The Walking Dead

A hundred and fifty yards behind her and Jamal, it was hard for Syed to follow her, but he had the skills. Syed's home, where he lived with his parents and where he worked in the kitchen of a fast-food kebab store, was north-west London, Hanger Lane, but the skills he now used had been learned on the teeming streets of Peshawar. Pakistan was where he had travelled two years before, aged nineteen, to visit family, and there he had been recruited. He had been putty in the hands of those who had noted him: four months before he had flown to the homeland of his father and mother, his elder brother had been attacked on a late-night bus, punched and kicked unconscious by white yobs — why? Because his brother was a Muslim, Asian, a 'bastard bloody Paki', the family had spent weeks travelling to and from the West Middlesex Hospital to see a young man who, for three days, had lingered close to death with tubes and drips keeping him alive. His brother was now recovered in body, but seldom left his Hanger Lane home. For what had been done to him, Syed had no regrets at having accepted the advances of the recruiters.

In Peshawar he had been trained in the arts of following a man or woman and remaining unnoticed. Ahead of him, the woman guided Jamal through the streets in the centre of the town and into the wide square, where the first buds were on the trees, and led him towards the steps up to the shopping centre. Using what he had been taught in Peshawar, Syed was in place to satisfy himself that the woman had no tail on her. If there had been a tail from the security people, he would have spotted the signs from as far back as a hundred and fifty yards. He would have seen men pass women and move forward without acknowledging a colleague, and men or women lift their hands to speak into their wrists, and the loitering of those men and women with newspapers who did not read the columns of print. They had believed him an excellent pupil in Peshawar, and told him so *. It was the first day that Syed had met others from the group, and the first time since his return from Pakistan that he had been called forward. He thought, his initial impression, that the woman believed she owned too great an importance with them, that she was flawed by the scar that marked her out and would make her remembered, but those decisions had been taken by others.

They climbed the steps to the shopping centre. From that distance, a hundred and fifty yards from it, he hated the place, and his thoughts were of avarice, its corrupting influences and ostentation. He saw the woman and Jamal skirt a gang of white youths. His brother would be avenged, his Faith protected, when the man came from abroad and they struck the target that was given them.

* * *

Looking for opportunities on Luton's streets was how Lee Donkin spent his days and evenings. Then, if he had found some and could buy, he spent his nights nodding out in the arms of injected heroin.

The best opportunities, and he had experience to back his opinion, were about in mid-morning: women pushing prams and buggies along the Dunstable Road, the Dallow Road or the Leagrave Road on their way to the town's shopping centre. Going to spend, weren't they? Cash in their purses, hadn't they? Never going to fight, were they? Lee Donkin, nineteen years old, fed his addiction with mugging and bag-snatching, and if the victim went down on to the pavement that was their fault for being flicking stupid and resisting, wasn't it? He had spiked hair, bleached white blond, but it was too distinctive when he worked and then he had his black hood over it. What made Lee Donkin most proud was the knowledge that he was a considerable statistic in the offices of the town's police station, among the detectives in the anti-street-theft team, but he had not been successfully prosecuted since he was sixteen when he had served thirty months in a young offenders' institution. Now, he reckoned, he was too smart for them. He was small and short but that was deceptive: his wiry body rippled hard muscle…He had an opportunity. A woman, not old but using one of those hospital sticks and bad on her feet, was ahead: she'd just missed a bus into town and was going to walk. She had a handbag hooked on her elbow, and he closed on her. Alongside that section of the pavement was the school playing-field over which he could leg it when he'd done her.

The hand of Lee Donkin slid into his pocket as his pace increased, as he came nearer to her, and he used his thumb to prise off the little leather sheath that covered the blade of the knife.