Read The Wolves of London for Free Online Page B

Candice’s salvation.
    ‘It’s not for me,’ I said out loud. ‘I wouldn’t be doing it for me.’
    I suppose I hoped that that might make it all right, but it didn’t, not really. Whether I was doing it for me or not, it didn’t change the fact that I was contemplating opening the door and letting the darkness back in. Because the thing is, nobody gets something for nothing in the world I was considering venturing back in to. If I rang that number, then it might mean Candice would be safe, but I would clock up a debt; it would make me beholden.
    ‘Da-deeeee!’ The call came from the living room beyond the flat’s short hallway, and despite the way I was feeling I felt a smile sneak on to my face.
    ‘What?’
    ‘It’s been ten minutes. Do I have to switch the DVD off now?’
    My smile widened. Despite often behaving like a small but lively bull in a very cluttered china shop, my youngest daughter was a stickler for rules and regulations. I considered giving her two more minutes, but then decided that the rule thing was something to be encouraged, not let slide.
    ‘Yep,’ I said, swinging my legs out of bed and bracing myself to sit upright. ‘I’m coming to make breakfast.’
    The next hour was the usual chaos of knocked-over beakers of milk and lost trainers and misplaced spectacles. Kate had been born in difficult circumstances, having to be cut from her mother’s womb because she was in a breech position with the cord wrapped around her neck. She was deprived of oxygen for longer than the doctors were happy with, and for a while it had been touch and go as to whether she might suffer permanent brain damage. In the event the effects, thank God, had been relatively mild – a few initial developmental and learning difficulties, which she was now more than making up for, and some minor optic-nerve damage, which meant that she currently wore cute, pink-framed spectacles to stop her from squinting when she was watching TV or trying to make out the words on the whiteboard at school.
    Needless to say, she was always losing the specs – when she wasn’t sitting on them and breaking them, that is. If I had a quid for every time I’d asked her where she was when she last took them off, I’d be a millionaire by now.
    On this occasion, the specs, smeared with jammy thumbprints, were found under the sprawled-open pages of her Toy Story colouring book, which she’d been engrossed in while I was grabbing a quick shower. By 8.10 we were ready to go – or at least, thanks to me, she was. She stood impatiently by the door, watching as I laced up my boots, wearing her now-clean specs and her green-and-red duffel coat, a Dora the Explorer school bag slung over one shoulder. Despite taking two supposedly fast-acting Ibuprofen and downing three cups of sludge-thick coffee my head was still pounding. I was flushed and sweating too after my shower, though I told myself I was only imagining that the sweat oozing out of me and forming damp patches on my shirt smelled like pure JD.
    ‘Come on , Daddy,’ Kate said, rolling her eyes, as if I was the one responsible for the string of mishaps which had made us late, ‘or Paula will go without me.’
    ‘No she won’t,’ I said. ‘She’ll knock on the door first to find out where you are.’
    ‘She might forget.’
    ‘She won’t.’
    ‘She might have already knocked on the door and we didn’t hear her.’
    ‘I think that’s unlikely, don’t you? This flat is so small that if you trump in bed I can hear it in the kitchen.’
    While Kate giggled I finished tying my laces and straightened up.
    ‘Right then,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’
    She turned and pulled down the door handle while I twisted the Chubb lock above it that she couldn’t reach.
    ‘Even if I do a quiet one?’ she said as the door swung inwards.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Trump in bed.’
    I grinned. ‘Even if you do a silent one. An SBD.’
    ‘What’s an SBD?’
    ‘Silent but deadly.’
    ‘What does that