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slammed, laughter hung shrill in the
air.
    Toffee turned to watch Sandy as she went across to the next archway, to look for food amongst the rubbish.
    ‘Why did you go back?’
    Mason shrugged and propped himself up. His head tilted back on the side of the stone. He squinted at Toffee, shook his head. Then he closed his eyes again.
    ‘That face will get infected. You need to clean it, stitch it up. We can’t take you to A&E – they’ll be watching. I’ll go and find you something to do it with
and get you a drink too – help to ease the pain. I’ll be back. Stay here. Here’s some money, in case you need it.’
    He rolled two twenty-pound notes tightly before pushing them into the lining of Mason’s coat.
    ‘I don’t want it.’ He shook his head.
    ‘Take it. You earned it, lad.’

Chapter 6
    After they watched Simon walk back into the hostel, Carter started the car. He called Robbo again.
    ‘We’re bringing in Olivia Grantham’s phone but I need a team of officers to go in to Hannover Estate within the next hour. I want to hit it quickly and a message sent out to
signal we mean business. If we leave it too long, gang members will have had time to intimidate any possible witnesses and time to cement stories. Make sure the gangs know we’re not going
anywhere. I need a team of ten officers, in pairs. Have armed police on standby. We need to find Mahmet Balik—’
    ‘Guv?’ Willis interrupted. ‘I want to go in as part of the team.’
    Carter nodded. ‘Robbo – correction, we’ll give this phone to a patrol car to bring in to you and we’ll coordinate the search of Hannover Estate ourselves. Pick officers
who know this area where you can; we’ll wait at the entrance to Parade Street.’
    Hannover Estate was an amalgamation of postwar red-brick council housing and newer high-rise concrete towers. The two had been botched together with social housing based on
small streets and balconies, gardens and civic pride. The reality had been the opposite. Families who didn’t care for the community had been dumped there and the place became a breeding
ground for gangs. There had been no more building since the early 1990s. The estate was slowly being left to decay from the inside out, as the council stopped maintaining it in the hope that it
would slowly empty of residents when their lives became intolerable.
    They waited in the car with a map of the estate up on Carter’s iPad and worked out how they were going to cover the whole of it.
    ‘It will take several days to make sure we catch the people at work,’ said Carter as he moved the map on the screen. Willis jotted down the names of the various areas.
    ‘We will split the estate into five sections and you and I will take the one here, nearest to the crime scene. This is also the roughest end, where the gangs are causing the most trouble.
We’ll try and catch them by surprise. Where is Balik supposed to be living?’
    ‘In one of the four-storey blocks, Drydon House, apparently – that’s the one beside the tower block.’
    ‘Okay, we’ll go straight there when the rest of the team arrive; we all start at exactly the same time, so that we have a chance of seeing who we flush out.’
    As they sat waiting at the end of Parade Street, they saw Sandford coming out of 22. He was stretching out his long back as he went across to his van, then took something out from the rear.
    ‘People never die where it’s easy to get at them, do they, Eb?’
    ‘No, they’re never so obliging, are they? They must be getting ready to move her soon.’
    They stared down the street in silence as they watched Sandford go back inside the building.
    ‘This street reminds me of where I grew up,’ said Carter. ‘It was here in the East End in Shadwell before it was upmarket. None of your swanky restaurants and private clubs
then. Good honest people that took care of one another. People lived alongside one another. My nan lived in a tower block – she and the