He looked round. Traffic buzzed down Essex Road; buses moved redly up and down Upper Street. What could have happened? Had the police mistaken Mr Sharpe for a tramp and taken him away? Surely not the Tormentors; they wouldn't dare do anything so flagrant, so against the rules, would they? Just because he and Mr Sharpe had been getting on so well?

He kept looking around, thinking that suddenly he would see Mr Sharpe waving from another bench, beckoning him to come and finish his cider and stop being so stupid. Maybe Mr Sharpe had moved to another bench; that must be it. He looked round all the other benches, but all he saw were tramps and dead-beats. Had they done something to Mr Sharpe?

It had to be the Tormentors. It was one of their tricks, one of their filthy tests. He didn't believe it was the Jews, like Mr Sharpe had said; he knew it was the Tormentors. They had done this. He'd get them, though, he swore. He'd get to the bottom of this, right now!

He went to the nearest tramp, an old man lying on the grass. He had very long greasy black hair and a collection of plastic carrier bags spread out on the ground around him.

"What happened to my friend?" Grout said. The tramp opened his eyes. His face was very tanned and dirty.

"I didnae do anythin', honest I didnae, son," he said. A bloody drunken Scotsman! Grout thought.

"What happened?" Grout insisted.

"What, son?" The Scot tried to lever himself up off the grass, but couldn't. "I didnae see anythin', honest. I've just been sleepin', honest. I havnae touched anythin', son. Don't you accuse me. Honest. It's no crime to sleep, you know, son. I've been abroad, you know, son, to foreign countries."

Grout puzzled over this last statement, then shook his head. "You're sure you didn't see anything?" he asked carefully, showing this drunk Scot that he at least knew how to speak correctly. He put some menace into his voice as he finished. "Quite sure?"

"Aye, I'm sure, son," said the Scot, "I've been sleeping; that's what I have been doing." He seemed to be waking up, making an effort with his speech. Grout decided the man probably knew nothing. He shook his head and went back to the bench, standing beside it, looking about.

A tramp a couple of benches further up towards Upper Street was waving at him. Grout turned and went up the path to the man. This one was even older and grubbier than the Scot snoring on the grass, cuddling one of his carrier bags. Where on earth were all the clean people. Grout thought.

"You lookin" for yer frand, muster?" My God! This one was Irish! Where were all the English people? Why didn't they send some of this lot back where they came from?

"Yes, I am looking for my friend," Steven said coldly, carefully. The Irishman nodded towards the apex of the small triangle of park, towards the bus-stops on the far, north-bound side of Upper Street.

"He wen" up that way. Took all yur stuff," the Irishman said.

Grout was puzzled. "Why? When?" He scratched his head again.

The Irishman shook his head. "I dunno, muster. He just up "an wen" as soon as you wen" down to the toilets; I thought you'd had an argument or somethin', so I did."

"But my hat..." Grout said, still unable to fathom why Mr Sharpe would do such a thing.

"That blue thing?" the Irish tramp said. "He put that in huz bag."

"I don't..." Grout said, his voice trailing off as he walked slowly up in the direction the Irishman had pointed.

He left the small park, waited for the traffic to clear, then crossed the road, over to the other side of Upper Street, keeping down by the roadside rather than going up the stepped curb onto the raised section of pavement, because he was afraid of things falling off buildings and he didn't have his hat. A horrible knotted feeling, a pain, started to eat at his guts; he felt the way he had in the home, when all the children he'd befriended were adopted or sent away, and he wasn't; the way he had when he got lost down by the sea at Bournemouth, on an outing. This can't happen to me, not on my birthday, he kept thinking. Not on my birthday.

He went down the side of the street, round the parked cars nose-in to the slanted curb, down to the bus-stops, looking all the time for Mr Sharpe. For some reason he kept thinking that Mr Sharpe would be wearing the blue hat, and he found himself looking for that all the time instead of Mr Sharpe, who, he now realised, he probably couldn't have described very well if a policeman had asked him to. He wandered down, the terrible feeling growing in his guts like a live thing, wringing him, squeezing him. People mobbed about him, on the pavement, by the bus-stops, down ramps and out of buses; blacks and whites and Asians, men and women, people with shopping trolleys or bags of tools, women with children in push-chairs or dragged along from one hand.

Older children ran by, screaming and shouting. People ate hamburgers from polystyrene boxes, chips from bags, they carried shopping or parcels, they were old and young and fat and thin and tall and little, dull and gaudy; he started to feel dizzy, as though the alcohol or the sultry air was dissolving him, as though the pain inside was wringing him out like a wet towel, twisted and squeezed. He staggered, pushed past people, looking for the blue helmet. He could feel himself being dissolved, his identity sapped from him, lost in this siege of faces. He got to the side of the curb, made sure there were no buses coming, then stepped out on to the in-set bus lane, turned round and started to head back the way he had come, further out from the crowd now, staggering and swaying his way back. He looked over his shoulder, but there were still no buses coming, ready to swing into the bus-stop lane and crush him, only traffic from the lights further down charging up the street, engines roaring. He heard a bike engine, revving, coughing. He kept going, heading back for the park; maybe Mr Sharpe would have come back. The holes he had repaired were around about here...

Rough, screaming engine noises shouted at him. He ignored them. A bike engine, spluttering, a diesel engine, revving. He felt suddenly dizzy and disoriented for a moment, filled both with a sudden panic and an unsteadying conviction he had been here before, seen this all before. He glanced up at the sky for a second, and felt himself stagger. His head cleared and he did not fall into the stream of traffic, but it had been close. He heard a great thundering noise then, a noise like a car hitting something, but probably just the sound empty lorries or trucks make when they go over those speed-ramp things, or holes in the road, too fast. He turned round slowly, still feeling strange, to see if it was one of the holes Dan Ashton and the squad had done. He bet it was.

A woman screamed from the pavement.

He looked up again, into the blue, blue sky, and saw something sailing out of it, like a reflection sliding over a globed, shiny blue surface.

A spinning cylinder.

A bike and a flat-bed truck flashed by on one side. He stood, transfixed, thinking; my hat... my hat...

The tumbling aluminium beer barrel hit him right on the top of his head.