A neat, balding man who’d have looked more at home in a library answered the bell and ushered us in, quickly, to prevent the others from following us in through the door. ‘Hello, I’m Arun,’ he said, shaking hands. ‘Glad you could make it. Dennis is still here, taking a bath.’ In the bleak concrete hallway the mingled smells of gravy, cabbage and stale cigarette smoke were almost overpowering. ‘Haven’t you got room for the people outside?’ Ben asked. ‘It’s not that,’ Arun said. ‘We don’t allow alcohol or drugs. They know the rules, but they try it on every time.’ ‘What happens to them?’ I asked, remembering the two men I’d approached in the street on my first search for the quilt, just a few weeks before. It seemed an age ago – so much had happened since then. ‘Some will finish their drinks and then we’ll let them in,’ he said cheerfully. ‘The others will have to sleep rough, I’m afraid.’ He led us through to the canteen, a large, brightly lit room with a stainless-steel kitchen hatch and about fifteen men and women sitting on benches at trestle tables, heads hunched over platefuls of meat, vegetables and gravy, greedily shovelling it in as though they hadn’t eaten for weeks.
