by Mike Ripley
By the time I had walked back to outside number 23, I had convinced myself I was fireproof. There was nobody on the street. Why should there be? It was a grotty residential street with no pub, store or eatery of ethnic origin. Its few residents would be settling in behind their curtained windows to watch primetime television.
There was no gate on the short path up to the house, so I just swung off the pavement and quickened my pace. Now was the time to work fast and ignore everything else. Make a way in; get in; get out.
I used the torch as I approached the door, flashing its beam around the edges of the plywood sheet nailed over the door frame. It had not been cut to size, so there was a lip down the right side where I could get the screwdrivers in.
As soon as I had seen it, I had known the door was the best bet. Sure, I had to get the plywood off and then the door open, making two operations, but the sound of a screwdriver being tapped into place and then levering out the nails would sound just like a distant thumping. With windows, the sound of breaking glass is, unfortunately, just like the sound of breaking glass, and is one of those noises that seem irresistible to the curious human ear.
Either the nails were too thin or the plywood was cheap and weather-rotted, because the thing came off much easier than I ever expected. I put one screwdriver in at about head height, tapping it home with the hammer, then the other about knee height. The strain from those two loosened the board enough for me to use the claw of the hammer as a third lever about midway between the screwdrivers. All I had to do was push on the three of them twice each and the wood sheet plopped away from the door frame.
I took a pair of screwed-up leather gloves from the pockets of my jacket and put them on, not to hide fingerprints but just to get a grip and no splinters. Holding the right-hand edges of the board, I just bent it towards me until it pinged off the remaining nails one at a time. I wouldn’t have thought anyone ten feet away in the street would have heard that, even if they had been watching.
I picked up the torch from where I had placed it, lens down, on the doorstep and flashed it up to suss out the door’s lock. The thing I noticed first, though, was the paint job.
It was the same light blue as the house used by the Shining Doorway in John Brome Street over in Sloane country. And it had the same, almost deliberately amateur and slapdash, three-foot high cross showing through the blue paint job; and now I could see why. I had seen the John Brome Street house only in daylight. In the dark, under torchlight, or presumably even streetlight, the cross shape glowed luminously. It was spookily effective.
At least I had the right house, although anyone in the street would see the cross as long as I was shining the torch. But there was nobody there. Don’t worry, just get on; get in.
There was a hole where a Yale lock had been knocked out, and no other sign of a lock, but the door was firmly shut. I reckoned it had a bolt or a wooden batten nailed somewhere down the door jamb from the inside. Putting the torch right up against the hole where the lock had been, I shone its light inside, then pushed down the right-hand side of the door. It gave under pressure, so I could see a faint line of light – everywhere except about nine inches from the top. Whatever was holding it was there.
I turned off the torch and selected the screwdriver with the widest head, pushing it between the door and the frame where the resistance was the greatest. The wood gave easily, and one tap was enough to push it home. Using the claw of the hammer over the stem of the screwdriver, I levered on the pressure until there was a satisfying crack from the other side and the door swung open.
Still working in darkness, I stepped in and pulled the plywood board back over the doorway so that little would appear different if anyone did walk by. Only then did I click on the torch and beam it around the dank hallway.
Now I was in, my priority was getting out, so the first thing I did was check out the back of the house for an escape route. The hallway led straight into a kitchen, or what had been a kitchen before someone had ripped out everything not nailed down, and no doubt stuff that had been too. There was a back door with an old mortice lock but no key. It took me no more than ten seconds to unscrew the metal plate that held the tongue of the lock, and I caught it before it could hit the floor. There was another sheet of plywood over this door frame, but from the inside it was an easy enough job to push it over the nails that held it in place.
I risked a quick scan with the torch and saw a rubble-filled, rubbish-strewn back garden with little sign of plant life. No more than 15 feet away was a crumbling wall that seemed to lead to the back garden of another house, which also seemed unlit and deserted.
At a pinch, it would have to do. I had been inside the house for less than two minutes. As there were about 170,000 reported burglaries in London each year, and goodness knew how many unreported ones, that made about one every three minutes. So I was on schedule.
There was nothing of interest in the kitchen or the hallway, although the hallway wallpaper had been painted over with white emulsion and then some artistic soul had scratched the flaking paint away in the shape of a crucifix in several places.
I put the beam of the torch on the staircase, which seemed sound enough and even had a threadbare carpet. There was a small landing at the top and three doors leading off it. I creaked my way upwards, trying to identify the various smells of mustiness, damp, dust and finally of toilets.
The bathroom had been trashed good and proper. If there had been a bath, it had gone, as had the lavatory, seemingly sledge-hammered judging by the pieces still on the floor around the open stench pipe that lead to the drainpipe on the wall.
The two bedrooms were just empty. Both had luminous crosses painted on the walls that picked up the light from my torch. In one, there was the impression on one wall where a bookshelf arrangement had been ripped away, brackets and all. Apart from that, nothing.
I hadn’t known what I would find. Finding nothing was both a disappointment and a relief.
Time to go. I was nervous enough. I always knew I never had the bottle to be a burglar. But then I wasn’t really burglarising anyone, was I? I rationalised it as I started down the stairs. I was detecting, I told myself. Looking for clues. It wasn’t my fault that there weren’t any.
Halfway down the stairs, I flashed the torch along the hall, and the beam picked up another luminous cross. This wasn’t on the wall, though. Those were scratched in the paint on the wall. This one was on wood and had been covered with blue paint, just as on the front door. At the bottom of the stairs, I shone the torch around it and realised it was a small door leading off under the staircase. I had missed it on my way into the kitchen and it had been behind me when I had gone upstairs.
It was obviously the door to a cellar, and I didn’t like cellars. They usually didn’t have other exits, and I had once been sorely hurt in one. But I had to look. This was the only room marked with a luminous cross. Was this what Stella had said they called the Contemplation Room? If so, I had every intention of contemplating it rather than going down into it.
There were two bolts on the door but neither was slotted home. I held one to pull the door open and shone the torch in.
The first thing I saw were the treads of the underside of the staircase, guaranteed to clout the unwary on the forehead. I turned the beam downwards, following the short flight of stone steps. The cellar was ten feet square at the most, and the floor area was at least two feet deep in rubbish. I could identify the fittings from the bathroom, including the smashed lavatory, and the metal-framed bookshelves from the bedroom wall. The rest seemed to be old carpets, empty paint cans, builders’ rubble, a set of curtains complete with curtain rail, a kitchen cabinet, sacking and old, stained mattresses. The smells coming out of there were: damp, paint and animal.
Definitely animal, which almost certainly meant rats. I didn’t like rats much either. What was it the environment people said about London these days:
you were never more than five feet away from a rat? Tell me about it.
There seemed to be nothing of interest down there. It was just junk, the sort of pile of detritus you would find thrown out front of a house being demolished, just waiting for the wrecker gang to cart it away to the local dump or landfill site.
So why was it inside the house? Why rip out the fittings and then carefully pile them in the cellar? They would only have to be hauled up the steps and out again if the place was sold, and it wasn’t the sort of sight to appeal to potential buyers, however buoyant the market.
Unless it was advancing the depreciation, as Carrick Lee Senior had called it; running the place down before demolition or conversion. No, that didn’t make sense either. To lower the value, just wreck the joint. Don’t wreck the joint then sweep everything neatly into the cellar. That’s just hiding the wreckage away.
But hide something under the pile of junk and then demolish the house on top of it, and what have you got?
A very good hiding place indeed.
I was grateful I had brought gloves, but I still used one of the long screwdrivers to move things aside, kicking them first to see if they moved.
I did most of it one-handed, as I didn’t want to let go of the torch, and I tried to keep one foot on the bottom step all the time, though I almost overbalanced more than once. I was also straining to listen, just in case somebody had found the door tampered with. It was unlikely, but I was conscious of having outstayed my welcome, and I was running on pure luck now.
Under what looked like the remains of an old bean bag, the fabric holed as if bitten in several places with the polymer ball filling spewing out, I discovered a pile of damp and shredded paper sacks. They too looked as if they had been gnawed. I speared one with my screwdriver and pulled. A paint can rolled over with a clatter, and I swear something scurried up the wall of the far side of the cellar, but my torchlight didn’t catch it, thankfully.
I had to put the screwdriver down to move the formica door from a kitchen cupboard and then a length of heavy, wet and stagnant carpet.
I had now cleared about a quarter of the floor area, the rubbish piled in the far end of the cellar where I had slung it. Still nothing, just plain, concrete floor.
I went up two steps and sat down, shining the torch beam around the cellar. I was hot and dirty and jumpy, and all I had done was rearrange the crap. Nothing, just house builders’ rubbish. It was obvious that the builders had been in at some point. The wet paper sacks I had moved were marked with a blue circle and carried the legend ‘Sand and Cement Mix’.
And suddenly that plain old concrete floor didn’t look so plain any more. In fact, bits of it looked quite new.
I stepped off the steps and onto the patch I had cleared, testing it as if it would tell me something through the soles of my old Travel Fox trainers. I crouched down and looked at it closely.
The cement had been mixed badly, or in a hurry, and was already powdering in places. In other parts, where there had been more sand than cement, there were deep scratch marks and small holes the size of a coin where the rats had tried to eat their way through while it was still wet.
I keep a half bottle of vodka in Armstrong’s glove compartment for emergencies. When I got home to Stuart Street, I took it with me.
Lisabeth was waiting for me on the stairs.
‘They haven’t rung,’ she said. Then: ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Shopping,’ I said, showing her the vodka.
‘Humph.’
I looked at my watch. It was still not yet 9.00 pm.
‘Try and get some sleep,’ I said, passing her on the stairs without stopping. ‘If they don’t ring, we’ll need an early start in the morning.’
‘Where are we going?’ she asked the back of my head.
‘To the rescue.’
I peeled off my clothes and ran the shower until it was hot.
Springsteen appeared just to howl at me, then he began to sniff at the pile of clothes on the floor, especially the jeans and my trainers, and he did it with his mouth open as if panting. Then he turned up his nose and left the bathroom without me having to hustle him out.
I twisted the top off the vodka and drank from the bottle as the hot spray opened up the pores the alcohol couldn’t reach.
I stayed in there for some time, thinking about how, from the dimensions of the patch of new concrete in that cellar, Carrick Lee had probably been just about exactly my height.
Chapter Seventeen
The stake out of the Church of the Shining Doorway began at 0652 hours, but Lisabeth wasn’t making notes. She was in the back of Armstrong, peering out of the rear window. From a distance she could have passed for one of those hideous nodding dogs that you used to see everywhere but have now been replaced by air fresheners in the shape of a fir tree.
She looked as if she had slept in her clothes, but I secretly believed she hadn’t slept at all. When she’d thumped on my flat door at 5.30 to tell me it would soon be dawn, I hadn’t argued. It was a relief to be able to stop dreaming about rats.
I had parked Armstrong so we could see the blue door of the house in John Brome Street. I could see it in the wing mirror, and by squirming her bulk around and kneeling on the back seat, Lisabeth could see it through the window. So far, the rescue plan was working perfectly. The only trouble was, that was all there was of the rescue plan.
‘Why don’t we just go and smash the door down?’ she asked after managing to keep quiet for all of five minutes.
‘What with?’ I asked, turning to look at her.
‘There’s a hammer and some tools on the floor here,’ she said deadpan.
‘Oh yeah, well ... let’s just wait, shall we? See if some of them come out. After all, we don’t even know how many people are in there. Stella said Connie likes them to go to work. Let some of them go.’
An hour went by and, to be fair, she hardly breathed a word. She just knelt there, clutching a hessian shoulder bag. I hadn’t asked what was in it. Suggesting she had brought along some lentil sandwiches or similar seemed frivolous, and she hadn’t moaned once that she was hungry. Perhaps it was clean underwear for Fenella, in which case she wouldn’t talk about it anyway.
‘There’s two of them,’ she said suddenly. ‘Girls.’
She was right. Two teenage girls, and they were hurrying as if late for the bus.
‘Shall I go and talk to them?’ Lisabeth said, without taking her eyes off them. ‘Ask them if they’ve seen Binky?’
‘No, leave it. We don’t want them running back into church, do we?’ I advised, and she accepted it, for now, but I wondered what length of fuse she was on.
I stared some more at the blue door with the cross I knew was there but couldn’t see at this distance. I felt like the Mexicans outside the Alamo, wondering just how many defenders there were in there. Stella had mentioned two males by name, Paul and Julian, and said there were up to seven women. I didn’t quite believe the last bit. The house here was bigger than the Islington one, but not big enough for those numbers. Maybe they took it in shifts.
At 8.15, two more girls and one of the young guys – the one who had given me a pamphlet – emerged. As they walked down towards Sloane Square, without giving us a second glance, they said something among themselves and started laughing.
I could almost hear Lisabeth bristling from the back. ‘Are they laughing about Fenella?’ she hissed.
‘We’re not even sure she’s in there. Relax, will you?’ I was beginning to wish I’d brought Springsteen along.
Then at 8.35 she just said: ‘It’s him. It’s him, isn’t it?’
Stella must have described him to her, as it was Connie. Tall, rangy, long, swept-back red hair, linen jacket, jeans and cowboy boots. He was holding a mobile phone and he was alone. He was just a tad too old to pass for a student but he could have been m
istaken for a graphic designer down on his luck.
‘Now what?’ Lisabeth whispered loudly in my ear. She had moved on to the rumble seat behind me to follow Connie’s walk down the road. She was still clutching the hessian shoulder bag to her chest.
‘We follow him,’ I said decisively. ‘I think he’s going for breakfast. Americans eat out a lot, you know. If he is, it’ll be just around the comer. If he’s not, at least he’s out of the way and we can come back and tackle the house.’
‘You want to have breakfast with him? I don’t believe it.’
But she followed me out of Armstrong and into the brasserie on Sloane Square like a faithful Labrador.
Connie was sitting at the table in the window. There was no-one else in the restaurant and only one waiter on duty. He had just placed a basket of croissants and a bowl of white butter in front of Connie when he saw us.
‘Just two cappuccinos,’ I said politely.
He nodded and waved a hand, saying ‘Sit anywhere’, and went behind the bar counter to nurse a steaming Gaggia machine. Connie never looked up. He put his mobile phone on the table and picked out a croissant and began to nibble the end.
I took hold of Lisabeth’s arm and guided her towards his table. She was still clutching her bag.
He looked at us just as we got to the table. He had blonde eyebrows, as many natural redheads do, and big, light blue eyes so bright I suspected coloured contact lenses. I felt Lisabeth stiffen under my grip.
‘Mind if we join you, Mr Smith?’ I asked.
He flicked his head so that his hair seemed to ripple back.
I knew women who did that to great effect.
‘It is Connie Smith, isn’t it? We’ve heard so much about you.’
He bit into his croissant, crumbs falling on to the white paper tablecloth.
