the fuck are you doing this?"

Jones sniffed and shrugged. For a few seconds he said nothing, and Billy wondered if he actually felt insulted at not receiving his due thanks for sparing him the razor. He almost laughed except it wasn't funny.

"Makes sense," Jones said at last."I've never been arrested, Billy. Did you know that?"

Billy shook his head. Keep talking, fruitbat, he thought tensely, and in about five seconds time you'll be telling this story to Old Splitfoot. He relaxed his right shoulder ready to swing as fast and hard as he could. Here, have a drink on me, blam! Strange, but the terror he should have been feeling wasn't there, not in that paralysing force he had experienced when Jones had killed the copper. The fear inside him now was like an engine revving. He felt just the way he used to feel when he and Warren first started robbing together.

"You and Warren are old lags, so you're the only ones who can identify me. And that twat who was driving the car of course, but he won't be in any rush to give himself up. I'll just wait until I get back to London and deal-"

The shotgun went off. Billy screamed and fell onto his back, smacking his head on a brick. Jones screamed and fell the other way.

"FOOT!" he cried, his voice high and shocked and screechy."ME FUCKING FOOT!"

Billy's upper body rose like the snap of a mousetrap. He stared incredulously at his own chest, and then patted himself absently as if searching for a shopping list. A feeble smile settled on his face. Opposite, Jones was writhing around in the debris, his fingers clawing at the bricks and glass. Billy stood up, intending to get as far away from the alley in the shortest possible time, and quite by accident stood on Jones's wounded foot. Jones howled and thrashed back and forth like a hooked fish on a riverbank. Billy opened his mouth and realised immediately that he was about to apologise. A short squawk of mad laughter spewed from his mouth.

"BILLY!" Jones's bald head came up, his expression twisted and grotesque."Don't you laugh at me fucknob, don't you fucking laugh-"

Billy swung the plastic bag in an almost casual sidewards arc and clubbed Jones on the temple with the base of the whiskey bottle. It did not break. Jones stared at him with stupid surprise. Billy swung again, this time bringing the bag down on the dome of Jones's smooth skull like a hammer. The bottle smashed and Jones withered comically into a sleeping position. Billy didn't wait around. A primal instinct told him to finish Jones off or at least get the shotgun away from him, but the other instinct, the survival instinct he now trusted implicitly, told him to forget Jones and get away from here before the law arrived.

**

The idea came to him in the toilet at McDonald's, which wasn't really McDonald's at all but a clone restaurant at the top end of town called Big Burger. It was clean whatever it was and the food smelled appetising. Billy washed his hands and face and then straightened his wig in the mirror. He stared at his reflection for a moment, wondering if now was the right time to be eating. Warren was dead. His best friend was dead but the most important thing on his mind at this moment was whether to get the Big Burger Special or a Big Chicken Bun. I'm hungry, he thought objectively, I must eat. My body knows that. I'll collapse if I don't eat.

Big Burger Special, large fries and a Diet Coke. Billy paid for his order and caught the look that the girl who had served him passed to her friend as she turned away. Why do I always get the tossers? the look said, and her friend's lips twitched into a smirk. Billy felt a sudden pang of sorrow for all those people with nothing to do in the evenings except eat alone in burger bars and get smirked at by the pretty young staff and their pretty friends. He felt like whipping off his hat and wig just to see that priggish little better-than-you smirk drip from their faces like so much cheap make-up. But of course he didn't, he simply took his meal outside and ate it standing against the metal crash-bars at the side of the road. He felt oddly at ease and put the feeling down to the warm yellow neon sign above the burger bar. Neon's were a familiar comfort in an alien world of strange accents and sinister shadows. But it wasn't home.

The burger was okay - not great, and certainly not up to Big Mac standards, but it filled the growling hole in his stomach. The fries on the other hand were excellent, hot and crisp and salty. Billy stuffed the last stringy handful into his mouth, slurped up the dregs of the Coke, and threw his waste into a nearby rubbish bin. Then he wiped his hands on his jacket and went to the phone box across the road, where he dialled 999 and asked for an ambulance. When he was put through to the ambulance controller he told them, in a dodgy Northern accent muttered through a napkin, that a man had collapsed outside the Big Burger. He hung up, and after checking that the coast was clear, he lay down on the ground and waited. The ambulance took less than five minutes to arrive. Billy was expecting it but the siren nevertheless made his wig curl. A paramedic spotted him and Billy made like a corpse. Someone shook his shoulder gently.

"Hello, can you hear me?"

Billy stirred, groaned, and moved his head from side to side. He thought it best not to fake unconsciousness just in case the unconscious body reacted in a way that a conscious body wouldn't, medically speaking that is.

"Is he with you?"

Another voice, male, indignant."Is he fuck."

"Did you call the ambulance?"

"Nah."

From across the road, someone laughing and shouting:"Gerry, come one!"

Billy fluttered his eyelids open. A face peered into his eyes. Male, early fifties, a kind and reassuring face.

"Hello, pal."

"Wherema?" Billy moaned."Wherema?"

"What's your name?" the paramedic asked.

"Ber- ( Billy Young, I'm the fucking bloke the coppers are looking for, well done for catching me) -Bert."

"Right, Bert, my name's Andrew. I think you've fallen over. Did you fall over?"

"Stinks of whiskey," a female voice noted.

Billy rolled his eyes and saw a female paramedic standing over him. She was holding a blanket and a medical box.

"Have you been drinking, Bert?" the paramedic called Andrew inquired. He used the same patronising voice he would have used on a very young child."Have you had a good drink?"

"Aye," Billy growled, deciding to follow the course Andrew had set."Aye, a fucking good drink."

Andrew made a brief examination of the patient, checking for fractures and neck injuries. Billy flushed with embarrassment and something like distant horror when he felt his wig slide a couple of inches to the left.

"Does it hurt anywhere, Bert?"

"Sick," Billy grunted, and Andrew rolled him over so fast that he really did think he was going to throw up.

"Alright, Bert, you stay still and Judy will get a stretcher for you. We'll pop you along to the hospital and let the nurses sort you out."

"Which hospital?" Billy asked too sharply.

"St George's," Andrew said.

Billy looked at the paramedic through half closed eyes and swimmy glasses and still recognised the faint air of suspicion on his face."Wheresssat then?" he asked, rolling his head drunkenly.

"Only a few minutes away, don't fret, lad."

Billy groaned, and this time he didn't need to act. He sat up abruptly, shrugging off the paramedic's assisting hand, and got to his feet.

"Hold on, Bert!" Andrew called as Billy strolled away."Hold your horses!" His female colleague was laughing from the open door of the ambulance.

"Fucking Poke Hole!" Billy hissed under his breath. The idea to skip town in the back of an ambulance had been inspired by the horror film, An American Werewolf In London. In that film the young American hiker is ferried all the way back to a London hospital because they don't have them up North, only vets and Brian Glover. Billy wasn't so naive as to think he would have got a free ride all the way to St Barts but he had hoped to get a lift to York or even somewhere exotic like Leeds. But no, oh no, because never mind the movies, Poke Hole had a hospital of its own. It didn't have a McDonalds but it had a fucking hospital.

Billy stopped outside a small independent cinema. He felt tears well in his eyes. He took his glasses off and wiped them with the back of his hand. I want to go home, he thought, and the thought was nothing but a frightened, abandoned little voice in a clamour of bedlam. On a whim he wandered into the cinema and stood conspicuously in a queue made up largely of families with young children. Only when he got to the front did he realise that just two films were showing. One of them was the welcome return of that old favourite ET and the other was Beauty and the Beast. School holidays, he remembered, and bought a ticket for ET. He purchased a carton of washy cola and some popcorn and took it inside the theatre, which was only a third full. The warmth and darkness lulled him into an anxious sleep from which he woke a short time later when a hand began to massage his groin. It was a woman too...no, not a woman, he realised as he lowered his head and peered sluggishly over the top of his glasses, a man in drag. A transvestite with an oval face and a psychotic smile. Billy's heart missed a beat when for a split-second the tranny looked like Daryl Jones, but then he remembered that all transvestites had scary smiles because of the amount of slap they put on their faces. And because they were men in wigs of course, but he couldn't very well hold that against a chap could he now?

"Watch the film," Billy said calmly."Stop playing with my dick and you might just get to see how it ends."

The transvestite pouted sulkily and fluttered his eyelashes."Spoilsport," he giggled, and wriggled a little closer. Billy saw that he was wearing a tight mini-skirt. He had great legs, in the dark at least."Southerner, are you? I went to London once, met this Italian guy at Heaven." He squirmed ecstatically at the memory and cuddled against Billy's shoulder."London's fab. Not like this place." He sniffed and stiffened a little."Small-minded bastards is what they are up here."

Billy let it all roll over him with unprecedented stoicism. Yesterday he would have paggered this person by now.

"Here, have some popcorn," he said."Watch the film."

The transvestite gave a delighted little squeal and snuggled up to Billy's side."Buy me an ice cream too," he said in a throaty whisper."I like having something to suck on."

"Don't push your luck, fag," Billy answered smoothly, and they laughed together.

**

"What's your name?"

"Eleanor."

"Your real name, I mean."

"Eleanor. What's yours?"

They were standing outside the cinema, framed by a neon poster of a melancholy Humphry Bogart trudging down a boulevard of broken dreams. Eleanor had her (his? her? what the fuck - her) hands in the pockets of her fur jacket. She was shivering.

"Tim."

"Your real name, I mean."

"Billy. What's yours?"

"Eleanor. Satisfied, Billy?"

Billy smiled wryly and nodded. People were looking at them now, the families wandering out of the cinema, tugging on the hands of staring children. It didn't bother Billy much. In fact he was thinking that the tranny might be a good accessory. Sure they got noticed but for all the wrong reasons. He once read that the best way to obscure your face was to carry a colourful bag or some other faintly ridiculous accessory, such as a transvestite if you were stuck for ideas. People saw you but they never remembered you, not your face anyway. They remembered the lime green holdall or the boldly striped umbrella or the big manly woman on your arm.

"I want to get a drink," Billy said."Is there a pub in this town where we won't get flattened as soon as we walk through the door?"

Eleanor smiled timidly and gazed at him with shy expectation."We could go back to my place," she said. Billy was suddenly struck by her vulnerability. In a way it had been the same with Warren. Without a guiding hand and the occasional kick up the backside Warren's naive and trusting disposition would have got him killed a long time before Daryl Jones came on the scene. He saw that same child-like susceptibility and weakness in Eleanor. Her desperate desire for human company was leading her into dangerous waters.

"I could be a killer for all you know."

"Are you?" she asked simply.

"I'm no angel," Billy answered."Come on, take me to a pub."

The rejection briefly dulled her eyes, but then she took Billy's arm and led him away from the cinema. She walked just like a woman, as Bob Dylan probably said, a modest little wiggle in her hips and her heels clacking rhythmically against the pavement. She smelled of peaches and menthol cigarettes."So you like girls, Billy?"

"Call me old fashioned."

"So what do you want from me?"

Billy laughed. It was an honest question he supposed."You were the one feeling me up in there, don't forget."

"Yeah, but only because I thought you were the type." She studied his face for a moment, smiling curiously."Funny, but you don't look the type now."

"And what's the type?"

Eleanor shrugged."Sad, lonely...asleep...I don't know. You look different now." She stepped out of line and stared him full in the face."Can't put my finger on it though."

"Keep that as the golden rule and we'll get on fine."

She laughed huskily and fell back into step. They passed what was most probably the town square. A fine Christmas tree decorated with coloured bulbs stood proudly in the centre, and beneath it a small brass band in Dickensian costume were playing God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen to a handful of locals. Billy was quite taken with the scene until he noticed the television news crew filming from a short distance away. He recognised the Cathy Flint from the news report on the fish bar's television. She was wearing a bright skiing jacket and a white bobble hat. The old man who was bending her ear about something was oblivious to the testy look of impatience on her face.

"Barry, can you get the star on top the tree!" she called to the cameraman, and rudely strode away from the old man without explanation. A passing police patrol car slowed down to a crawl. Both the occupants were staring out of the passenger window, inane grins splitting their faces.

"Oi, sweetheart, give us a kiss!" the policeman in the passenger seat shouted. He was about forty, older than the driver by about twenty years. He puckered his lips and made a squeaky kissing sound, which the boy with his arm looped over the steering wheel considered the funniest thing since Pingu. Cathy Flint, now arguing some technical point with her cameraman, looked around, her face sharpening with prickled indignity.

"Hello, ducky!" the young driver managed to blurt out before falling into a helpless fit of giggles.

"Grow up, jackass!" Eleanor bellowed, and Billy jerked away from her in alarm. It wasn't the pitch of her voice that so shocked him but the sudden realisation that Cathy Flint was not the object of their crass comments.

"Who's your boyfriend?" the older jackass called. A trail of cars were mooching stealthily along behind them like a parade of circus elephants."Who gets on top tonight, eh?"

Eleanor opened her mouth to respond but Billy propelled her swiftly along, past a mildly amused Cathy Flint and a seriously bemused cameraman, and out of the square.

"Told you the people up here were small-minded," Eleanor said. There was no anger in her voice, just traces of disgust and resignation.

"I thought that kind of stuff went out yonks ago."

"Oh sure, in London and on the telly maybe, but then you don't walk around in a dress and a wig."

Billy grunted sarcastically. They were walking too quickly; Eleanor's heels made an urgent clack-clacking sound on the pavement.

"Hold up, Billy!" she said, slowing him down by pulling on his arm, as if it was the emergency cord on a train."If I go over in these heels I'll break my neck."

Billy slowed his pace reluctantly. Ahead of them was a large unlit car park with a few cars scattered vulnerably around the edges. Billy couldn't help but measure them up like a lion stalking a waterhole. He mentally calculated how many stereos and mobile phones this car park was worth and then effortlessly translated the amount into street-value pounds sterling. All this from a lad who had trouble multiplying odd numbers and frequently relied on his fingers for the evens. The irony was not lost on him.

On the far side of the car park was an arrangement of mills and warehouses. A feverish pink and green neon proclaimed one of them to be The Old Black Kettle.

"A cowboy bar?" Billy asked, raising a surprised eyebrow."Are we dressed for it?"

"I'm alright in there," Eleanor said confidently. She searched for the right phrase, smiling a little sadly when she found it. "I'm a bit of a novelty, bit of a pet."

They crossed the dark car park and went inside the Old Black Kettle. It was fairly quiet inside. A dozen or so patrons dressed casually in jeans and shirts sat largely at the bar drinking bottled beer. The light was golden and subdued, the floor polished wood. Saloon doors led the way to the toilets - not Gents and Ladies, Billy was amused to note, but Cowboys and Cowgirls. There was a stage and an area in front of it for dancing and fighting. A noticed pinned to one of the huge speakers reminded everyone that Wednesday was line dancing night.

Nobody took much notice of them as they arrived at the bar, the transvestite and the man who was maybe wearing a disguise. They all seemed preoccupied with troubles of their own, best gals who'd walked out on them and were now demanding a D-I-V-O-R-C-E, or the loneliness of long-distance trucking or maybe just worries about recent uncertainty down the plant.

"I hate toy cowboys," Billy whispered."Why does everyone in here think they're American?"

"It's just dress-up, Billy," Eleanor said, fixing him with a look of matronly disapproval."You've never played, I take it?" And again her expression changed to one of puzzlement, as if there was something she thought she ought to be getting but wasn't. An awkward moment was avoided when a barmaid decked out in a white mini-skirt and white stetson came over to serve them. She was a glamorous young blond with a slightly intimidating aloofness about her. Although she gave a faint smile of acknowledgement to Eleanor her reaction to Billy was one of veiled caution.

"Usual, Ellie?" she said.

"Yes, dear."

The barmaid cooly scanned Billy's face and seemed to dismiss him in an instant. "And your friend?"

"Bud," Billy answered."And a whiskey."

"Any preference?" she recited.

"Have you got Jack Daniels?"

She sighed deeply, exasperated. Suddenly Billy didn't fancy her anymore. Suddenly she was ugly, an ugly person, just like those girls from the Big Burger and even the two coppers who had tried to humiliate Eleanor on the way over here.

"Not tonight. Tonight we've got Wild Turkey, and if you really want to be the Lone Ranger I can dig out a bottle of Jim Beam, but it will cost you. And we've got the usual stuff."

Billy took off his National Health glasses and leaned forward a little. Something she saw in his eyes removed the look of haughty disdain from her face. "Wild Turkey's fine," he told her politely."Wild Turkey, no water, no ice, and no attitude. Shall I repeat that order?"

"Don't mind Kay-lee," Eleanor said as she climbed gracefully onto a bar stool. It was a request rather than advice. This was probably the only pub in town where she could be free to enjoy a drink and a chat without idiots wolf whistling and calling her ducky, the only pub in town where she could be Eleanor instead of Tom, Dick or Harry, and Billy wasn't doing her any favours by upsetting the bar staff.

"I'm sorry," he told her."I've had a gutful, that's all."

"Tell me about it," she said toughly."She dipped in the pocket of her fur jacket and brought out a packet of menthol cigarettes. Billy declined one and took out his Marlboro. He lit hers before his own."I've ran from it and I've fought it like a wild thing. Neither works, Billy." She blew out a breath of minty smoke and appraised him thoughtfully."Best thing a person can do is ignore it, and I've just realised what it is that's been puzzling me about you."

The barmaid dumped their order on the counter. She took Billy's money and returned the change without comment. Billy pocketed the money absently, his eyes hardly straying from Eleanor's knowing gaze. For a long time she said no more on the subject. Billy downed the Wild Turkey in one gulp and felt the rising terror and panic settle a little. Someone got up from the bar and wandered over to the old Wurlitzer juke box. A few moments later Don Henley was singing Desperado.

"You can't fool someone who spends half their life wearing a disguise, Billy," she said at last. She was watching him steadily, more concerned than suspicious."I don't want to be a woman, I just like dressing up as one. During the daytime I work at the DSS office in town. I wear a shirt and tie and trousers and everything, but at night-" she gripped her hands together and pulled them to her heart, her expression distant and dreamy, shining."At night I'm Eleanor, queen of Ritchmire and belle of the Old Black Kettle." She lowered her hands and smiled pensively at Billy."It's not who I am though, Billy, It's who I become. I see that on your face, in your eyes. You've become someone but it's not who you are."

"You don't want to know who I am," Billy said quietly. He drank from the Budweiser bottle, felt his shoulders and chest begin to tremble and his arms break out in goosbumps.

"Are you in trouble?"

He laughed mirthlessly, avoiding her eyes."You could say that."

"I won't tell anyone," she said, lowering her voice. She reached out and took his hand."I promise, Billy, I won't tell anyone."

Billy looked up slowly. The depth of honesty and compassion in her eyes staggered him and flooded him with emotions he didn't fully understand. He wished they were alone so that he could break down.

"I'm a bankrobber," he said, and proceeded to tell her everything.

**

When the tale was told he excused himself and pushed through the saloon doors and through another door marked Cowboys. He locked himself in a cubicle and cried quietly for some unknown time. Another cowboy came in and sat down in one of the other cubicals with a pained groan. Billy listened to the other's strange noises until he was using the toilet roll not to mop tears but to suppress the giggles. He would go now. He would thank Eleanor, maybe even kiss her on the cheek, but then he would leave her life forever before he ruined it the way he had ruined Warren's life and the life of Constable Allen Foster, 24.

He unlocked the cubicle and flushed the pot for effect. He came out and went across to the mirror, noticing a slug-trail of smeared blood leading to one of the other cubicles. It didn't mean anything to him, a fight he'd missed maybe, but that's all. He didn't think about Daryl Jones, not until he was straightening his hat in the mirror and saw him emerging from the cubicle behind him.

Jones was in the act of fastening his jeans. He was standing on one leg. The boot of his other leg was shredded at the toes and stuffed with white tissue paper which was rapidly absorbing fresh blood. There was a horrid blackish scab on his temple where Billy had clocked him with the whiskey bottle. Blood running between the cracks gleamed under the fluorescent. When he saw Billy he just froze. Something began to boil behind his eyes, something of such psychotic ferocity that the whole building seemed to shake with its vibrations.

"Yoooooo!" he gurgled as Billy spun round."Yooooooo!"

Jones went for his shotgun and his jeans fell to his ankles. Billy saw his only chance and rushed him, his head low like a ram. He caught Jones full in the stomach and sent him crashing to the back of the cubicle. Jones doubled over and sat on the seat. immediately he tried to get up but Billy leaned on him with all his weight, punching wherever he could land a punch. The scab on Jones's temple split like a fruit, blood spilling down his face. There followed a bizarre little dance as Billy attempted to stamp on Jones's injured foot and Jones naturally tried to dodge him.

"Fuckinggetyoursbashtard!" Jones's teeth snapped and mashed together like the blades of some lethal machine.

"Shut up!" Billy hissed at him."Shut your fucking-" The heel of his trainer connected with the toe of Jones's boot. something crackled and squished wetly. Jones opened his mouth in muted agony. The air was expelled from his lungs like a gunshot. All his strength left him. What Billy did next was one of those things than can never be planned, a piece of inspired improvisation that would be well received in the history of grizzly murder should it ever get out. Throwing off his cap, Billy whipped off the wig and jammed it into Jones's mouth and pushed it down the back of his throat with his fingers. Jones came alive at once, frenzied, his head straining against his own neck like a rabid dog on a leash. He stared at Billy with eyes that were wide and frantic and horrified. He looked as though he had a small dog jammed down his throat.

"Eeeeeeek!" he cried, and Billy used the palm of his hand to prevent him from spitting out the wig, whilst at the same time keeping him down with his other forearm.

Jones turned red, then a dark, devilish crimson. He clawed feebly at Billy's coat, growing weaker and weaker with every passing second. Billy leaned on him harder, grunting with the effort, exorcising this evil spirit from his life. It took no more than three minutes or so to choke Daryl Jones to death but Billy felt like he had run a marathon. They slumped together, one to hell and the other to the toilet floor. Both of them were completely out of breath but in Billy's case it was only temporary. He laughed exhaustedly, laughed at how easy it had been, at how utterly comical and insane. He laughed at Daryl Jones, who had shot himself in the foot and ultimately choked to death on a Rod Stewart wig but only because his jeans fell down at the wrong moment, and he was still laughing when someone came in to use the toilet, whistling - and this was the funniest, most sanity testing part of it all - Yankee Doodle Dandy as he pissed up the urinal. Billy had to bite his fingers until the pain brought him back to reason.

The cowboy zipped his fly and left. Billy waited a few moments and pulled the wig from Jones's mouth. He didn't want to put it back on but he knew he had no choice. He wiped it against his coat and pulled it on his head, shivering with disgust. He picked up his cap and pulled that on. As he did this he noticed the small window positioned directly above the toilet. It was big enough to climb through, and what's more it was open. He looked at Jones, grotesque and undignified in his final pose, and positioned his foot on the seat between the dead man's splayed legs. Billy pushed the window open fully, checked that the coast was clear, then hoisted himself up and through. It was only as he dropped into the car park that he remembered Eleanor.

Sleet in the stiff wind peppered his face. In a couple of seconds his exposed skin began to feel cold and raw. Very faintly, with concentration, he could still hear the brass band in the square. Was that Jingle Bells they were playing? He couldn't tell for sure. Too distant. Some of the notes were being snatched away by the strengthening wind.

Billy put his spectacles back on, blew on his hands and then stuffed them into the coat's warm pockets. He wondered briefly if Eleanor owned a car. He could drive that out of town, drive it anywhere he wanted, with little fear of being stopped by the law, but he dismissed the idea with caustic self-reproach. Was that any way to thank Eleanor for her kindness and understanding towards a stranger in a strange town?

There was something he could do to repay her. He could get the hell out of her life for good.

**

Billy steered himself away from the square. He crossed the car park and turned right up a dark street of partially derelict terraced houses, then quickly became lost in a tangle of back streets and featureless buildings. His superficial knowledge of the town's geography was even more superficial than he had thought. It was an old town, full of secret corners and dark runs leading sometimes to hidden places and sometimes back to places he had already passed. At one point he thought he saw a river, an oily black tongue rippling elusively at the foot of a steep cobbled hill, but when he tried to navigate his way there he found that forces conspired to keep him away. He could never go in a straight line for more than twenty yards. That time he found himself back at the church where he and Warren had hid, only when he got closer he discovered it wasn't the same one. This one was smaller and in ruins. The lead had been stripped from the roof, the timber doors pulled away and most of the fittings inside removed. Billy didn't go inside. It was spooky and desecrated. It seemed to harbour a residual menace like the skull of a maniac.

But the biggest shock of all came when he approached the rear of an imposing Victorian structure surrounded by a tall wrought iron fence. At first he assumed that this was Poke Hole general hospital. The building was certainly in the style of a Victorian institution in any case. It had lots of little square windows where suffering people or orphaned children might have pressed their faces to gaze out at the falling snow on bleak, long ago Christmas nights. And there were vans parked inside the grounds. Ambulances, only they turned out to be police vans.

"It's a shitting nick!" Billy whispered out loud. he experienced more in the way of despair than fear. It seemed as though something up there was giving him a message: didn't matter which way he turned, he would always end up where he was destined to go.

He was determined to press on and put the police station behind him. If he turned back and tried once again to negotiate the maze of streets and back streets that grew beneath Ritchmire like a tangle of roots he would only end up at this very spot. Sooner or later he would be standing at this same fence, and he figured the more frustrated he grew the sloppier he would get. At this moment in time he was still fairly rational but another trip through Wonderland might drive him madder than old Hatter himself.

He skirted the fence, keeping one eye on the back door of the police station. Someone did come out, two male and one female plod in uniform, but they stayed by the doors smoking and telling each other how cold it was. When he arrived at the front of the building it was to a sight so unexpected that a temporary mental inertia turned him into a zombie walking mindlessly towards his own destruction.

The circus was in town. Perhaps as many as fifteen or more vans were packed into the small car park outside the main doors. The BBC and ITN were here, and so were a number of other crews whose initials meant nothing to Billy. Cars were parked in every available space, not just in the car park but in the street opposite the police station. Some of them were occupied by hunched dark figures sipping soup or coffee from plastic cups. Groups of reporters and television people were congregated around the entrance to the police station. As Billy passed through them, still in a dazed state of semi-trance, he heard a fattish man in a parker mutter to a colleague: "I'll fucking twat him if he does that again. Bastard Sun."

The Sun, the super soaraway Sun, Billy thought absently. The Sun was Britain's best selling daily newspaper. Not the Poke Hole Bugle or whatever it was called, but the biggest and brightest Sun. Tomorrow he would be on the front page of the Sun, barring any last minute Royal tittle-tattle or a scandal from the House.

He saw Cathy Flint and felt a bizarre urge to wave. She was speaking into a camera...no, not speaking exactly, just nodding her head with the occasional attentive tilt. She became aware of Billy and watched his approach with idle curiosity.

"Hello," she said."I know you don't I?"

Billy was plucked from the enchantment as if by a magic kiss. Suddenly, it seemed, he had turned another blind corner and found himself face to face with that bird from the telly. And she knew him too. She recognised him even through his crappy disguise. Hello, cop killer and wig murderer. Almost casual and polite, as if...

"From the square," Billy said, and all at once his heart began to beat an unnatural tattoo. He glanced slowly around him, feeling like a mouse that wakes up in a cats' home.

Oh shit, Billy, a sinking little voice moaned. Oh, this is where it ends, young Billy Young. This is where the sad theme song fades in and you fade out to the credits.

"I feel like I ought to apologise," Cathy Flint went on. She laughed awkwardly."I don't know why though."

Billy frowned then remembered the moronic duo in the squad car."Not your fault."

Cathy Flint smiled self-consciously."So where's your friend?"

Billy wished she would simply march away as she had done with the old man in the square. Rudeness he could stand, a trendy liberal lefty pee-see guilt trip he couldn't stomach.

"I hardly knew her. Him." He shrugged."Whatever."

She nodded. He recognised that as her attentive and comprehending but not completely emotionally detached nod. Then she nodded again, this time at the camera. "Would you like to be on television? We're asking local people for their reactions to the shooting of the policeman."

Billy stared at her for a long time. Laughter ( or was it a scream?) swelled and expanded inside him with such clamorous outcry that the effort of keeping it back threatened to split his skin at the seams. He wondered what her reaction would be if he just told her that he was so, so sorry.

"Okay," he said."What do I do?"

Billy was positioned in front of the camera. Cathy Flint didn't stand next to him with a microphone as he had expected, but instead remained between the cameraman and the soundman, who dangled a furry boom mike over Billy's head.

"I know what that is," Billy said, smiling dimly."Boom mike, right?"

"Right," Cathy said."Are you a Londoner, Mr..."

"Jones," Billy answered smoothly."And no, I'm from Coventry but I spent a long time in Hong Kong."

Cathy Flint gave a quick distracted nod."Okay, Mr Jones, start whenever you're ready. Just tell us your reaction, you know, how shocked you were and how upsetting its all been."

"Do you think you could take the cap off?" the cameraman asked.

Billy ignored him."I was there, you know," he told Cathy Flint."I was in the bank when it happened."

Three faces stared at him with something like holy inspiration. Cathy flint turned to her cameraman and gestured busily.

"We really want to hear all about that, Mr Jones," she said with breathless sincerity."We'd really appreciate it. Do you have a first name?"

Billy smiled passively, letting the motion of Cathy Flint's sudden bout of nervous excitement wash over him the way he had allowed Eleanor's clumsy sexual advance to wash over him. Cathy Flint didn't give a shit about who he was (although she would if he was to tell her the truth) and she didn't really give a shit about the dead policeman, she only cared about how it all related to her own life. And that made them even didn't it, like soul mates or rats in the same sewer.

"It's Daryl. My name is Daryl Jones, and I can't take the hat off because I'm bald on top and sensitive about it."

She had pulled a notebook from her jacket pocket and was busy scribbling down his name."Don't worry about the hat, Daryl, it's not important so long as you feel comfortable." She looked up and smiled with bright, fervid encouragement. Billy decided she was twenty-two but hadn't dated anyone her own age since the sixth-form."When you're ready."

"Don't you want to ask me a question?"

"No, no, don't bother with that. Just carry on."

So Billy carried on, affording his testimony all the solemn dignity he could muster. He stared through the camera into the eyes of the British public, indelibly scarred and haunted, a survivor barely clinging to the wreckage of his own life.

"I was in the bank when all of a sudden three men came charging through the door. They had guns. They were very frightening. Everyone was frightened. The policeman just happened to walk through the door at the wrong time. One of the gunmen, the lanky one, rushed across the bank and shot him in the head. I'll never forget it. It was a terrible thing. The other robbers could have stopped him but they didn't. They should give the policeman a medal. He was very brave, a very brave man."

"Thankyou, Daryl," Cathy Flint said."That was very moving."

Billy shrugged and smiled vaguely."It's the way I tell 'em."

"It should be on the last news bulletin at five past midnight, just before the late film. If not you'll see it tomorrow morning."

"It'll be yesterday's news by then won't it?"

She laughed, mistaking Billy's cynicism for humour."Technically yes, I suppose it will." She checked her watch and hummed indecisively."Shall we give it another half hour or take off now and come back in the morning?"

The cameraman called Barry said he was ready. The soundman had already started to pack his gear away. Billy stuck his hands in his pockets and prepared to move himself when Cathy Flint offered her hand to shake.

"Thanks again, Daryl. Hope we haven't inconvenienced you. I bet you've been delayed enough already by the police."

"Sure," Billy said absently. Her hand was soft and warm like a child's."I'll be getting off home myself."

"Can we drop you off anywhere?"

He was turning away when she said this and part of him dared not turn back. Nothing was that easy, not after a day like this. After today even the most simple things in life were going to be fraught with peril and paranoia. The dark spectre of this day would watch over him always, through every hour of anxious stolen freedom and every moment of fitful, tormented sleep. It seemed, for a bleak and totally hopeless second, that his only realistic course of action would be to walk into the police station this very minute and drop his cheap wig and glasses onto the sergeant's desk.

But then he remembered who he was and what it felt like to rob banks and steal other people's money. He turned to Cathy Flint and smiled gratefully."Thanks," he said."I'd really appreciate that."

"Good." She looked at him closely, her expression clouding as if someone had walked over her grave, but then dismissed it, forgot it, whatever it was."Where can we drop you?"

"Out of town," Billy told her."Just out of town."

END