Angel Confidential by Mike Ripley Page B

the night shelters. But those weren’t the sort of places from which a girl like Stella left for work every morning and returned every evening to be greeted with hugs and kisses by her house-mates.
    From the way Veronica had described that – not to mention the cross painted on the door – I had guessed we were talking religion. It didn’t surprise me. Who else would a runaway, love-lost girl turn to in the big city? After drugs, religious sects offering all the safety valves of a family without the hassle of relatives, were London’s most successful growth industry.
    The only question really was, what was their particular angle? What did they offer? What were their aims? How much did it cost to join, apart from a mail-order account with Cotton Traders?
    That didn’t take much detective work either. The smallest and youngest of the three, wearing the ‘buttermilk’ shirt, handed me a printed sheet with a cheery greeting of: ‘Hello, neighbour.’
    I wondered if he’d seen me looking at the For Sale sign, but then I realised that he probably said that to all complete strangers.
    â€˜Thank you,’ I said, taking the sheet from him. I half expected a sermon, or at least a come-on scam for money. Maybe I wasn’t his type of likely cult material, as he smiled and turned to follow the other two shirts – one tangerine, the tall guy’s an eggshell shade – down the street.
    They didn’t give me a second look, and I concentrated on the paper I had been given, so they could get ahead of me. And as I stood there outside number 8, I distinctly heard the sound of bolts being scraped home behind the door. At least four of them.
    I glanced at the flyer I had been handed. It had been printed from a word-processor by someone trying to use all the available typefaces and then duplicated on bleached, unrecycled paper. Whoever these guys were, they were not eco-warriors. The key message came under the title:
    Â 
    The Church of the Shining Doorway
    Â 
    â€˜Give me your young people that I might
    lead them to the shining doorway of
    Jesus and all his understanding.’
    Â 
    Constantine
    Â 
    That was all it said, but below it was a hand-drawn logo of a door with a large cross as if painted on. I thought about the sound of the bolts being fastened behind the door of number 8, just a few feet away from me, and wondered why that particular doorway, shining or tarnished, needed so much security.
    I folded the flyer carefully and put it in the inside pocket of my leather jacket. The three of them were at the end of the street now, the tall one half a pace in front of the other two, slipping on the linen jacket he had been carrying. Even from where I was, I could see it had all the creases in the right places.
    I wondered whether to follow them or try my luck with whoever was in the house. I decided to keep to the street. I would need a good line in blag to get into the house, and for what? Stella should be at work, and I certainly didn’t want Veronica coming looking for me if I did manage to get in.
    As they turned the corner of the street I opted to tail them. It went like a dream. Dead easy, this tailing stuff. They never suspected they were being followed, and I stuck to them like glue all the way to where they were going. About a hundred yards round the corner into Sloane Square.
    They stood and conferred for a moment outside the entrance to the underground station. Then the tall one in the linen jacket flapped a hand in dismissal and walked off, but only as far as a brasserie ten feet away. He took a seat in the window, and a waiter in a striped apron the size of a beach towel offered him a menu. He ordered without consulting it and, while waiting, produced a small, flip-up mobile phone and began dialling.
    His two foot soldiers took up position straddling the entrance to the tube station and began to hand out flyers. I watched from across the square, noting that