Taking pity on him, the girl removed the list from his hand and studied it. “Go and wait by the counter,” she told him kindly. “I’ll be back in a minute when I’ve got all the things you need.”
“Thank you,” Rodent said, relieved that she hadn’t asked any more questions.
Leaning against the counter, he watched her flit gracefully around the aisles scooping up various items. She was wearing brown knee-length boots, he noticed. Sensible in this weather. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he knew her, but she didn’t look like the type of girl who would hang around the streets with wasters like him.
As he glanced down at the chair she had been sitting on when he’d entered, he caught sight of a folded newspaper. It was that morning’s edition of The London Echo, and to his surprise, a mug shot of Claude Winston defiantly stared up at him from the front page. He leaned over the counter and picked up the red top, letting it unfurl so that he could read the headline.
‘EVIL COP KILLER UNLAWFULLY AT LARGE’, it proclaimed.
“Terrible, isn’t it?” the girl asked, making him jump. He hadn’t noticed her approach.
“What is?” he asked, confused.
“What that bloke in the paper did to that poor policeman yesterday,” she said, indicating the newspaper with her brown eyes.
“Oh, yeah, right,” Rodent said, handing her the newspaper. She placed it on the counter and turned to face him.
“You don’t recognise me. Do you?” she asked, returning to the staff side and ringing up his purchases on the till.
“You do look familiar,” he confessed, “but I can’t think where I know you from.”
“You’re Jimmy Dawlish’s kid brother, aren’t you?”
“That’s right,” he said, wondering how she could possibly know that.
“Ronnie, isn’t it?”
“Rodney,” he corrected her. “Do you know Jimmy, then?” She looked far too young to have been one of his girlfriends – and way too smart. Jimmy had always preferred girls who had no opinions of their own and unquestioningly did as they were told, and Rodent couldn’t imagine this one fitting into that category.
She grinned. “My name’s Jenna Marsh, Kevin Marsh’s younger sister.”
Suddenly, everything made sense. Their brothers had been best mates for years. They had gone to the same schools, the same borstals, and the same prisons.
“We were in the same class at primary school,” Rodent said as the memories came flooding back. “I remember you now,” he said excitedly. “You always had your head buried in a book.”
Jenna chuckled. “Nothing’s changed,” she told him. “What about you? You were always a bit of a loner as I recall, and I always thought you looked sad.”
Nothing’s changed with me, either, he thought.
“I’m doing okay,” he said glumly. “Got a job and everything.” He wasn’t really sure if selling drugs counted as a proper job, but at least he was earning an income and not on the dole.
Jenna frowned. The last time anyone had mentioned Rodney to her had been a couple of years ago, and it hadn’t sounded like things had been going well for him.
“A friend of mine went to the same secondary school as you,” she said, “and I seem to recall her telling me that you left before taking your GCSEs. Surely that can’t be right?” Jenna had studied for those exams as though her life had depended on passing them all, and her efforts had been rewarded with a series of straight-A grades. She had then repeated the feat with her A levels. Although she had now taken a gap year to get some life experience, she intended to go to university in September to study medicine. Because she was so driven to succeed in her studies, Jenna struggled to comprehend that some people didn’t feel the same way about academia.
“I did,” Rodney said, smiling to mask his embarrassment. “You know,” he said trying to pull off a carefree shrug. “School wasn’t really for me and I wanted to get out into the real world and start earning a crust.”
Jenna didn’t know at all. “But didn’t you miss all your friends?” she asked. She had made so many during her secondary school years and she missed them all terribly now that she had left.
“Not really,” he told her. “The other kids all thought I was funny.”
“Funny ha-ha or funny crazy?” she asked with a mischievous twinkle in her eye.
Rodent shrugged again, awkwardly. “Bit of both, probably,” he said with a lopsided grin.
Her face turned serious, and her big brown eyes seemed to bore into his, catching him completely off guard. They were beautiful eyes, he decided, feeling his throat go dry. Unlike his elder brother, Rodent didn’t have a lot of experience with girls and he felt totally tongue-tied in her presence.
“Listen,” she said, leaning in conspiratorially even though no one else was there. “This friend of yours with the wound, if he’s hurt himself doing something illegal, or if he’s been attacked by someone from a rival gang, he should still go to the hospital and get proper medical treatment.”
Rodent shook his head adamantly. “It’s nothing like that,” he said, wilting under the intensity of her questioning gaze.
Jenna’s face softened, and she placed a hand on his forearm, causing his pulse rate to spike. “I’m not trying to pry,” she assured him. “It’s just that I remember when Kevin slashed his arm wide open the night him and your brother broke into that Jewellers in Ripple Road. He didn’t go to the doctors for days, and by the time he did, it was badly infected. Nearly lost his arm, he did, the stupid sod.”
Rodent remembered it well. Despite the doctors calling the police, and Kevin being nicked for the burglary, he hadn’t grassed Jimmy up.
Jenna removed her hand, and he immediately found himself wishing that she hadn’t. The contact had been… comforting. It wasn’t often that someone showed Rodent kindness, or touched him in a manner that didn’t constitute an assault.
“Look, he hasn’t been stabbed, and he hasn’t hurt himself breaking into a
