The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die Read Online Free PDF Page A

gate, an intact Coke bottle with a singed rag stuffed in the neck that had failed to ignite properly.
    ‘Petrol bomb! They petrol bombed us!’ Ella said, transfixed by the tableau before her.
    She ran inside, heart thudding. She picked up the phone.
    ‘Don’t call the police!’ Letitia shouted. ‘Are you mad? Think I wanna be labelled as a grass?’
    Ella ignored her and dialled 999. She held the receiver to her ear and squatted in the lounge where the flickering screen of the TV was the only source of light. Richard Gere was smiling now. Talking without sound. Lips moving. Carefree. Smart in his uniform. In the seconds she waited to be connected, she heard their voices again at the back. She could see them through the net curtains, moving below the streetlight.
    ‘Which service do you require, please?’ the woman at the other end asked.
    ‘Police. Quick. They’re here,’ Ella said.
    The gate clicked as they crept into the garden. Right up the back path; brazen now. Ella could see their hooded silhouettes as they skulked by the door. She fired the details of her name and address at the woman on the phone.
    ‘Come quickly!’ she shouted.
    Too late. Ella screamed.
    It takes more than one go to smash an entire window in with a crowbar. The crowbar doesn’t do a clean job and glass is much harder to break than people think. Danny and his boy smacked the window hard, twice, and left only small shards stuck to the white UPVC frames. They had had a lot of practice lately.
    Oh Danny Boy, Oh Danny Boy, the sirens are calling
,
Ella thought.
    Their trainer-clad feet pounded away, accompanied by laughter and whistles. Down through the twists and turns of the alleys they would run, like rats hastening to the sewers. Always knowing where to go to ground. Ella knew this much.
    Letitia was standing by the back door, staring down at the wreckage on the carpet.
    ‘How can they do this? Nearly Christmas, man. Look at the fucking mess. And now the cops are coming. I told you not to bloody ring them.’
    Ella stared at the glass strewn at her feet. She looked around at the dismal living room. Sagging three piece suite, peppered with cigarette burns and food stains. Scratched coffee table. Old stereo, a relic from the early nineties. Drunken, balding Christmas tree, perched in the corner like a sad, old glittery tart at a crap party. There was nothing left to steal. There was nothing left to break. She shut her eyes and swallowed hard. She thought about her just-in-case hammer under her pillow. Then she kicked the despair aside.
    ‘I’ll help,’ Ella said, grabbing a dustpan and brush from the cupboard under the sink.
    The wail of sirens heralded the approaching police but something caught Ella’s eye. She looked up from sweeping the glass, wondering what the bright light in the back was. The tree. The tree, the only attractive growing thing in Ella’s garden, was a prunus kanzan – standard council issue that bore racemes of pink candyfloss blossom in May. There was something different about it now.
    Ella edged closer so that the icy wind whipped through the empty window frame and made her ironed hair slap up and down on her shoulders.
    In the small garden, the tree looked like a bright Christmas message from the Ku Klux Klan. Fire licked along its slender branches. A flaming cherry tree, blooming unnaturally early. Ella spied the dark figure standing behind the fence, admiring his handiwork. One of Danny’s boys.
    Oh Danny Boy, Oh Danny Boy,
I hate you so.
    Twelve sleepless hours later and Letitia was holding a black bin liner open.
    ‘Stuff that shit in the bag. Come on! Quickly,’ she said, staring at Ella.
    Ella put the handbags into the bin liner one at a time.
    ‘Grab a pile, for Christ’s sake. We ain’t got all day.’
    Ella looked up, checking that they weren’t being watched.
    The factory where her mother worked was cavernous. Cardboard box high-rises stretched up to the double-height ceiling, looking like an