Joe Craig - Jimmy Coates - Killer

Everything seemed very quiet. There was no traffic, just the low hum of the city and the sound of lonely cars somewhere in the distance. One of them had Jimmy’s parents in it. Then he thought about Georgie. Where had she run off to? Did she think she was going to be able to find him? Jimmy shivered and wondered whether his sister was as cold as he was. At least she had shoes on.

He hauled himself up the wall at the side of the house and stretched over the gate to lift the latch. It swung open with a creak. He took another glance over his shoulder at the street, but couldn’t see anything. Then he turned to the path that ran down the side of the house. It was darker than he had ever seen it.

Jimmy told himself not to be so scared. It was his own house and he knew there was nobody there. Any noise, he told himself, was just a stray cat. He started repeating it in a whisper. “Any noise, it’s just a cat.”

As he made his way round to the back of the house, he started singing it quietly to the brightest tune he could think up. Barefoot, and singing about cats, Jimmy felt like an incompetent burglar. Car grease blackened his cheeks. When he caught his reflection in a side window he thought it was almost funny.

Knowing it would be locked, he tried the back door. Then he looked for an open window, but there wasn’t one. He considered climbing the front of the house to get back into his bedroom, but it would have left him too visible from the street. Instead, he picked up a large stone from his mother’s rock garden and slammed it through the kitchen window.

As much as there is any right way to break a window, Jimmy did it the wrong way. Afterwards, he remembered that people in TV shows always used their elbows, and put a blanket or something in the way. Jimmy had just pushed his hand straight through. Now there was more glass all over his clothes and falling on his feet. Some had hit him in the face. Fortunately none went in his eyes. What had happened to his ability to do things right? If he did have some strange power to escape dangerous situations it would be much better if it didn’t just disappear when he needed it.

Jimmy reached in, undid the latch and opened the window. When he had scrambled inside, the first thing he did was pick up the phone. There was no dialling tone. All he could hear was the blood surging through his head and his short breaths. He found his father’s mobile, but the casing was smashed. Jimmy quickly realised too that there wasn’t any power in the house. He wasn’t planning on staying anyway. He couldn’t just wait at home while his sister was in the streets on her own and his parents were being taken away in a van.

Jimmy tried to think quickly of all the things he might possibly need, but his heart wouldn’t slow down enough to let him. He didn’t even know where he was going or who he was running away from. He went upstairs for his school bag and threw the books on the floor, replacing them with a change of clothes and an extra jumper. Then he picked out some food from the fridge–as much as would fit in the bag. There were some chocolate bars as well, and he grabbed an apple, in case he really got desperate. He opened the freezer and reached around at the back until he found the wad of cash that his mother kept there for emergencies and pizza. Finally, he jammed his feet into some shoes, still wearing his wet socks with glass trapped in the fibres.

As a last-minute thought, he went looking for a torch. He knew there was one in the house somewhere. He ended up on all fours searching in the bottom of a kitchen cupboard. It was then that he caught sight of his wrist. There was a huge piece of glass sticking out from the base of his left hand. But it didn’t hurt. He hadn’t even noticed it until now: a lethal shard of glass.

He carefully pulled it out. It had gone deep into his flesh–more than a centimetre–but there was no blood. Jimmy wiggled his fingers. He clenched his fist. It seemed fine. There was a cut in his skin where the glass had been, but instead of being red, there was just a deeper layer of skin which looked sort of greyish. That had never been there before. He should have been bleeding to death by now. He considered putting a plaster over the cut, and even prodded it a few times, but decided that as it didn’t hurt, it would be a waste of time to administer first aid in the dark. He spotted the torch and calmly popped it in the top of his bag, then went to sit at the kitchen table.

The house was completely quiet. Jimmy had never realised how lonely silence could be. He stared at the door and couldn’t help imagining his parents walking in, all smiles and jokes. Two mugs waited by the kettle for someone to pour tea. But nobody was coming back. He had never felt so alone.

It’s all so strange, he thought, but the strangest thing of all was him. He went up to his bedroom and looked down at the fall he had made.

The glass shimmered like broken stars and a black tear dripped down Jimmy’s cheek. He wiped his face, smudging grease on to the back of his sleeve, then looked again at his wrist. What was this inside him? What had made him jump out of the window? He thought about why he hadn’t been hurt in the fall, and why he wasn’t bleeding now. A second later he heard his mother’s terror in his head. Why had his father let those men into the house? Why had his parents walked away with them so calmly? And why had Jimmy’s father not wanted Georgie to shout for help?

Jimmy picked up his bag, ran downstairs and out of the front door. If he was going to help his family he would have to get away from the house. And he needed the police. When the men in suits came looking for him, there would be more of them. Maybe he should learn to fight like he had in his bedroom, whenever he wanted. Otherwise he was just an eleven-year-old boy with a dirty face.

Jimmy started walking in the direction the van had gone. The suburbs of London swallowed him up; one semi-detached family house after another in a groaning mess. Thousands of people were asleep in their beds and Jimmy walked past their front doors trying to remember where the police station was. After a time he walked almost without direction. The streetlights just seemed to make the shadows darker, so that’s where he walked, wary of anything that looked like a black car with a green stripe.

He let out a yawn the size of the city and didn’t notice the thin, dark figure of the only other person in the shadows that night.

It had started following him.

MITCHELL HAD HAD quite a day. Twice he’d nearly been caught lifting a purse from someone’s bag, and both times he had been forced to drop whatever he had his hands on and run. So yesterday he had come out into a part of the suburbs he knew, to work the commuters as they left the tube station. But they were always in such thick bunches that it was hard to get among them without arousing suspicion.

Now the streets were really quiet and he was beginning to abandon hope of stealing anything for the day. He thought about the smell in his brother’s flat and didn’t feel the urge to rush back there. Besides, he knew how hilarious his brother would find it if he went home empty-handed again. Mitchell didn’t like being a thief, and he didn’t much like his brother either. He especially didn’t like living with him, but it was the only place he could go until he was old enough to get his own place. And his brother only let him stay on condition that Mitchell would steal for him.

At first he’d been good at it–beginner’s luck maybe. He was certainly fast when he needed to get away, and being a kid had its advantages; it meant he stood with his head at about the height of most people’s shoulder bags. The last few days, though, had been really tough. He was tired and miserable. He didn’t want to go home, but there wasn’t much point roaming the empty streets and getting cold.