The Savage Day. Jack Higgins

gazed down at the child, those dark eyes blazing, and then he did a strange thing. He reached for one of the limp hands and held it tightly for a moment.

      ‘The bastards,’ he said softly.

      A Saracen swept into the square on the far side and braked to a halt, effectively blocking the street.

      ‘Will you get out of it, Binnie,’ she said.

      I jerked him to his feet. He stood looking down for a moment, not at her, but at the child, then turned and moved across the square away from the Saracen without a word. I went after him quickly and he turned into a narrow alley and started to run. I followed at his heels and we twisted and turned through a dark rabbit warren of mean streets, the sounds from the square growing fainter although never actually fading away altogether.

      We finally came to the banks of a narrow canal of some description, moved along the towpath past an old iron footbridge and turned into an entry. There was a high wooden gate at the end with a lamp bracketed to the wall above it. A faded sign read Kelly’s for Scrap. Binnie opened the judas and I followed him through.

      There was a small yard inside, another lamp high on the wall of the house giving plenty of illumination, which made sense for all sorts of reasons if this was a place of refuge, as I suspected.

      Binnie knocked on the back door. After a while, steps approached and he said in a low voice, ‘It’s me, Binnie.’

      A bolt was withdrawn, the door opened. An old woman stood revealed, very old, with milk-white blind eyes and a shawl across her shoulders.

      ‘It’s me, Mrs Kelly,’ Binnie said. ‘With a friend.’

      She reached for his face, cupped it in her hands for a moment, then smiled without a word, turned and led the way inside.

      When she opened the door at the end of the passage into the kitchen, Lucas and the bomb-thrower were standing shoulder to shoulder on the other side of the table, Lucas holding the Schmeisser at the ready, his friend clutching an old .45 Webley revolver that looked too big for him.