The Sword of Feimhin

Book 3: The Three Powers Quartet

by Frank P. Ryan

Genres: Fantasy; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

Four young men and women fell into the magical land of Tír through a mysterious portal in Ireland - and now the fate of two worlds lies on their shoulders in this 'enthralling' (LA Times) and 'fast-paced, action-packed and truly fantastical journey' (Fantasy Book Review) The Tyrant has control of the artefact known as the Fáil, and as he strengthena his hold on the forces of dark magic, he now threatens Earth as well as Tír. In a violently dystopian London, Mark has joined forced with Nantosueta to search for the Sword of Feimhin, while on Tír, Alan has mustered a Shee army and is intent taking the fight to the Tyrant - but obstacles obstruct his path at every turn. And Kate, now in the in-between world of Dromenon, finds herself entering the Land of the Dead . . . Day by day and hour by hour, the looming threat grows. 'Ryan's grand epic style . . . Passionate and dedicated fantasy fans will find a rich, immersive world and carefully handled characters' Booklist

Release date: September 4, 2014

Publisher: Jo Fletcher Books

Print pages: 427

Sample

‘Smoke!’ Nan exclaimed in surprise, as she performed a small pirouette while still holding on tight to Mark’s left hand, lifting it to duck under his arm.

‘Try not to draw attention to us.’

‘What is this smoke in the air?’

‘We call it smog.’ Mark watched her from the corners of his eyes, aware of the nervousness that had consumed her since their arrival here on Earth from Tír. ‘There are power shortages. I think people must be opening up the old blocked fireplaces. They’re burning coal and wood – and probably any old rubbish they can lay their hands on.’

His old leather jacket, the jacket he had worn on leaving Earth perhaps two years earlier, had proved to be too small for him on his return. He had been no more than a youth on leaving Earth but he had grown and matured to a young man. Back in Clonmel, the southern Irish town where the Temple Ship had brought them on their return, he’d been obliged to buy new trainers, jeans, several T-shirts, a new black leather jacket – artfully scuffed so it didn’t appear too new – and a navy beanie to hide the oraculum in his brow. As for Nan – she had had a field day becoming acquainted with popular fashions for teenage girls. And now, kitted out in black leather boots that rose to mid calf, a chunky-weave purple pullover and blue jeans under a thick navy woollen overcoat, she twirled around again, then gazed into the distance. ‘But I can see plumes. There are buildings on fire.’

‘Yeah – maybe.’

Somewhere not too far away, judging from what he had gathered on the news, some buildings would still be smouldering from the recent riots. Anarchy appeared to be endemic in London these days.

It was mid-afternoon in a dank October; the light was poor, cloaked by dense cloud and smog. People just thirty or forty yards away looked like ghosts moving through a mist. Even Mark felt nervous about their situation. He sensed, as Nan did, that they were surrounded by danger. They were walking through a thickening smog that might have harked back to the pea-soupers of half a century ago, the ones they had learned about in school. And smog was not the only reminder of more primitive times when poverty was rampant and life was cheap.

It was important that they didn’t draw attention to themselves. But that was proving to be a problem with Nan. On Tír she had been queen of her own dominion: the Vale of Tazan. A teenage queen, but a queen nevertheless. That royal heritage showed in her face, in her eyes, in her bearing and it made her stand out. He glanced at her, worried. She must be feeling lost and confused here at every step, he thought. Only yesterday, at the airport in Dublin, she had stood and stared at the queue working its way towards passport control. ‘These women,’ she’d exclaimed, ‘have painted their lips as red as cherries.’

He had squeezed her lightly. ‘Try not to stare – it’s just a fashion.’

‘On Tír, it was only the recusative priests who painted their faces – they painted them black, along with the palms of their hands.’

Mark chuckled. ‘There – you see, it’s just their fashion.’

‘Fashion? These women – they should ride six miles a day for exercise.’

‘They do. They ride six miles or more, on buses, and tubes, cars and trains.’

‘But this is just sitting on their bottoms with no exercise, other than their lazy imaginations. I suspect, upstairs – is that what you would say, upstairs? – they are as lazy and complacent as they sit on their – how do you say …?’

‘Bottoms?’

‘Arses.’

‘That word is considered impolite.’

‘Hah! Yet is it not so? They sit on their arses in their buses and trains. And surely those arses would be a deal less padded if they could desist from eating this execrable fare you call fast food.’

He grinned. ‘It would be difficult to ride horses here in the city.’

‘There are machines – iron horses. I have seen them.’

‘Motorbikes.’

‘Well then?’

‘It is thought a little unladylike – though some do.’

‘I would like to try that – to ride an iron horse.’

He laughed. ‘I’d love to see it.’

‘And as to the appalling drink you call tea …’

‘Hey, don’t let anyone hear you criticise tea!’

‘And no servants – you are sure?’

He nodded. ‘I’m sure.’

‘It is no wonder they are consumed with despair.’

How lovely she looked, with her olive skin and her cascade of blue-black hair. Mark hugged her to him. He kissed her eyelids, first one and then the other.

He loved her deep chestnut eyes, which contrasted so sharply with the faintly blue-tinged whites. He loved the umbrage in them right now.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

‘Don’t be sorry.’

‘I grumble too much?’

‘Grumbling suits you.’

It was hardly surprising that Nan felt uncomfortable here. She came from an utterly different world, closer in its customs to Earth in medieval times. Her lips moved as she spoke, but they didn’t pronounce the words in any Earth-based language. She was speaking one of the many languages of Tír and Mark, a native Londoner, heard her words as though spoken in English; not through his ears, but mind-to-mind, a gift of her power. Right now, walking the smoggy streets of the city, he wanted them both to appear as normal as possible. She said, ‘I shall desist from grumbling.’

‘I feel like doing some grumbling myself. This Church of the English Martyrs – we need to find it.’

‘Yes, we do.’

Bridey, the housekeeper of Kate’s family back in Clonmel, had given Mark instructions on where to find the church where Bridey’s uncle – Father Touhey, a retired Roman Catholic priest – was expecting them. But the church was small and obscure and Bridey had never been to London in her life. Her instructions had been vague, to say the least, and thanks to the destruction brought about by months of rioting, travel had proved to be difficult in the inner city, now a maze of roadblocks and impassable side streets. Their only hope was to find some helpful local, a shopkeeper or a policeman, who might be able to give them directions. Mark shook his head, directing Nan into a side street away from any curious gazes.

He had difficulty in coming to terms with the shocking anarchy and violence that was now commonplace here in London. He had even more difficulty coming to terms with all that had happened to him in the last two years – a passage of time that had felt much slower on Tír. He had crossed, with his adoptive sister, Mo, and his American and Irish friends Alan and Kate, into an alien world ravaged by war and dominated by an extraordinary and very dangerous spiritual force known as the Fáil.

When he had kissed her closed eyes a moment ago, he had found himself gazing into Nan’s jet-black oraculum, startled by the metamorphosing matrix deep within it, tiny arabesques that appeared and disappeared in time with her heartbeat.

Although he couldn’t pretend to understand how, he believed that the power conferred on him and Nan through their oracula was linked to the same Fáil. On Tír the triple goddesses of the Holy Trídédana were incredibly powerful, especially Mórígán, the goddess of death. The black crystal triangles they bore in their brows were oracula empowered by Mórígán herself. He had wondered if that force would still prevail back on Earth. But now, walking these dystopic streets, the very fact that they were able to communicate through their oracula suggested that it did – at least to some degree. And that was as surprising as it was disturbing – even frightening.

‘It’d be nice if we could test the situation, Nan. We need to know how strongly Mórígán’s power extends to Earth.’

He felt a tremble in her as she kissed him softly.

At Dublin Airport, Mark had steered the inquisitive Nan further along the crocodile queue of prospective passengers, praying they would get through passports and boarding cards without drawing attention to themselves. The passports had been a bit of a problem, even with the help of a certain Mr Maguire, a useful acquaintance of Bridey’s. He had registered them with what looked like genuine green-covered Irish passports, with false names and dates of birth. It might have proved hilarious had he registered Nan’s true date of birth, which, if he translated Tír to Earth years, would have placed her birthday somewhere back in the Bronze Age.

As they had passed under the bilingual signs, heading for the X-ray machines, her eyes, round with amazement, had been darting everywhere, from other people, to the ‘painted’ women, to the overhead monitors and television screens.

Worried that air travel would terrify her, he had offered to take her across the Irish Sea by boat but she had insisted on flying. Then in the departure lounge she had pressed her face against the plate glass windows, twirling a strand of hair in her right hand, staring out in open astonishment at the aeroplanes landing and taking off into the cloudy grey skies.

‘Flying for the first time can be a frightening experience.’

‘You promised me it would be exciting.’

Mark had tickled her waist, his free hand fingering the battered old harmonica he had somehow managed to retain: the only physical possession that linked him to a man who he assumed was his biological father. A fleeting memory passed through his mind, of standing close to Nan, sharing the view of their reflections in the window, gazing out on the planes soaring into the sky.

When they got to London, she had told him what she’d thought of flying. ‘All through the flight I was close to fainting with terror.’

‘But you made it – you’re here!’

‘Yes, I’m here! And you told me London will be interesting. Instead I find myself fearing for my life.’

‘Oh, come on – let’s not—’

‘You tell me’ – she tapped him on his leather-coated shoulder – ‘you will protect me from whatever danger we encounter. So what is the likelihood I shall end up saving you?’

He laughed, squeezed her mildly resisting body close to his own. ‘I’m sure you will do it with elegance and aplomb.’

‘You might forgive my thinking that anything that could possibly go wrong will go wrong – and I shall be picking up the pieces.’

It had been that journey from Ireland that had created today’s immediate problem. He had been unable to bring along the Fir Bolg battleaxe bestowed on him by the dwarf mage, Qwenqwo Cuatzel, back on Tír. A twin-bladed war battleaxe, almost three feet long, would hardly pass unnoticed through the obligatory X-ray machines. Vengeance, he had named it – and now he sorely missed his weapon. Even during his imprisonment in Dromenon he had imagined it, sensed it, always there strapped to his back. He had never otherwise been parted from it since it had been conferred on him – not until the day before yesterday when Bridey’s contacts had arrived to smuggle it across by truck and ferry, concealed among a consignment of agricultural machinery. Since being parted from it he had felt himself incomplete. Even now, he was consumed by the paranoia that he would never get it back.

*

They headed past tall office buildings and apartment blocks with broken windows into Soho. People were sitting in doorways, smoking and staring. Mark asked a passing woman if she knew the way to the Church of the English Martyrs. She ignored him, hurrying on by with an averted gaze. Mark found it hard to believe that this was his native city. The London he had grown up in had the confident and attractive hustle and bustle of one of the greatest cities of the world. In more normal times he would have enjoyed strolling along here with Nan, like any other couple.

Nan linked her arm in his. ‘I have the sense that we are being followed.’

‘I feel it too.’

‘In an hour it’s going to be dark. We need to find the church.’

They ducked into Archer Street, passing the boarded-up shell of a theatre that still had the tattered shreds of its posters hanging from the walls. Mark decided he would try a dingy pub on the corner. He slid a ten pound note across the bar and asked again.

The barman glowered. But he took the note.

‘Keep going the way you’re headed. You’ll come to Peter Street. It’s a small church off to your right – close to the end of the road.’

When they came to it, the shops and houses on either side of Peter Street were boarded up and the street itself was blocked by a ten-foot barrier. Across the barrier was a giant poster with a central logo. The logo was a triple infinity. The poster read:

DISCOVER THE PROTECTION OF THEINFINITE TRINITYDISCOVER STRENGTH, LOVE, SANCTUARYBE WELCOME TO THE ISLINGTON CHURCH OF THE SAVED

The Islington Church of the Saved was the church founded by Mark’s adoptive father, the Reverend Grimstone. There had never been much Christian love in Grimstone’s theology, any more than in his treatment of his adoptive children. Now Mark stared, speechless, at the clever way the poster had warped the Tyrant’s symbol of the triple infinity into the Christian concept of infinite trinity.

Now that Mark considered the poster, there was no mistaking its significance. That same sigil had decorated the hilt of the twisted cross Grimstone had used as the foundation emblem of his church here in London. And it had decorated the hilt of the great sword that Padraig, Alan’s grandfather, had shown the four friends in the barrow grave in the woods behind his sawmill. That grave was the burial chamber of a Bronze Age prince, called Feimhin. But when Mark and Nan had revisited Clonmel, they had found the sawmill burnt to the ground, with Padraig missing, believed dead. The barrow grave had been desecrated, the Sword of Feimhin stolen. Mark and Nan did not believe that Padraig was dead. They believed that Grimstone’s followers had kidnapped Padraig and stolen the Sword. The robbery had to be important. Padraig’s family, over countless generations, had been keepers of the Sword. Padraig had explained a little of its history – and the danger it carried. When that ancient prince, Feimhin, had originally wielded it in the Bronze Age, it had led to bloodshed on a colossal scale. Padraig’s term for it had been ‘endless war’. He had also shown them that its dark magic was unchanged, even today. And so it was in search of Padraig and the sword that they had now arrived in London.

It was a cross that wasn’t a Christian symbol at all, but the symbol of their arch enemy, the Tyrant of the Wastelands. If ever Mark had questioned whether Tír and Earth were linked, he was looking at its confirmation.

Nan was tugging at his arm. ‘What does it mean?’

‘I don’t know.’

They were jostled to one side as some teenagers barged past, not caring if they knocked them over.

A moment later, a girl’s scream came from the direction that the teenagers had been running in. Mark wondered if he should go and investigate, but his instincts told him to forget it. The girl screamed again – a long drawn out strident wail. Then it stopped. He had no idea if it was just kids playing around or if somebody had just been seriously hurt. But he had no intention of abandoning Nan here while he investigated.

Two well-dressed and clean-scrubbed young men appeared out of nowhere, asking if they were lost and offering to help them. Under the immaculate charcoal suits they looked fit and well toned – like trained military recruits. Mark wondered if it had been these two who had been following them. He said, ‘Maybe you can help us. We’re looking for the Church of the English Martyrs.’ They ignored his question. Their expressions remained studiously bland. Each was hugging a small leather-bound prayer book.

‘Grace be with you, brother and sister.’

Nan squeezed his arm, affecting a smile. ‘Thank you. May I enquire? Are you members of the Grimstone church?’

‘We are members of the Saved.’

‘Stop, look, listen!’ She had said. Now Gully Doughty heard Penny’s words inside his head again. ‘It’s okay,’ he muttered to himself. ‘There ain’t no ’urry.’ He stopped for as long as it took him to shove his grimy spectacles up his nose.

Thinks she’s smarter than us. An’ maybe she is.

His mind reeled, just thinking about it. He didn’t want to think about it. Only he didn’t rightly know how to stop thinking about it. That was the trouble with thinking. You found yourself thinking about things you didn’t want to be thinking about in the first place.

‘Now you got to ’old yer breath an’ listen,’ he muttered to himself again. He held his breath. He listened.

Maybe she’s a whole heap smarter than me while I’m a whole year older than her. A whole year! Only she goes right ahead and says it.

Shit! The truth of it was that, when it came to it, he didn’t really mind thinking about Penny. And he didn’t mind thinking about Penny at all when he considered it that way about.

Gully made himself listen again. He heard nothing because there was nothing to hear. Then he shoved the cardboard box up through a crack in the wall and into a soot-stained shaft.

So wot – so Penny is smarter than me. But it’s only smartipantsness. She ain’t a deal smarter when it comes to finding the bleedin’ food so’s we can eat. I’m the one who has to go out and do things.

It was dark in the rubble-strewn basement. The temptation was to hurry, but Penny was right. There was no need to. His brown eyes swept the gloom, making sure there was nobody about. There was only this one way in, but it was kind of awkward because the box was so heavy and he didn’t want to shine no torch into the gloom; that might let someone know he was there.

The basement was ankle deep in soot and ash from the fire that had burned above it. There wasn’t any kind of a door into the shaft, only the crack in the wall where you could squeeze through a gap between jagged bricks and the edge of a wrecked car that stank of piss and cat shit. His bladder always seemed to respond to them smells, like now, so it felt like a balloon just about to pop. But he didn’t want the bleeder to pop right here and make the stink worse. He just shoved his back up against the wall, so as to balance the box, and bent his knees up so that the soles of his trainers were pressed against the rusting metal of the other side of the shaft. That way he could shimmy up the first two floors in the dark, keeping the box safe in the curl of his belly, all the while feeling the muscles of his thighs bunching so hard they was just about splitting the seams of his pants. Foot by foot, he slid his back along the wall, all the way up past the boarded ground floor.

Sometimes there was dossers there. They pulled off the boards and kipped down in the mess and lit fires and scrapped among themselves.

‘Don’t forget to wait and listen …’ she always reminded him.

He waited, just for a little, time enough so as to get his puff back, making sure there wasn’t no dossers who could have heard his scratching.

‘Fuckit – they’s too pissed to hear anyway.’

He’d come to the bit wot Penny called the air lock.

‘It’s the airlock that keeps us safe, Gully. It stops anyone who tries to climb the shaft. It puts an ocean between them and us, leaving us Our Place like a secret island rising above the ocean.’

He liked the idea of that. He liked it when Penny talked about Our Place like it was a secret hideout. It was a mystery to Gully how a lock could be made out of air. But it was a good thing as far as Our Place was concerned. It made it safer. For sure, Penny was smart. He had to grant it to Penny how she got her angles just right. Gully couldn’t deny that about her. She had the brains for stuff like that.

He shoved the box out before sliding his body over the big muck hole – wot Penny called the cave of wrack and ruin – where, if you listened when the wind was blowing, you could hear the clatter of parts of the roof still falling in. When it rained, the water came through here like a river. The fire had burned out them floors in between the roof and the basement. He had watched it happen: flames roaring like a horde of demons through all five upper storeys. The crashing and cracking as the innards tumbled down amid the smoke and the heat had been so loud. When you looked up, you could see a massive crack in the roof. Penny said that this was because the internal walls had gone. He was sure them fire demons was still alive, creaking, up there in the concrete of the roof where it sloped and dangled all over the place.

Emerging out of the shaft, he slid the box along so he could sit astride the I-beam. It was a bitch, because his back was grating against the scratchy cinders. At least the glasses wouldn’t come off – he had heated the ear pieces in a candle flame to bend them around his ear lugs. He stood to relieve his busting bladder, while simultaneously removing his glasses with one hand and washing the lenses with his spit between his finger and his thumb. He laughed now to think that he could have shown Penny how well he could multi-task – and all the while perfickly balanced on the one-foot-wide flat of the I-beam. He wiped his glasses dry again on his hooded denim jacket.

Lens-wiping and dick-shaking-off all done, he made a point of resting a calf against the box and holding still for another few moments of self-congratulation on his multi-tasking, while still waiting and listening.

He heard a slithering noise from the floor below. Could be he heard the whisper of dosser voices. Maybe somebody felt the rain of his piss coming down out of the dark. Gully giggled again. But might be it wasn’t such a smart thing to do.

‘Check if Our Place is secure.’ He heard Penny’s warnings in his head again.

He felt so guilty that he stopped right there on the giant iron beam, holding himself rigidly still. He closed his eyes so he could listen better.

Once ain’t enough, he thought

Gully made his way over the rusted I-beam that bridged the devastation of the collapsed upper stories; a thirty-foot crossing with the cardboard box balanced on his dark mop of curly hair, one hand steadying it. Stepping cautiously in the dark, he felt around with the edges of his trainers with the other hand, registering the hard sharp side of the beam, until he arrived at the junction where iron merged with the ledge of concrete. Manoeuvring himself, and then the box, he pushed himself through the trap door that opened into the shaft and dropped lightly onto the rusting roof of a big, unmoving lift. He hauled the box down off the ledge.

The box held the stuff he had bought from the sale of Penny’s drawings. The honey – a tiny pot of the waxy sort Penny liked – wos a surprise he had for her. Maybe it would make her think about him like any normal gel should.

‘Weird she is. Won’t let me touch her or nuffink!’ Gully wanted to kick something right there and then. His fists bunched. ‘Why won’t she let me touch her – not even give her a little hug?’

Penny was smart enough, her ma and da coulda been professors. Yeah – professors or the like. Only she wouldn’t talk about ’em. Never. Only thing she ever said, maybe like she was recalling a thing somebody must have said to her, was, ‘You are the strangest thing – the most disruptive child.’ The hoity-toity accent Penny put on it made it sound like a school teacher mighta said it. Or more like some bleedin’ professor. Not that Gully had ever met a professor in his life.

‘Won’t let me touch her, she won’t. Won’t even let me pull up close to her in the cold. Don’t feel the cold, she don’t – not ever. Not even when her ’ands are blue with it and her skin is covered in goose bumps. Not let me come close, just to warm one another. Paranoiac – that’s wot she is!’

Might be a good thing, being just a bit paranoiac. Might keep you alive. But you didn’t want too much of it.

Gully stopped and listened again and only when he heard not so much as a rat squeak did he slide across the rusting roof, heading to the porthole in the wall, where he shoved the cardboard box into the dolly. ‘Dolly’ – that was what Penny called it. She knew the words for things like ‘dolly’. Gully would give her that. She was smart with the sums, and she was smart at remembering the pictures. But for all of her smartipantsness, there was that weirdness about her, in so much as she would think about things nobody in their right mind had any right to think about. There was scumbags who called her Cat and made meowing noises when they saw her coming. Like they knew that Penny had claws. All the same it frightened the life out of him at times, the way she took no notice. Like she didn’t seem to know how to be afraid when anybody with ’arf a brick o’ sense knew there was times when you needed to be afraid.

On his knees now on the gritty ledge, he slid the box further forward, finding the port hole in the dolly. He opened the porthole and slid the box into the empty chamber inside. He got it so it was sitting right in the middle and then he pulled on the cord – three sharp tugs. It didn’t ring any bell at the top, but it made a soft noise, when the leather spring opened and shut. He waited for Penny to give the single tug back that would tell him she got the message three floors above. She would then haul it up and pass the knotted rope down the other shaft so he could follow.

While he was waiting, he thought back again to the night of the fire.

Razzers had started it in the small tube station next door. That too had been derelict – the entrance boarded up. Gully had watched them tear off the boards and go inside with their cans of petrol. He had watched it burn. The fire had quickly spread to the five storey red-brick office building next door. He had waited to see if the fire engines would turn up, but nobody bothered. The buildings was empty and there was more important fires elsewhere. So the fire had it all to itself, gobbling up the tube station, until the roof and the walls caved in. But the old red-brick office building had stood the worst of it. Penny said it was because of the I-beams and the reinforced concrete up there in the roof. That and the water storage tank that was perched right up there on the topmost corner, right over the surviving two rooms that were left to them. Our Place had been saved when the tank had split and the water had deluged onto the topmost floor and covered the corner of the lift shaft and a few other bits and pieces, like the dolly, two rooms and the I-beam wot came out into the dangling metal sleeve of the dolly. Otherwise, all that was left was a big empty space, a black hole of cinders and broken concrete and twisty bits of rusting iron.

In the two or three minutes he had been waiting, his knees had begun smarting from kneeling on sharp grit and there had been no answering tug on the cable. Sometimes it took a while, like when she was up on the gantry, drawing her pictures. But this time Penny was taking too long. The thought grew in him that she just wasn’t there.

Penny shoulda been there. She shoulda waited for him. She had promised she would.

A mixture of fury and apprehension caused Gully to jerk upright onto his feet, cracking his head on a protruding ledge of concrete.

‘Ow – ow! Bleedin’ ’ell!’ He no longer gave a ratarse shit if the dossers heard him. Wincing and holding his head, he was forced back over the I-beam and the rusty roof of the trolley car. Here he extricated a plastic torch from his pocket, directing its beam into the well of the lift shaft. Only then did he notice that the knotted rope was down.

Penny really had gone out.

But she had taken the precaution of pushing the loop of rope into the corner and fixing it out of sight under a brick. Gully shoved the glasses back up his nose.

‘Wot’s Gully to think, gel?’

He clambered up the knotted rope within the lift shaft and when he got to the top there was no sign of her. That did not come as a surprise. He didn’t even bother to look for a note. He was the one who left notes.

He moved over to the dolly and hauled on the chain in the channel by its side, muttering and fretting all the while. He hauled out the box and carried it into the kitchen area.

I suppose it must ’a been some kind of impulse, not some emergency situation?

He sat down, his arm lying over the box. He let a puff of air out between his pursed lips – a habit that Penny would have complained about if she was here. Well, that’s the price you pay, gel, for not being here! He hoisted out two heavy bottles of drinking water, which he been allowed to fill up at Mrs Patel’s corner shop for free, and set to preparing two sandwiches – beef for Gully and salad for Penny. He placed his sandwich on a small, clean square of toilet paper, right there on the pink-tinged Formica table, carefully wiping away the crumbs so that it became shiny again. He had so wanted to tell Penny how he had bargained on the Hawksmoor picture with that Reverend woman. He could rip off her high-pitched la-di-dah voice just perfick. She was an old biddy that ruled the same church as in Penny’s picture, the one who made him laugh with her purse dangling on a bleedin’ chain.

‘Squeezed twenty quid out of ’er, I did, wot bought the groceries, lots of fruit and vegetables and such like – an’ the lice comb. She tells me the picture makes the church come alive. I just thought you’d a liked to hear them things.’

He flopped down on the concrete floor by the side of the dolly and