Under Cover (Agent 21) Read Free Page B

telling them where to run in order to cut Ricky off.
    – Remember what that weird man said: ‘When you know you’re faster than someone, run in a straight line. Otherwise they might out-think you, like I just did.’
    Good advice. Ricky kept running to the end of the street, across the main road that ran at right angles to it and straight down another street that continued in the same direction. When he looked back over his shoulder five minutes later, Baxter and his heavies were nowhere to be seen.
    He stopped at a children’s playground in an area of open parkland alongside the road. It was empty, which was hardly surprising, since the swings were padlocked and out of order, there were graffiti on the play panels and a heap of litter on the ground. Ricky sat at the bottom of the slide and took a moment to catch his breath.
    With sweaty hands he opened up the bag and rooted around inside it for the precious photograph and the letter. They were still there at the bottom. The glass of the photo frame had cracked, but that didn’t matter. He could still see the photo of him, his mum and his dad sitting on a park bench, his older sister Madeleine between them. They were all laughing at a long-forgotten joke. And the letter was still snugly tucked inside its envelope.
    He carefully put his treasures back into the bag. Then he looked around to check nobody was watching him, before removing his right trainer. Inside, carefully folded up, was the twenty-pound note.
    For the second time in the last few minutes, he felt a moment of gratitude for the advice he had received from that odd-bod with the bald head and bad teeth. This was now the only money he had in the world.
    – And you don’t even have a place to live.
    – Shut up. I’ll think of something.
    But right now, he couldn’t think what that something would be.

3
FEEDING TIME
    Even a B & B was out of the question. Too expensive, even if he could nick more money first, and a kid Ricky’s age could never book a room without somebody asking questions.
    He quickly rejected the idea of approaching the Thrownaways. He didn’t need any more fights, or any more scars.
    Ricky bitterly resented the loss of his room. Baxter might have been loathsome, but at least he didn’t care that Ricky was only fourteen years old.
    He needed
somewhere
to sleep. The thought of being alone on the streets, all night, frightened him. Anything could happen there.
    At first, he felt like he was wandering aimlessly. But as dusk arrived, he found himself walking footsore along the Euston Road. He realized that he had been heading for central London all along. He felt slightly more comfortable there, at least during the day. The bustle and the noise were the closest he ever got to having company. In any case, all the vagrants seemed to congregate there. And he was one of them now.
    – We have to eat
, Ziggy said.
    True. Ricky was weak with hunger. Certainly too weak to pick someone’s pocket. You needed your wits about you when you did that, and all he could think about now was his hunger pangs. His stomach groaned as he walked past pizza restaurants and steak houses. As he looked in through the windows, his reflection stared back – his right eye was so swollen it was almost closed up. He touched it gently, then winced. He could forget about pickpocketing for several days. To do that, you needed to be invisible. With a face like this, he was anything but.
    He wondered how little of his twenty pounds he could spend in return for a full belly. Eventually he decided chocolate bars were his best bet – cheap and filling – so he bought two Snickers from a Tesco Metro, then started looking for somewhere to settle down and eat them.
    He chose Bloomsbury Square. He liked it there among the old university buildings. It had a patch of garden in the middle, with several little thickets of trees dotted around. The garden was surrounded by high railings, and there were benches that he could sit on –