TIGER LILY

OF

BANGKOK

IN LONDON

The Tiger’s On The Prowl Again!

by

OWEN JONES

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Copyright © May 2015 Owen Jones Author

Published by

Megan Publishing Services

http://meganthemisconception.com

All rights reserved.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Written during ‘National Child Abuse Prevention Month’

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CONTENTS

1 The Sunday Times

2 Great Ormond Street

3 Dolphin Square      

4 The Gang

5 Lily Seeks Help      

6 Piccadilly Circus

7 Lily Works on a Theory

8 Lily Gets Organised

9 Freelancing

10 The Squat

11 Greg

12 Alice

13 Confession

14 Home Sweet Home

15 Business As Usual

00 The Disallowed      

About the Author

1 THE SUNDAY TIMES

Lily was a good intuitive shot. She was one of those people who doesn’t seem to have to take aim like most marksmen. Whatever her eyes were looking at was in trouble – they were her laser-targetting devices. She threw her meat cleaver and hit David Cameron right between the eyes. She had been willing the blade to find that spot, but she knew that she had hit it as much through luck as judgement.

She was still fuming mad, so she jumped up and retrieved the six assorted kitchen knives from the two chopping blocks to which she had stuck six photos of famous politicians and personages cut out of the Sunday Times colour supplement at random. The chopping blocks were hanging from cords like dartboards on the far wall of the kitchenette.

“How dare they?” she said to no-one but the photographs. “How dare they allow child abuse to go on under their very noses and do nothing about it!?”

Leon Brittan got a steak knife in the right eye, but she was still most proud of the Cameron shot, although hitting any part of a three by four inch photograph from ten feet with ordinary domestic cutlery was quite a feat in itself, especially as she hadn’t practised since she’d left Bangkok.

Lily was no ordinary young woman though.

She had studied martial arts in her native Thailand and taken up archery in conjunction with that. Throwing knives or indeed anything sharp had just happened, because she couldn’t practice archery in her flat, first in Bangkok and now in London. She was still a medical student, but she had managed to get a placement in Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital for two years.

She had one year left.

Her English had been good since school and studying medicine had meant that she had had to read a lot of medical books and journals in English. She had decided to force the pace by reading the Sunday Times from cover to cover every week, and it did take her all week to accomplish. Today, she had been reading about the suspected paedophile rings operating in Dolphin Square and some of the orphanages, children’s homes and hospitals up and down the country.

Margaret Thatcher and Jimmy Savile caught steak knives in the head for the fourth time each. They had thwacked in hard and were still vibrating from the ferocity with which they had been thrown.

Sunday was the only day that she knew she would be free every week, so she was still in her girlish pyjamas. She was also entitled to a second day off a week, but sometimes she took two half days and other times she just worked it. She didn’t really have a lot of use for free time. She still hadn’t made any close friends in London, although she sometimes went for a night out with a bunch of her co-workers.

It wasn’t a problem to her though, she had been a loner since her so-called uncle had started abusing her when she was eleven, half her lifetime ago and she loved her job and the children it involved her meeting. Lily was petite and could still pass for a child if she wanted to. In fact, many of the children at the hospital thought at first that she was a patient dressed up as a nurse, although she was in fact a student doctor.

She threw the six knives at the six photographs one more time, then she returned her attention to the long article on establishment child abuse.

It cited alleged instances from the Seventies and Eighties, yet she wasn’t even born until 1993 and the names meant nothing to her. The only politicians she had heard of when growing up were Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and George Bush, who, she knew wasn’t even British. Now she was aware of Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Miliband. In fact their photographs were on the wall, although she was conscious that some of them were still in school when the abuse took place. Others, suspected participants or, at best, misguided facilitators were already dead, and yet others waiting to die in nursing homes or mental institutions, oblivious to the scandal that was brewing up among the general public outside.

Lily picked up her iPod and called up the locations mentioned in the article. First, Stoke Mandeville hospital where someone called Jimmy Savile, now dead, had carried out many of his crimes; then Dolphin Square, in Pimlico, the heart of London’s Westminster and West End; Elm Guest house, Barnes, in south-west London; and finally Grafton Close Children’s Home in Richmond-upon- Thames.

Investigations by various police forces including London’s Metropolitan Police Force such as Operation Fairbank, Operation Midland, Operation Fernbridge and Operation Yewtree were still mysteries to her, but she wanted to learn more about them.

It was gone eleven by the time Lily stopped reading about the allegations. Her head was reeling and she felt sick. Memories that she had always tried to push to the back of her mind were resurfacing and she didn’t like it.

She took off her pyjamas, opened the French windows onto her fourth-floor verandah and stood naked in the summer sunshine, then she calmed her mind and began her warm-up moves of T’ai Chi, before moving on to the more aggressive Kyokushinkai Karate, which she had studied in Bangkok as a full contact sport. She was light, but fast and strong and many opponents had made the mistake of underestimating her.

When she felt more at ease, she collected the six knives and threw them at the tattered images one last time, then she put the knives away and the photographs in the bin and ran her bath.

Lily had always sought solace in a warm bath, it was where she carried out most of her most productive contemplation.

She had hoped that those dark days of madness in Bangkok of two years before were behind her. She had forgotten how many men, suspected paedophiles, she had killed, although she would be able to recall each grizzly instance and count them if she wanted to. She never did want to though. It was more than ten and that was close enough for any young woman to cope with, however much the victims had deserved their fate.

This was not her country though, she could pretend that it wasn’t her fight. Surely, the British would sort out their own mess. Yes, she could try that approach and stay out of it. That thought lasted almost a minute, but she knew how the rich and powerful could literally get away with murder in her own country, and hadn’t Nick, the chief witness in this London scandal, and several officers in the Metropolitan Police Force hinted at something similar happening in Britain?

How could she do nothing when she had the power to do something, albeit illegally? She could help redress the balance, if she were strong enough. In Bangkok, she had been burning with rage, now she was only really angry and she was older and more able to control her temper. Practising martial arts had been a great help in that respect.

However, she could still choose to do something, and who knew? Being sanguine about the problem might even make her more effective and less likely to get caught.

No-one had touched her since she had moved to London. She was still officially going out with Ron, but he was in Bangkok and neither of them had expected the other to remain faithful, although they Skyped one another often and always finished by saying ‘I love you’. Ron even sent her part of his allowance from his parents so that she would be free from financial worries and could concentrate on her studies. Not that she was poor anyway. She had stolen a lot of money and jewellery from the men whom she had liberated from their sinful existence to start a new life and make amends.

She couldn’t tell Ron that though, he only knew about the ten million Baht that her mother had left her, and that was not a lot of money to him or his family.

Lily lived quite frugally, not purposely so, it was just her nature. She took buses everywhere, didn’t go out much and didn’t own or want a car, despite the fact that the British drove on the same side of the road as the Thais, so she would have picked it up quickly.

Her only extravagances were her apartment, her vast wardrobe of assorted outfits and her collection of make-up . She liked nice clothes and she insisted on living in a comfortable environment and Ron’s contribution paid for most of the rent anyway.

She foresaw that in about fifteen months time, she would return to Bangkok, move in with Ron and pass her doctor’s examination, before looking for a job somewhere. Ron would want that to be in Bangkok, near his parents, where he had lived all his life and that was all right by her, because she hadn’t spoken to any of her family since her mother’s funeral.

However, that was all next year, what about the rest of this one?

She knew deep down that there was no way that she could do nothing. It just wasn’t an option. She despised her own family for having done nothing when she was being abused, however much they asserted that they hadn’t known what was going on. She couldn’t believe that no-one had noticed that she had become ‘quiet’, troubled and nervous of being left alone with her treacherous ‘uncle’. It was inconceivable to her, and so was the idea that she would be able to live with herself if she did nothing now.

However, do what?

Although the skin on her fingers had long since turned wrinkly, she let more hot water into the bath and thought.

It seemed to her that the main difference between the situation she had faced in Bangkok and the one she would in London was local knowledge. She been going from home to work, to the shops and back home for the last year and didn’t know her way around like she did in Bangkok. Furthermore, the article she had been reading, had talked about homosexual paedophiles, whereas she had concentrated on men who liked young girls, other than that, perhaps, she could adapt her old tactics to the new circumstances without too many complications.

She paused to consider whether her not inconsiderable make-up skills would stretch to making her look like a boy. She wasn’t sure, but sat up in the bath to see her face in the clouded mirror. She pulled what she thought were boys’ faces, but was not convinced, then the idea struck her that she could make a passable lady-boy – a transvestite.

This led her to thinking about disguises, uniforms and ultimately, weapons.

The skewers had been exceedingly effective in Bangkok, and could be used again, but they were necessarily close-range weapons and they may form a link with the Bangkok murders. She could throw, which would put more distance between her and her target. She was sure that she would be able to hit a man somewhere from twenty to thirty feet, given the right missiles and more practice, but she could easily treble that distance with a bow and be more accurate.

It was getting hold of the weapons without drawing attention to herself that was the problem. She was not your typical Londoner, whatever that was, but she didn’t feel like one anyway, and she knew that her deceptions worked best when she was able to relax and believe herself what she was trying to convince others of.

She stood up slowly and pulled out the plug with her foot, then rinsed herself off with cold water from the shower head, wiped the mirror with the flannel and studied her body.

No problems yet, and she might just pass for a boy, she thought.

She dried herself off, covered her body in talcum powder in the old Thai style and applied other creams and her beloved jasmine oil to her face, hands, arms and neck as she was accustomed, then she wrapped a large towel around her body and went back to the living room.

Before she had even had a chance to take a coffee onto the balcony to enjoy the summer that the British said was so hot, but was the same as a Thai winter, she knew what she would be doing that afternoon, and if she did that, she knew what she would inevitably be doing in the near future, as sure as ‘b’ follows ‘a’ and two follows one.

She got dressed in drab student-type clothes so as not to stand out and went shopping.

The train was in motion and the destination inevitable.

The first thing she wanted to do was find a hobbyists, so she loaded an app onto her iPhone and let it look for the nearest registered outlet. A taxi took her to within a hundred yards of it minutes later.

She took a deep breath, and walked into the small shop.

“Hi,” she said, not attempting to hide her Asian accent. “I want to make plaster models for my family for good luck, but heads keep snapping off. Do you have metal rod to put inside?”

“Yes, Miss. We stock several diameters, which would you like?” He helpfully pointed at a rack of what looked like stainless steel stair rods behind and below the counter.

“Er, I think six millimetre”.

“Certainly, Miss, how many?”

She could see that they were a metre in length.

“Er, three, please. Er, how you say? I am here for holiday and not have tools for cut. Do you have?”

“No, Miss, I’m very sorry, we are waiting for delivery, but there is a Jewson’s builders’ merchants two hundred metres out this shop turn right. They will have angle grinders, hacksaws or whatever you need”.

Lily paid and left for Jewson’s, happy that her first purchase had gone so easily.

At Jewson’s, she took her time looking around. She knew what she wanted, just not what form it would come in.

She weighed six-inch nails in her hand, but they were far too light. Then she spotted the nail punches. That was more like it. She put a roll of eight assorted-sized punches and a single, loose one of the largest punch into her trolley. As she was looking at files, she noticed a broken one, the handle of which had come adrift. The metal file was nine inches long and the wicked-looking spike that went into the handle was four inches. She reassembled the useless tool and put it in her trolley too. Then she bought a four-inch angle grinder, a few spare discs, a hacksaw, spare blades and a pair of pliers, and left.

She took a taxi to a hundred metres from her flat and stopped for a coffee before continuing home.

Lily put the bags containing her purchases under her bed and then caught a bus to a shopping centre that she had not used often, but she knew quite well. Her first job was one of her favourite hobbies: she walked from shop to shop holding clothes up against herself and chatting with sales assistants about the latest fashions and which colours suited her best. She wasn’t completely sure what she wanted, but she had the confidence to know that she would recognise it when she saw it.

She was now officially on a mission and they had always worked out for her, so far.

Lily already had a vast collection of makeup since that had been a passion of hers since she was first allowed to wear a little eye shadow and mascara at the age of sixteen. She also had several CD’s of magazine cuttings on different styles and techniques of applying makeup that she had collected over the years and scanned to disc.

She had always liked to experiment with new looks and styled herself on Madonna: she wore wigs and different styles of clothes which transformed her from a teenage punk to a demure young woman and every stage in between. She could even hide the fact that she was Asian, although she didn’t normally bother. However, being of Chinese-Thai descent, she had a naturally light-coloured skin, and since she had lived in London, it had paled to a typical European hue. The only style she had never tried, and couldn’t think why not now, was to look like a boy.

She brought up mental images of Julie Andrews and Lisa Minnelli dressed in men’s clothing and thought that it looked quite good, but not what she was after. AC-DC was more what she wanted, but then they were real men. That didn’t put her off, she just started paying more attention to the sort of clothes that teenage boys wore in the UK. She soon realised that most of them were shapeless scruffs when they didn’t have to go to school. She would have no trouble hiding the fact that she was female if she wore a hoodie or a kagoule.

They went on her mental shopping list.

She also bought short and long trousers, skirts, blouses and shirts, socks and sensible shoes, then took her bags to a coffee shop for the chance to think. She tried what she thought was a butch voice on the waitress who came to take her order, but she wasn’t happy with it and noticed the strange look on the girl’s face, so she didn’t say another word in the shop.

Lily was running her purchases through her mind and letting combinations of clothes and scenarios suggest themselves to her, when the usefulness of several more items suggested themselves. When she left, she was glad to get out of there as she felt that she had made a fool of herself. She felt as if this were confirmed when the two waitresses started giggling to each other as she walked out of the door.

Lily wanted a large map of central London that she could hang on the wall, a roll of one-inch wide Sellotape and some inexpensive party wigs. They were easy enough to find and she bought four assorted types and the four polystyrene heads to store them on cost more than the nylon hairpieces. It was four o’clock when she got in a taxi to take her and her things home, which was a touch on the late side for what she wanted to do, but she couldn’t help that.

She didn’t have time to put her clothes away properly which would normally have been a priority after such a shopping expedition, but they had strict rules on noise in her apartment block and there was to be no noise made that might disturb other residents after five pm. It was one of the reasons why she had chosen the flat in the first place and she didn’t want to start attracting any undue attention to herself now.

She took the angle grinder, the pliers and one rod from under the bed and on to the verandah, where she plugged the cutter in. Then she divided the rod into six pieces with markings using an eye-lining pencil, put on a pair of sunglasses and, holding the rod with the pliers she carefully cut it up. She was left with six six-inch stainless steel rods a quarter of an inch in diameter.

She listened for neighbours banging on the wall in complaint, but she still had twenty minutes to make as much noise as she wanted. She had to do it now, because when she was working, she didn’t get in until six. There were no signs that she had upset anyone, so she placed the grinder between her knees, clenched hard and started it up again. She took a six-inch length of steel and turned it on the spinning blade until it was as sharp as a teacher’s 3H pencil. It was too hot to touch, but she admired the point and then treated the other five rods in the same manner.

She switched the machine off and listened intently again, but still there was nothing. Good, she was five minutes within her limit. She was hoping that people would not have associated the noise with a shy, foreign, female, medical student anyway and she was probably right. Lily returned the angle grinder to its box and hiding place under the bed and fetched the broken file and carefully used it to take off all the rough edges and burrs from the six items.

She turned them over in her hand, feeling their weight and testing their sharpness. Some she perfected with the file before laying them out in a row on the table before her.

‘They ought to be black,’ was the only criticism she could think of, ‘but they’ll do for now’.

Lily brushed the dust and filings over the edge of the balcony. She was house-proud, and always had been, but she didn’t want that in her flat. She put the dustpan and brush away, and started to control herself again. Deep breaths, mind-focus, calmness…

She gathered up the mini rods, their combined weight in her hand felt reassuring, like an old, oft-used hand gun – a friend that she had known in the past. She fanned them out in her left hand, points towards her body and walked to the far end of the room. She span quickly and had flicked three bo-shuriken into each of the chopping blocks in ten seconds. It was almost as fast as automatic fire. The first hadn’t hit its mark before the second and third were flying on their trajectory behind it

There came a tap, tap, tap on the wall. Lily snapped out of her reverie and looked at the wall clock. It was five thirty and they were into the curfew on noise.

She put the bo-shuriken rods in the back of a drawer and went for a shower.

‘Six hits with six forty-gramme, six-inch steel bolts from twenty feet wasn’t bad,’ she was thinking as she stood under the shower, ‘ even if the targets were fifteen inches in diameter’.

She hadn’t thrown shuriken since Bangkok and had never used this particular design before, so she was happy with that… for today. It was only the start of her training, but it was a propitious sign.

2 GREAT ORMOND STREET

Lily got up at seven, as she usually did on a working day, showered, performed her exercise routine of T’ai Chi and Karate Kata, ate, showered again, dressed and caught the eight fifteen bus into Great Ormond Street where the eponymous hospital that she worked at was located. The bus got her there at about eight forty which gave her plenty of time to change again and start work at nine.

As an overseas medical student who was not going to be sitting any examinations, she had a nine to five job, acting more as an assistant nurse than a doctor, but she was still learning a great deal and this placement would be impressive on her curriculum vitae. Two years experience in one of the best children’s hospitals in the world would be worth more than her Thai degree outside Thailand.

She went into the staffroom associated with her ward to check what duties had been assigned to her for that day and pick up a copy of her rota for the week. She noted that her recommendation for two half-days off on Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning had been approved, so she asked for Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning for the following week in writing on the receipt that she had to hand back that proved that she had received her work schedule.

She said a perfunctory ‘Good Morning’ to those whom she knew and received a similar reply. Everyone was too busy at the start of a shift to stop for a chat, then she hurried off to look for the doctor and sister whom she would be assisting on their round.

Lily was popular with everyone, but especially the children, they seemed to regard her as an older sister and she was able to talk to them on the same level about things that they had only seen on television. When she was alone with them, she charmed them with stories of Asian princes and princesses, tigers, crocodiles, huge snakes and elephants, all of which she said she had seen in the flesh back home. And it was true, she had, although she had seen more snakes than royals, and the elephants, tigers and crocodiles had been on farms not in the jungle. Still, she could tell a good story and keep them amused or distracted while the oft boring treatments and tests were being carried out.

Working with the children like this was her favourite part of the job and her enthusiasm showed and earned her respect.

On the previous 14th November, she had turned up for work in ‘traditional Thai costume’. It wasn’t, she had come across the sarong in an Oxfam Shop and bought a few pieces that went with it, but with her hair up and talcum powder on her face, the children were convinced that she was Oriental royalty herself. Her superiors had allowed her to wear it for that one day only when she had explained that that day was called Loy Krathong – ‘Launching Boats’ - and was Thailand’s equivalent of St. Valentine’s Day when many women across Thailand wore traditional dress.

The kids had loved it and the long term patients often asked her to wear it for them again.

She would have her own children, probably with Ron, one day.

“Lily, bring the trolley a little nearer, please”.

“Oh, sorry, sister,” she replied, snapping out of her daydream. One of her jobs on these rounds was to push the drugs trolley, then the sister would hand the medication to the doctor to administer. This child, a girl of about seven, had Type 1 diabetes with complications and needed regular injections of insulin, until they could find a better alternative, if there was one. She watched the doctor find the vein, the poor girl wince and look away, and the doctor insert the needle.

It brought a tear to her own eye and she quickly wiped it away, because she wasn’t sure whether it was regarded as a sign of weakness in Britain. It would have been wrong in her county, but it didn’t stop her feeling the child’s pain anyway.

When the girl caught her eye, Lily winked, smiled and held up a thumb. The girl managed a smile too and they both felt a little better.

Lily watched the sister disconnect the sharp and drop it into the receptacle on the trolley. Then they moved on to the next bed and Lily gave a little wave ‘Bye-bye’. The girl grinned and waved back.

At lunchtime in the hospital canteen, Lily often sat with some of her colleagues, but not always. Sometimes, she went shopping, as did everyone from time to time, and on other occasions she would sit alone. People assumed then that she was homesick and respected her privacy. However, on this day, she wanted to talk. As they were eating, she asked:

“Did anyone read that article on organised paedophile rings in hospitals and children’s homes in London in the Sunday Times? It didn’t mention this hospital, did it go on here as well?”

Her fellow diners looked horrified.

“Of course not,’ said a male nurse after a few seconds to the agreement of the others.

“But how would you know, Julian, you weren’t working here thirty-five years ago”.

“No, I wasn’t even born, but it’s best not to stir up trouble with awkward questions like that, Lily… they can’t do the hospital any good”.

“Julian’s right, Lily,” advised Susan, another nurse. “We can’t change what has gone on before, we can only be vigilant and make certain that it doesn’t happen on our watch”.

“What and let the perverts get away with their crimes? Is that what you’re saying? What about the forty-year-olds and justice for them after all this time?”

“All right, what do you want me to do, Lily? ‘ Cause I don’t know what I can do to help”.

“No, nor do I, but if I was in Bangkok, I’d write to my MP and insist that he supported an inquiry into the allegations. A letter only takes thirty minutes and an email only three”.

“Yes, well, I’ll probably do that, I just meant what can I do here, now”.

“I don’t know… this is not my country… I don’t know how things work here. I only know that this is deeply shocking to a Thai, because Thais hold Great Britain in the highest regard, and all we have heard is scandal for years, and now this”.

“Yes, well, we’re not proud of our self-proclaimed betters either,” added Jane another nurse at the table. “I’m with Lily, we should be doing something, but what?”

People stared at their food or their newspapers and wished that either they or Lily had chosen that day to go shopping.

They were all glad to get back to work.

Ten minutes before the end of her shift, Lily went to the stores and stole a few syringes and needles to fit. She put them in her overalls, changed, transferred them to her bag and calmly went for her bus home.

She had the beginnings of an idea.

On the way home, Lily called in at a DIY shop to buy an electric drill and a set of fine bits. The shop had a hobbyists’ section where she noticed small pots of enamel paint. She bought two of matt black and two children’s paint brushes. It seemed appropriate somehow. She judged that one pot of paint might just cover six of her new bo-shuriken

After eating a meal of salad and Sunday leftovers, she showered and dressed in baggy jeans and a T-shirt, then sat on the verandah and painted her shuriken. The small pot might have covered seven items, but she knew that the dregs would have gone hard by the time she got around to cutting any more, so she stood them on their point against the railing to dry, put the brush and tin in a paper bag and pulled on her new hoodie. She wanted to test something.

She took the bag with her and wore the hood down, so as not to alarm her neighbours then went down onto the street. While still in the shadows of their building, she tied her hair back tightly, put the hood up and walked up the quiet avenue where she lived, dumping her paper bag in the first bin she passed.

She put her hands in her pockets, adopted the slouch and mannerisms of a bored teenage boy and headed for the local shopping centre which she knew attracted groups or gangs of teenagers after the shops were closed.

When she was almost there, a youth jumped out from behind a wall and started to walk half a pace behind her to her right, on the inside of the pavement.

“Got any ganja?” the person asked.

She didn’t reply, but kept on walking.

“I’m talking to you, you ignorant piece of shit…”. he put a hand on Lily’s shoulder and in an instant she had tripped him to the floor.

“You’ll regret that you fucking bastard! You don’t know who you’re dealing with. This is our manor and we don’t tolerate intruders,” he said as he jumped up and pulled a knife as big as a Roman broad sword from behind his back.

There was a distance of about three yards between them.

Lily was watching the fifteen year-old like a hawk, but she kept her head down so that he couldn’t see her face.

“Fuck off and leave me alone,” she said quietly, but it was not what she wanted to happen and she knew that the boy couldn’t lose face either. Being Thai, she knew all there was to know about face.

When the boy made his move, it was plausible, but amateurish. She hit his arm carrying the knife aside, grabbed his wrist, relieved him of the knife and spun to the side kicking him in the head and dropping him on his backside on the pavement. When she threw the knife into the nearest tree sticking it into its truck twenty feet above the ground, the boy charged again thinking her stupid for throwing away a weapon, but assuming it was another boy. When he was within range she hit him just hard enough on the nose to make it bleed, but not hard enough to break it. He fell to the pavement again.

“Who the fuck are you, man? I’ve never seen you around here before”.

“I’ve never seen you either,” she said in another version of her butch, boyish accent, but then I just got here”.

The boy wasn’t sure whether to get up or not, but it suddenly occurred to him that the knife that this person had thrown away was sticking in the tree.

“That was a lucky throw with my knife,” he said.

“Why, did I hit that beetle then?”

“What? No, surely not…” he stammered still looking at the knife stuck in the tree as he started to get up. She stepped forward and held out a hand, which he took.

It surprised her, she wouldn’t have accepted any help.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Fuck off’.

“Hiya, Fuck Off. Where did you learn to do all that shit?”

“None of your business”.

“No, fair enough, but if you live around here, why not join our gang? We can take care of you, give you safe passage and all that..”.

“You give me safe passage? I just took your knife off you, stuck it up there in that tree, gave you a bleeding nose and put you on your arse… three times”.

“Yeah, but do you want to go through this hassle every night? There are lots of us around here and we control this hood”.

“Well, maybe, but I prefer to be alone. I don’t want to hang around with a bunch of spotty kids talking about who they groped last week. What’s your name?”

“Psycho”.

“Really? I said name, not handle, stupid”.

“Oh, I don’t just give that info out to anyone who asks…”.

“OK, fuck off then,” she spat out and turned again to leave.

“OK, OK, Jack, as in jack-knife, get it?”

“Yeah, great… Good thinking… Jack-off, more like”. She turned to leave again.

“Wait, you haven’t told me your name and don’t you want to meet the gang?”

She did, but things had already gone better than she had hoped for.

“You can call me F.O. for short and I’ll have to meet your pals another day. I’m too busy tonight and you have put me behind time”.

She started walking away again.

“But how will I recognize you, F.O? I haven’t seen your face”.

“True, very true, but I’ve seen yours… just remember what you do know about me… that’ll be good enough for now. See you around, Jack”. This time she walked away and didn’t stop, but she crossed the road to get one last surreptitious look at him. Jack was gazing up into the tree, probably wondering how the Hell he was going to retrieve his knife or tell his friends how it got up there.

She walked around the block making sure that Jack wasn’t following her, and then returned to her flat, taking the now unnecessary hoodie off and letting her hair down again before entering the building.

Lily sat in front of the TV and flicked it on hoping for more information on the paedophile ring, but she was out of luck. She idly took the drill from its box and inspected it. It came in a neat plastic carrying case and as a bonus, they had added six assorted screwdriver bits inserted into a strip of yellow plastic which would stand on a worktop. Each bit was held firmly in its own hole. She tugged at one of the bits, but it was difficult to get it out, so she went to fetch her pliers from the draw.

While there, she saw the shuriken and a light went on in her head.

After pulling all the bits out of their holder, she pushed the shuriken into the holes. They fitted perfectly, but the arrangement was top heavy and so unstable. It was dangerous as well, looking like a silo of miniature Tomahawk cruise missiles on a submarine. They were much longer than the screw bits, so easier to grip and consequently easier to remove. She wiggled them in their sockets until they were only lightly held and extraction was fast and easy, but it still wasn’t right.

Lily removed the shuriken, put the holder on the floor, and put a dart point first into one of the holes, then tapped it through the plastic with the flat of her palm. She held it up for inspection. The shuriken was held firmly in place, as before and it was safer to carry, but the needle-like point stuck out below the bottom of the holder. She pushed all the sharpened rods through the holder in a similar way, then went into her kitchenette. She had three large flat jars for tea, coffee and sugar which had large cork stoppers.

Lily took the one out of the sugar jar and used her hacksaw to cut an inch off the bottom, then cut that into pieces and fitted them onto the vicious points of her missiles. It could and would be improved upon, but it would do for now. She put the assembly into the back right-hand pocket of her jeans to try it for size, but it sank into the pocket without trace. She was still wearing the baggy, low crutch jeans that she had bought to assist her in her disguise as a boy, so she changed into her more usual skin-tight Levi’s and her bottom and the tight denim held the unit in place however high or low in the pocket she wanted to carry it.

She pushed it in deep and walked around. It wasn’t uncomfortable and nothing was sticking in her. She could get used to it. She checked in the full-length hall mirror – the top three-quarters of an inch of each rod was protruding from her pocket like pens from a foreman’s jacket. It was perfect and she could cover those with a jacket or a jumper. Lily reached behind to pull one out.

It came, but they were too deeply-seated. Raising the assembly in her pocket could be done, but the actions necessary to accomplish the move looked odd. It was easier, and less noticeable, to undo her trousers, lift it up, and re-button her jeans. With a jacket or jumper, no-one would ever notice.

She was eager to practice with her shuriken right away, but could not make a noise, so she tore two strips of cloth from a duster and sewed them onto two corners of one of her pillows then hung that at approximately head height from one of the hooks on the back of the front door, and hung a chopping block over the cushion.

The hall was only twelve feet in length, nowhere near as long as she would have liked it to be, but she could practice entering the hall and throwing as if she had been caught by surprise. She tucked the back of her T-shirt into her trousers and stood before the chopping block like a gunslinger waiting for his opponent to make the first move. Suddenly, her right hand flashed behind her back, drew a missile and launched it at the block under arm.

It hit, then another and another and another. The last two she threw more deliberately, harder, over arm. She undid her trousers, retrieved the plastic holder and the six pieces of cork and reloaded her shuriken into their magazine. She cut a picture of Jimmy Savile showing off his OBE out of the colour supplement and Sellotaped it to the block.

Lily practiced for two hours, destroying a dozen photographs. She enjoyed the discipline, but she also tried to have fun, sometimes rolling into the hall from the lounge and throwing her darts over arm like hand grenades. She also experimented with the height of the magazine in her pocket. For operational use, she found it best to have the shuriken protruding by three to four inches.

At the end of the session, there were a few holes in the pillow, and a few in the door, but scores in the chopping block, which was actually beginning to disintegrate in the centre from the sustained punishment.

Lily dismantled her target and put a cover on the pillow lest the landlord’s representative should pay a visit unexpectedly, and put away her weapons and tools, then ran a bath while she did her T’ai Chi and Karate Kata despite the exercise she had just had. She enjoyed doing the T’ai Chi that her grandmother and mother had taught her – that and genes were about the only connection to them she had left. The four of them, with her father, had often practiced T’ai Chi in the garden together in the good old days, before ‘uncle’ had brought such shame to them all that the sessions had petered out.

She had learned the rudiments of Muay Thai at school, as most Thai kids did, but she hadn’t really felt that it suited her, so she had switched to Kyokushinkai Karate in Bangkok and that had felt more natural to her. Again, she enjoyed practising the Kata at home – she thought of it as a celestial dance.

When she recognised the sound of the water in the bath reaching the level that she liked it, which was deep, she finished what she was doing and turned it off. She stripped off, putting her clothes in the laundry basket and waited. She was in two minds whether to get the newspaper article from the day before and reread it, because she wanted to know the names that were still unfamiliar to her. She wanted them to be on the tip of her tongue at all times like her own name, but she decided against it.

She was calm, she had done her exercises and it would serve no useful purpose to get herself wound up again now. Perhaps the television or some music? But, no, she just stepped into the warm water and closed her eyes.

She thought about her twenty-four hours off and what she should do in them. There were several things she felt she ought to do: visiting Stoke Mandeville Hospital, looking around Dolphin Square and researching her topic on the Internet were just three of them. She also had to work out how she could make the best use of Jack and his gang, if they were worth bothering with at all. She even had some ideas for modifying her bo-shuriken but the next batch would have to be made outside the noise curfew again.

An hour later, when she felt herself drifting off, Lily got out of the bath, covered herself in talc and jasmine oil, put her clothes out for work the next day, got into her pyjamas and slid into bed, where she fell asleep instantly, although the calming effect the exercises were meant to have on her was not achieved that night. Lily had dark disturbing dreams which reminded her of the times she was alone with her ‘uncle’ and how she had always hoped that someone would come in and rescue her, but no-one ever had.

She had had to do that herself and she could still taste the blood sometimes, warm and sickly, and feel his worm in her mouth suddenly growing smaller as his screams and threats grew louder.

3 DOLPHIN SQUARE

On Tuesday, Lily was looking forward to visiting Dolphin Square. She didn’t expect to uncover anything, she just wanted to have been on the scene of the crimes. Despite being impatient to leave, the time passed quickly. Before leaving work, she stole a bag of two dozen small test tube ‘corks’, made of red rubber now, from the stores. That was that little problem taken care of, but if she had known where she could have bought them, she wouldn’t have taken them. Standing outside the hospital at one o’ clock, she checked her A-Z of London and started walking in the direction of the square. It wasn’t far, close to the Houses of Parliament, which was why it was a favourite town residence for MP’s and Peers.

Her first impression was that it was far larger than she had expected. She hadn’t gone in disguise, but being Asian and frequently consulting an A-Z, people naturally took her for a tourist. The few people that passed her in the square, smiled or nodded, but no-one stopped to question her or say ‘Hello’. She suspected that the residents found the square’s recent notoriety embarrassing, and didn’t want to be associated with it. She could imagine how awe-inspiring a child being brought there at night would have found the place.

It was massive, palatial.

She took a few photographs with her phone and left within the hour, although she did pose as a prospective Chinese client at the administration block and picked up a few leaflets.

She then took a bus back to her own neck of the woods, where she bought some food in a supermarket and some timber in the hardware store. She suspected that the young man who served her fancied her, and she strung him along, because when she asked for the two by one PSE and the one-eighth ply to be cut to size for her, he made no extra charge. She also bought a box of inch-and-a-half eight Phillips screws, and then went home.

Lily knew what she wanted to achieve, but she didn’t know how to go about it. She put her angle grinder, a rod and her drill on the balcony table, and fitted the drill with the third smallest bit, which was about half as thick as a match and two inches long.

She stood with the rod clenched between her knees, poised the drill above the rod, pulled the trigger, and bore down on the rod, but it span off immediately.

She tried several times with the same result. She could see that that was not going to work.

So, she put her daps on and jogged back to the hardware store.

“Hello, did you forget something, Miss?” asked the man.

“I don’t know, I’m hoping that you can help me with a problem”.

“I will if I can,” he replied, “as long as it’s nothing to do with your boyfriend. I don’t get involved with maritals”.

“No, it’s nothing like that,” she smiled sweetly. “I am trying to drill a small hole in a piece of metal, but the bit keeps slipping”.

“Ah, the slippery bit! I see… it’s a common problem but easily solved”.

He reached behind him and pulled forth a contraption.

“This will help in most cases. It’s a drill clamp. You raise this thing here up, like so, fit your drill in here, and clamp it tight. Then you put the thing you want to drill in here and clamp that tight… then lower the drill, line it up, switch it on, and lower the drill into the object by turning this knob. It effectively turns your hand drill into a bench drill”.

“Fantastic! I’ll take it,” she said genuinely pleased.

“No problem, but I have one more tip for you. If the item you want to drill a hole in is particularly shiny, hard or slippery, put a bit of sticky tape across it first and drill through that”.

“Thank you,” said Lily, “you have been so helpful, I don’t know how I would have managed without you”.

“It was nothing. Do you want a roll of tape too?”

He slapped a roll of yellow tape on the counter. She didn’t need that, but she took it anyway and returned home.

She marked the rod into six equal lengths as before and cut it up, then fixed the drill and one of the rods into their clamps as she had been shown, and slowly lowered the spinning bit into the metal. She stopped suddenly, remembering the tape, fixed a piece over the end and drilled almost the full length of the bit into the rod.

She did all six and then put points on the end she had drilled.

After filing the burrs off and tidying them up, they looked like huge pencils, the lead of which had fallen out.

Just what she wanted.

Next, she put a chopping block on the floor, laid two pieces of two by one on it as far apart as possible and put a small sheet of ply over them. Using the drill with a screw bit, she fixed the whole thing together and hung it on the pillow on the back of the door.

She threw two of her original shuriken at it, one over and one under arm.

They both smashed through the ply and buried themselves into the block.

She took the screws out and added another sheet of ply making it a quarter of an inch thick, but it was still no barrier. She added a third and the missiles passed through the ply, but did not stick in the block.

Now, she filled a syringe with milk from the fridge and squirted it into the holes of two of her new darts. The liquid did not run out when the darts were inverted, but when they passed through the ply and stopped, the milk kept going, the momentum causing an injection.

She was triumphant, now she only needed to know what liquid to fill them with.

She was pleased with her day’s work so far, so she cleared her work things away, made a couple of sandwiches and took them and a bottle of cold beer onto the verandah to think. She could fill the syringe shuriken with hydrochloric acid, that would be extremely painful, so much so that they might eventually die from it in agony. Or she could make Ricin, she already knew how, and she could source the raw beans easily enough, that would kill them as well, or she could just use salt to aggravate the wound.

‘How much damage did she want to cause people?’ That was the question that needed answering, but she couldn’t know until she knew what that person had done. She had no qualms about killing someone, if she judged that they deserved it and would otherwise get away with their crimes.

She mixed beer with the sandwich in her mouth and liked it

She was an Avenger, not an angel, but certainly an instrument of fairness. As a Theravada Buddhist, she believed that Karma was always fair to all, but as a victim of child abuse, she knew that retribution sometimes came too slowly. She would be there to speed the inevitable payback up a little, even if it had a detrimental affect on her own future, which she fully expected it would have, for she knew that no-one was above The Law of Karma, the natural, immutable, law of the Universe.

However, she had to do something, and she could only do what she knew how to do.

She checked the time, six o’clock, but she couldn’t resist it. She took the six original shuriken and hurled them at the block on the kitchen wall.

Thwack, thwack, thwack… thwack, thwack, thwack.

Tap, tap, tap, came the reply as if from a fellow prisoner in an adjoining cell.

She intended to go looking for Jack later, so she couldn’t have the bath, oils and talc that she craved. Smellier was definitely more realistic than fragrant. She settled for taking off the little make-up she had worn and washing in plain tap water.

As she began to get dressed as a boy, she had second thoughts and fished the clothes she had worn the night before out of the laundry basket. She held them to her nose and was disgusted. She could hear what her mother would have said, but she pulled them on anyway, and after a while she was only aware of the smell every now and then.

Lily had always been sensitive to smells, and this was definitely not her favourite.

At seven o’ clock, she tied her hair back, put her hoodie under her arm and went downstairs to the street, where she pulled the hoodie on to complete the simple disguise.

She walked, or shambled, in the same direction as the previous evening. Jack did not appear at the same place and his knife was missing from the tree. She continued with added caution, she knew that damaged face, or pride as they called it in the West, could fester.

All her senses were on edge.

Then it came.

Despite the hood over her ears, she heard the swoosh of a heavy stick moving at speed behind her from the right.

She fell to the ground of her own volition like a stone, rolled to her left and was up again while her assailant was still recovering from his unexpected mis-strike.

As she pounced for the stick, she saw a boy ten yards ahead and another ten yards behind. She grabbed the loose end of the stick, kicked the boy in the testicles and then hit him with it hard on his right shoulder, his dominant side, which she could tell from how he had been holding the stick. There was a loud crack and the stick broke, she was hoping that his collar bone had too, because she didn’t want to have to fight three assailants.

She kicked him hard in the neck to render him unconscious for good measure and then stepped back into the quiet road where there was more room.

Space was to her advantage.

She watched them advancing on her from both sides and she could see them signalling to each other. She was calm, but she wanted to be cold. She preferred to scare them than hospitalise them.

She was already sensing that they weren’t sure what to do next.

When the boys were still fifteen yards apart, she ran at one of them screaming with her half stick raised.

He froze, but it was not the reaction that Lily was looking for, so when he held up his hands to defend himself, she leapt at him bringing the stick down hard on his right wrist. The snap was definitely his that time, so she turned to meet the other one. He was running towards her when she turned, but stopped when she faced him.

She beckoned him with her left hand, holding the stick in her right.

Now that he had stopped advancing, she looked behind herself, he hadn’t gone down and was only three feet away, so she performed her most dazzling backward spin and kicked him in the carotid artery.

He went down unconscious and the other boy stood where he was shaking his head almost imperceptibly.

He had capitulated.

She threw the stick at him and shouted ‘Fuck off!’

He wouldn’t, but he didn’t take up the challenge either, so she continued in the direction she had been walking.

As she rounded the corner opposite the shopping centre ten minutes later, she saw a group of teenagers standing by a bench laughing and pushing each other around. One of them was Jack. She stood under a street light until he noticed her and then she held her arm out straight and pointed at him. When he did notice, he said something to his mates and they went silent. She knew then that they had known about the ambush and they hadn’t been expecting to see her for a while.

She held her arm out still, but it didn’t look like he was coming.

She counted eight, two of whom were girls, though she knew that that was no guarantee of victory. She was beginning to wish she hadn’t thrown the stick away.

“Jack-off, get over here now or I’ll come and get you”.

Once put on the spot in front of his palls, he had to go, and Lily knew that. When he was three-quarters the way towards her she ran at him with all the power she had putting her shoulder into his chest, sending him backwards for yards and down. She took his knife from his trousers and threw it into a tree again.

“Aw, F.O. what d’you go and do that for? It took me hours to get it back this morning,” he wheezed.

“You sold me out,” she said, knee on his chest holding her clenched fist back in readiness to deliver what every movie-goer knows is the final blow.

He put up a hand, “I didn’t, I swear. The knife’s not mine, it’s my brother’s and he noticed I didn’t have it any more He helped me get it back and wanted to check you out for himself”.

“Himself and two of his pussy mates… Well, they’re probably at the hospital now getting broken bones repaired and that’s where I should put you”.

“He wouldn’t have hurt you, honest. He said he only wanted to see what you were made of..”.

“Really? Well, your fucking brother is a fucking liar”.

She sensed that he could see at least part of her face, so she stood up and kicked him in the side of the chest, but not hard, then offered him her hand again, which he accepted.

“So, what happens now, Jack-off? As you said last night, I don’t want to be going through this hassle every night, so do I have to put you all in hospital? And the next time I throw that knife of your brother’s, should it be at him? I might miss a beetle, but I don’t miss people… how much do you care about him?”

“No, not Bob… he’s all I’ve got”.

“God help you then, that’s all I can say”.

“We all stick together round here. One for all and all for one..”.

“Yeah, right… all the way from here to the nick. Look, Jack, I might be able to use your help. What do you think?”

“Doing what? My loyalty’s to the gang..”.

“Sure, but I won’t ask you to go against your friends… I promise. We need to talk, just you and me. Your friends can wait outside, if you like. Look, there’s a Wimpey’s over there. I’ll wait for you inside, your friends can watch but only from outside. OK? It’s on me”.

“OK, I’ll go tell them I’m all right”.

“I’ll see you over there,” said Lily walking towards his gang friends but not paying them the slightest attention.

“Here, I’ll have a double cheeseburger and Coke. Have what you like and keep the change,” she said putting £20 on the table.

When he returned he said, “You’re not Old Bill, are you?”

“At my age?” she replied, “Since when did they start recruiting at comprehensive school?”

“Well, none of us know you, what school are you at then?”

“I’m not at any school any more.. or not yet… Things went bad for me, an uncle was touching me up, so I ran away… I knocked him over the head, pinched all his money and did a runner. That was last week… now I’m trying to get back on my feet again. That’s why I don’t let people see my face, I may be on Crime Watch one day soon and don’t want to be recognized”.

She could see that Jack was taking it all in, hook, line and sinker.

“But if you can fight like that, why did you let him, er, you know?”

“Simple, he was the one who taught me all this stuff”.

During the silence that followed, Jack’s phone rang.

“Hi bro, where are you? … Yeah? … They got mashed up bad? …OK, I’ll tell ‘em… see you at home later, bro”.

“Don’t tell me, that was your brother and I’m guessing he was the one who wasn’t hurt”.

“Yeah… broken collar bone and broken wrist, plus other superficial injuries”.

“Yes, well, they won’t be superficial next time, they’ll be fatal and you can take that from me”.

“I do, I believe you, er, F.O… Can I call you something else? F.O. doesn’t flow off the tongue, you know what I mean?”

“Youriko.. You can call me Youriko, if you like. I have to go now, Jack, but you can Skype me on that name whenever you like, just don’t expect me to be able to reply immediately… Things are kind of tough right now, you know?

“See you around,” she said getting up, “I’ll see you, Jack… Oh, am I going to get any shit from your mates with their noses pressed against the glass?”

“No, Youriko,” he replied, picking up his mobile, but Lily was already walking towards the exit.

When Lily got home, she opened a Skype account in the name of Youriko and then took all her clothes off. She couldn’t remember ever having smelled so bad.

There were already quite a few Skype accounts with that name, but she opened another one anyway, making hers unique with the addition of _do to her name, so that it meant ‘The Way of the Lily Child’. She also added part of her postal code. It would be a test of his initiative if he found her, Child of the Lily, among all the others. Somehow, she doubted that he would manage it without a few clues.

She checked her clock, it was a little after nine. Lily didn’t have to get up early, but in the summer Bangkok was six hours in front of the UK and she hadn’t spoken to Ron for a while. She felt guilty about that, but it wouldn’t do any good to phone him at three a.m. and make him feel obliged to explain why he was in a nightclub, and if he was in bed, it was already too late. It was at times like these that she missed her family, even though she had given up on them years before. She hankered after the long evenings sitting on the family table outside the house talking and joking until it was time for bed, when they would all sleep in the same room anyway - safe in each other’s company.

The only times things had gone wrong were when her parents had left her alone, and now they would never come back for her and she had no-one except Ron, and he was five and a half thousand miles away.

Lily often became lonely, but when she caught herself wallowing in it, she always tried to distract herself, knowing that if she didn’t, she would cry and she didn’t know where that might lead, and didn’t ever want to find out.

She started to run the bath, scenting it with an extra dose of jasmine, took the Sunday paper and lay in the warm water until it was deep enough and she could concentrate on her reading.

But, she couldn’t concentrate, and threw the paper out the door. She didn’t know where to start… that was the first problem, and if she was hoping that the gang would be of any use to her, they would have to know that she was female. Try as she might, she couldn’t see a way around that. She smiled to herself, she had even given Jack a Japanese girl’s name to call her by without thinking.

It had been her nickname in the dojo in Bangkok. She doubted that Jack would be astute enough to look it up and realise what extra information she had given him, but one of the gang might.

It had been a subconscious tell, but it could possibly be made to work in her favour. If anyone asked why she had pretended to be a boy, she could say that she hadn’t, everyone in the East would have known that Youriko was a girl’s name.

Satisfied that she was a short pace further forward than an hour before, she got out of the bath and did her exercises naked and dripping wet.

The recurring question now was, should she let them see her as sexy or not?

She would remain an underage girl, not that was likely to mean much to them, but she would not out herself as an adult.

When she had finished her Kata, she showered again, put on her oils, talc and pyjamas and got into bed, but the problem wouldn’t leave her alone. It went against the grain to make herself look less attractive than she was, but it may be a way of alleviating some of the problems she could foresee.

She would not tolerate any kind of sexual initiation ceremony, so much was certain, no-one had made her do anything like that for a very long time and no-one ever would again. On the plus side, some of them had seen a few of the things she was capable of. She hoped that that would be enough, but knew she couldn’t count on it.

She awoke an hour later covered in perspiration and very thirsty. As she drank water from the fridge, she remembered having dreamed of her ‘uncle’ and shuddered involuntarily.

She wondered whether she was making herself ill again.

4 THE GANG

Lily got up at seven, her normal time, and was glad to do so. She had slept badly and awoken from disturbing dreams several times. She felt groggy, as sequences from the dreams replayed themselves in her head, so she showered, performed her exercises with extra vigour, showered again, and had breakfast while watching the news. There were a few more snippets about the Dolphin Square paedophile ring, but not enough detail to call it news.

She had a feeling that these cases would drag on for years until most of the assailants had died, and then it would all be swept under the carpet. The sham of a ‘full investigation’ would produce extra work for millionaire lawyers and barristers, but no convicts.

She was waiting for nine o’clock when she could start making noise again and get rid of some of her pent-up aggression.

She practiced for two hours with her original bo-shuriken for fear of damaging the more delicate tips of the new ones and at eleven o’clock, she set up her angle grinder again and sharpened the quasi broad-head arrow tip on the bricklayers’ quoin block she had bought.

It travelled and threw well both over and under arm without spinning, but lacked the weight to penetrate clothing, although it was perfect for ripping open a throat from short distances. She tried dozens of times and thought that ten feet was the maximum.

She trialled the nail punches too, but they were too short, so not as good as her home-made weapons. Lily had to be in work by two, so it was a short afternoon to five, but it did still have to be done. She set the alarm for twelve forty-five, made a few sandwiches and went on the Internet.

She was looking for relevant stories that people had posted, but the newspapers were scared to. There were dozens of them, and Lily was awoken from her studies by the alarm, just as she knew she would have to be.

She saved her work, showered again and went to Great Ormond Street.

After work, Lily walked back to Dolphin Square in search of inspiration. There was a bar-cum-restaurant on the square called the Dolphin Bar and Grill. She would have liked to have gone in dressed as a teenage boy, and she could have got away with it in Bangkok, but it was different in London. In London, laws were not only for threatening people with in order to extract a bribe, most people stuck by them. A barman would want to see ID and she didn’t have it proving she was a boy. In Bangkok, she could have bought the ID card, but here she didn’t know where to go.

Lily walked in. It was not particularly busy and a barman approached her at the bar immediately.

“ID, Miss, please?” He scrutinised it and handed it back. The fact that he seemed to be checking whether it was a fake gave her some hope. She still often had to show her passport to prove that she was over eighteen, but she had never suspected before that their might be forged ID cards about.

“A bottle of San Miguel, please?” She took the bottle to a window table, from where she could observe the goings-on at the bar and in the square outside. It was tough, she thought, because she had no friends to advise her. That was why she needed the gang, and if not that one, then another.

She felt like a wolf in sheep’s clothing sitting there so innocently, although she knew that this was sure to be the most upright bar in the country since the scandal broke, not that it had been mentioned in any of the articles that she had read. She didn’t even know whether it had existed back then.

Forty-five minutes later, she took the bus to the shopping centre near her home, bought another hoodie and pair of baggy jeans and went to her flat feeling despondent. The whole affair was getting to her, but she knew that it was too late to back out now - she was stuck between a ship and the quay.

Lily decided to ask for membership that evening. She stopped in a bar near home, drank two bottles of San Miguel slowly and then went to her flat. she put on her new clothes without showering and left the apartment without brushing her teeth although she felt foul doing so.

She turned right out of the gates again and hoped that they would find her soon.

“Youriko,” came a familiar voice two hundred yards down the avenue.

She carried on walking.

“Got any, ganja, arsehole?”

She stopped and turned around to look at Jack.

“What do you want?” she asked simulating indifference.

“My brother told me to tell you can join our gang”.

“Right, tell him you told me. Why should I?”

“Er, like what we were talking about, it’ll save you a lot of hassle”.

She turned to face him completely.

“Look, Jack. When I go to the dojo to train, I’m not allowed to hit anyone too hard unless I break their bones… do you see where I’m coming from with this? But you lot give me reason to use my skills almost to the full. If I join your mob, I will lose all that, won’t I? I’ll have to go back to hitting punch bags… it would deprive me of a lot of real fight training. So, now tell me again, why should I?”

“We want you to be on our side”.

“Thank you for your honesty. What does initiation involve?”

“Oh, sorry, I can’t tell you that unless you want to join”.

“Jeez! Go on then, lead the way”.

“Do you want a spliff?” asked Jack walking beside her.

It was quite commonplace to have smoked weed at least once in a teen’s life in Thailand, but Lily hadn’t taken to it, she preferred a beer, but could go without that too.

“No, you’re all right, Jack, not just now”.

“Er, Youriko, could you call me Psycho when we’re with the others, please?”

She turned to look at him again and clicked her tongue, but said, “Sure”.

Jack phoned ahead and tried to prevent Lily from hearing, but not very successfully.

“Where are we going?”

“I can’t tell you, it’s a secret”.

“Well, look, Jack, it’s against my nature to walk into an ambush, so if you don’t tell me, I might not go”.

“We’re going to the hideout”.

“And where’s that?”

“Please, Youriko, I can’t tell you”.

She stopped and looked at him again.

“It’s a deserted school over there”.

She carried on walking again.

“Thank you,” she whispered, but Jack looked a broken man.

As they approached an old, abandoned school and entered its grounds, Lily appeared to slip in the poor light, she reached for Jack’s shoulder, and as he put his hand out to help, she relieved him of his knife.

“The less of this sort of stuff the better for me,” she said throwing it high up in a tree again. “You understand, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he replied looking crestfallen, “through here”.

He stopped her under a portico and made a call. A few seconds later the heavy, but worn and battered front doors were opened from inside.

“I’m warning you now, Psycho, I will not be putting myself at any more risk than I think I can deal with”.

He didn’t know what to say, because it wasn’t up to him.

She found herself standing in a large room, the assembly hall, where morning prayers had been held until months ago. It and the fifty or so teenagers inside were illuminated by candles. There was complete silence until a boy at the far end shouted, “You have indicated that you wish to join us, kneel and strip to the waist so we can see who you are”.

“I will not strip,” she said kneeling, “I swore a month ago, before I came to this manor, that no-one would ever abuse me again. However, I understand that you need to know who I am, so I am prepared to remove my hoodie”.

“I could shoot you dead right now, if you don’t act according to our rules”.

“Yes, and I could die… or I might just make it over there, stick that gun up your arse and blow your brains out”.

“Just take your jacket off”.

Lily knew that the element of surprise was still hers and that the danger point would be when the jacket came over head and rendered her blind for a second, but that then she would have the advantage for a few seconds, if she needed them.

“I won’t have anyone standing behind me”.

She saw Jack’s brother beckon the two guards forward, and she knew that they were the only two. She crossed her arms, reached down to her waist and slowly raised her jacket to her breasts, which she thought were adequately disguised by a baggy T-shirt. It was her face that would give the game away. She took a deep breath and drew the hoodie over her head in a split second. She heard gasps of surprise, but only to the extent that she had expected. Seeking to increase the effect, she withdrew the band from her ponytail and shook her thirty-inch locks of glistening, jet-black hair free.

“You’re a fucking girl!” exclaimed Jack.

“Well done, Sherlock, so what?”

“Er, nothing, just saying”.

“Yeah, well who are you telling? I think everyone’s already worked that out for themselves”.

“How old are you and where are you from?” asked the leader.

“Fifteen, from Kyoto, Japan but we moved to Rotherham three years ago. I didn’t like it, now I’m here… What difference does that make?”

Nobody answered, but Lily could feel that popular sentiment was with her.

“Does anyone object to this sister joining our gang?” asked the leader.

One girl shouted, “I had to give all the boys a blowjob to join, will she have to as well?”

“Good point, sister. What do you say to that, Youriko?”

“I say, I don’t think that that is right. I think that the sister was asked or even told to do that and she did it without questioning why. Just because someone asks or tells you to do something, it doesn’t mean that you have to do it. Many people have stood up for their right not to be humiliated and it will not happen to me again… I’ve been through all that shit and I’m telling you all, I would rather die than be abused again and shame on you guys for putting the girls through it”.

She received a stony silence.

“OK, look, I don’t mind, I’ll fuck off and leave you to it… and don’t worry, nobody will hear about you from me”.

She stood up and walked towards the door.

“Elected!” shouted a voice, followed by many others.

Lily had thought she had them, but she didn’t stop walking until Jack touched her shoulder.

“You’re in, Youriko.. that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

She stopped, turned and said quietly, “Yes, thank you, Jack, it is, but why do they want me? What is supposed to happen now?”

“Some people give a little speech and say thank you, others express their gratitude in other ways…”.

“Yeah, so I heard, well I won’t be doing that”.

She turned to face the leader and the gang members, dropped her hoodie to the floor and bowed slightly in the manner customary in Kyokushinkai Karate. Then she stood up straight and took a few paces forward.

“Thank you all for accepting me into this gang I have never been in a gang before, and certainly not in a British one, so I am uncertain what it is you are expecting of me.

“However, there are some things that I