Angel Boy Read Free Page B

home…’
    â€˜It’s eleven o’clock!’
    â€˜I’ve been trying to get you! I never know where you are till you phone us!’
    Stephen Boameh would probably remember the curtains in this hotel bedroom for ever,marked all over with the hotel name. He stared at them, unblinking, as he took in this gut-punch news.
    â€˜No friends came round for him, no …
people
… about?’
    â€˜None that I saw. Stephen, son, you’ve got to come home!’
    â€˜I’m coming! Look for his Day Book, see if there are phone numbers there for school friends – and you ring them, don’t mind the time.’
    â€˜And the police?’
    â€˜When I get there. But ring the Korle-Bu hospital, ask about… road accidents…’
    â€˜I’ve done that. And the Trust hospital, and the Ridge. None with children, they’re saying…’
    â€˜I’m getting home, fast as I can.’
    â€˜Yes, son – really fast! And keep that mobile on!’
    Quickly, Stephen telephoned the town’s posher hotel where his passengers were staying – nice people who fully understood why he was leaving them. He threw some cedies at the nightdesk and ran out with his holdall to the car – to drive south as he’d never driven before in his life.

Chapter Four

    L eonard would never let himself go to sleep again. When whatever was going to happen happened, he was going to be awake to fight it; on this he was determined. He wasn’t a tough boy, he was more like his father. If people said to Leonard Boameh,
Do you want a fight?
he’d say
No!
and he’d back off. But he wasn’t a coward: he didn’t think of himself as chicken: he just wasn’t aggressive. If he
had
to fight for something, he would. And if he had to fight for his life tonight – or for anything else – he’d fight until his last breath and the last drop of his blood.
    Unless he could escape first. But he had noplan. He wasn’t tied up, and no one was sitting on him any more, but when the street kids had finished swearing and smoking and making their backside noises, he was pushed away in a corner furthest away from the curtain of old sacks in the doorway. To get out, he would have to fly like a mosquito over their bodies – unless every one of these kids was asleep; and whenever he lifted his head to look around, there were always night eyes glinting back at him, wide open.
    And the uncle had changed his message. Now he sort of smiled, ‘C’n jus’ kill you!’
    â€˜You get yourself to sleep, boy!’ the daddy kid croaked, then gave him a kick when Leonard looked around once too often. ‘You gotta look real angel boy tomorrow.’ And Leonard’s numbness came back to cover him like an icy shroud. So, why would he have to look the angel boy tomorrow? Were these kids going to sell him off as a nice-looking little house-boy for someone? Were they going to trade him to someone forcedies or dollars? Were they heading over the border with him to Ivory Coast, to sell him off to another people? He’d never get back from that – no one ever did.
    He lay there with his eyes staring up, one small tight body in this huddle of tight bodies, except that these others were free…

    On the road south there seemed to be more stretches of pothole and broken surface than good tarmac, but at this time of night there were no lorries and no street vendors standing at the roadsides holding out their fruit or small meat, so Stephen pushed his old Vauxhall to the limits in his race home. Normally, with passengers poking their cameras out of his windows, or asking this or that about people’s lives, and the state of the country, and the flash floods, and the road-building programme, this journey would take him over three hours. Tonight he did it intwo; and at just after one o’clock in the morning he yanked on his brake and ran into the house.
    And