Andy McNab - Dark winter

'Kelly… Her name is Kelly, and she's fourteen.'

'She's not your daughter?'

'No, I sort of look after her.'

'She could have worse, I suppose.'

A sign whizzed past – 'King's Lynn 42' – and what seemed like twenty miles later another said, '38'. The road was elevated in places and there were dykes either side, waterways draining the fenland, and miles and miles of jet-black earth growing spuds or carrots or whatever.

'So, foster-dad, step-parent, whatever you are, what's it like having to look after someone else?'

'It's all right.'

'That your great insight to parenthood, is it – all right?'

I pushed the seat back so I could stretch my legs. 'Here's what I reckon.' I turned to face her. 'First off we buy a town map, find out where this place is, then get into the town and have a look, yeah? What time does it get dark?'

Before she could answer, the moan-phone rang. I passed it across. 'Here. I'm an arsewipe-free zone, remember?'

She hit the keys and put it to her ear. 'Hello? Yes, sir, I'm on secure.' She looked at me and rolled her eyes. He wouldn't have been able to talk to her if she wasn't. There was a pause. 'Oh, no, he's driving, sir.' She nodded in response to whatever was being said, then looked at me, her face very serious. 'Yes, sir, I will.'

Pressing the off-key with her thumb, she passed the phone back to me. 'The address has been flagged up for two years with Immigration and local plod.'

'Is he doing anything about it – you know, unflagging it?'

She shook her head. 'Nope – deniable, remember, Norfolk boy.'

'Fucking idiot.'

She nodded slowly. 'Are you ever going to tell me what you've got against him?'

We were just coming into the outskirts of King's Lynn and Suzy pulled into a BP station. You always start an op with a full tank, and in any case we needed the town maps.

As I walked back across the forecourt looking at the folded-out map I could already feel the breeze off the North Sea. King's Lynn was at the bottom right-hand corner of the Wash. The Great Ouse ran through it, which was presumably how the boats made it into the docks.

We crossed a ring-road lined with DIY, furniture and electrical superstores with a few burger franchises thrown in, and as we followed signs for the town centre things began to change for the worse. It was a sad mix of 1970s concrete and hundred-year-old red-brick housing. The whole place looked as if it needed a massive dig-out and a coat of paint. Quite a few of the shops were boarded up. We passed a huge open-air car parking lot alongside a drab grey concrete shopping precinct, then a few crumbling, peeling Georgian houses.

Suzy was looking as pissed off as I was, screwing up her face and shaking her head, chewing even faster on her nicotine gum as we passed a group of three teenage mums with prams and badly dyed blonde hair.

We kept on the main artery coming out of town towards the bypass. I checked the map. We weren't far away from Sir Lewis Street now. Huge fuel-storage tanks and industrial pipework started to come up on our left, half painted, half rusting. 'We need Loke Road – on our right.'

We both saw it. We were just short of the dock entrance as we turned right off the main, alongside a vast area of wasteground. 'Sir Lewis coming up, over a stream and first left.'

Suzy looked even more depressed as we made our way behind the back yards of Sir Lewis, row upon row of two-up, two-down red-brick terraced houses straight out of Coronation Street.

We continued past the target road and Suzy was still complaining: 'It's so fucking soulless.'

As I looked down the narrow alleyways that punctuated the terraces I could see washing in almost every yard, and bin liners spewing out their crap on to the street. Somebody in the sixties had made a fortune convincing the residents to shell out on stone cladding and pebbledash. There were plenty of tired for-sale signs stuck to the fronts of houses, along with the obligatory Sky dish, and none of the cars parked on either side of the narrow road seemed to have a registration plate higher than J.

We passed a local store, a handpainted sign for a hairdresser's, and a pub. Then, within a minute or so, we were surrounded by 1950s council houses and low-level flats. We turned right, towards the railway station.

'Let's park up there and come back to do a walk past.' If you park in a residential area, people expect you to go into a house nearby.

The road signs ran out but we eventually found the station, an old Victorian brick and glass building, with a brand new Morrisons superstore next to it and a Matalan clothes shop. Suzy turned into the Morrisons car park and we sat studying the map to get our bearings.

'It's an old map.' I ringed Morrisons. 'But that's where we are now, in that open ground. The target is maybe ten minutes' walk north.'

Sir Lewis Street was part of a six-block grid of terraced houses lying along three roads, each about 250 metres long and parallel to each other, cut across the middle by Walker Street. It backed on to the stream, and was a little longer than the other two. The wasteground stretched all the way from the stream to the main.

Suzy pulled a face. 'How can anyone survive here? I fucking hate these places.'

I shrugged. 'People don't always have a choice, do they?'

We worked out a strategy for the walk-past, not knowing exactly where the target house would be. According to the map, the top of the road was a dead end.

Suzy ripped the corner off and furled it into a pointer. 'If we walk down Loke, back to the shops we just drove past, and take a right down one of the alleyways, we should be able to work our way down to the dead end of Sir Lewis. If we can get on to it, we can then walk the whole length of the street back towards Loke.'

'Done. OK, the story is we're here for a few days' holiday. We were just taking a walk, we got lost and we're looking for the station.'

Suzy locked up, double-checking all the doors and making sure the kit in the boot was out of sight.

The parking lot was swarming with cars and trolleys. Suzy and I walked side by side, heading for a gap that led into the housing estate. Suzy slipped her arm through mine and chatted happily about the make and colour of each car we passed. Anything to look natural from a distance as we wormed our way through.

People had made efforts to stamp their individuality on their council houses, and that seemed to piss her off even more. Some had stone lions mounted on their gateposts, gnomes sitting on the front doorstep or fishing beside little ponds; others had bird-boxes with windmills. The smartest had carports. Suzy particularly admired some loose half-bricks in the wall next to a telephone pole. 'That'll be the DLB [dead letter box], yeah?'

I nodded as we hit Loke and turned left, going back the way we'd driven, past all the Corrie two-up-and-two-downs. A stone panel set into one of the walls said '1892', which must have been the last time anyone had had the decorators in. Through net curtains I could see patterned brown carpets and brass dogs sitting on tiled fireplaces.

Suzy hadn't cheered up much. 'I really hate this.'

'What's the matter? Don't you like Norfolk?'

'I ran off to sea to get out of a shit-hole like this. Look at it, it's like fucking West Belfast on a bad day. Give me Bluewater and my new conservatory any time.'

I looked around, knowing exactly what she meant – apart from the Bluewater bit.

We carried on down Loke, passing the first two roads that paralleled Sir Lewis. A twentysomething Chinese guy came out of a corner shop with a newspaper under his arm and his finger in the ringpull of a Coke. He knocked back a mouthful, jumped into an old red Lada and drove away from the target road.