Never Back Down

by Solomon Carter

  “Jess, run!”

  The motorbike hurtled towards them as they crossed the middle of the white lines dividing the lanes. The bike was upon them in an instant and still too fast to be safe. Eva ran with a burst of pace and energy, dragging the less fit Jess behind her with strength and adrenaline. The motorbike cut the air behind Jess with a gust, and thrust on towards the next mini roundabout just metres down the road. The rider turned and barely made the corner; he needed to have been an experienced rider just to have survived the aggressive turn he just performed.

  “What the hell was that?” said Jess.

  “Either that was the fastest courier I’ve ever seen, or that man was trying to kill us,” said Eva, thinking it through as she looked on up the road. She could not see the onward straight road beyond the roundabout, but could hear the diminishing whine of the speeding motorbike.

  “Do they know we’re here?” asked Jess.

  Eva thought about lying, and then changed her mind. “It’s possible,” was about as honest as she could get.

  “Right! Let’s get on with this, then.”

  Jess now walked in a brisk diagonal towards the vast white hangar – not towards its gleaming atrium main entrance, but toward the discreet doors usually sited at the back and side of such buildings. Eva followed, listening to the motorbike sound carrying in the stifling air. She didn’t like the fact she could still hear it. She didn’t like it at all.

  Neither did the man in the Toyota Hi Lux.

  Neither did his boss when he got the call about it. Grudgingly, Brian Gillespie soon conceded that it still didn’t matter too much how this played out. The women were only a wild card. For now it was just a game, a show to watch. Which was the kind of thing a man said to himself when he didn’t want to get upset if he lost. And at the same time, any man knew these words were empty. Gillespie was a sick kind of villain, his enemies and the police knew enough to tell anyone that, but he liked his sport, and he admired the underdog. And these two crazy bitches were about as underdog as anyone was ever going to get.

  The side door was open on the latch. Not a good idea, and the lectern-come-desk inside by the doorway was empty too, suggesting a security man had abandoned his post to go to the toilet. There was a sign-in pad on the desk with some tear off strips for visitors to fold into badges and wear with a lanyard. Eva ripped off two quickly, snatched up two lanyards and then hurried past a wide stairwell and took a left, following a sign to the ladies toilets. Once inside, each woman took a cubicle and scribbled out a name and a company on the ID and threw the lanyard around their neck. Eva took out a diary and pen from her bag to pose as some kind of executive. Jess would be her PA. They took a breath then made their way past the lectern, which was now manned by a tall African man with his back to them. They walked directly towards the main reception to ask a few questions or see if there was a map of the site. The reception was housed in a wide airy atrium just inside the front door. A woman with her hair tied tightly back sat behind a vast desk. She had so much product on her head her hair looked sculpted from play-doh. The phone rang, but it seemed to be answered elsewhere.

  “Hello there,” said Eva. The woman with the product said nothing, just waited with a fixed unpleasant smile and unforgiving blue eyes as fixed as her hair.

  “We are looking to speak to your facilities manager. I did have his name, but I’ve had such a shocking morning that I haven’t brought it with me. And my PA is being a complete ditz, aren’t you, Jenny?” Nasty boss, a role most employees could relate to.

  Jess did great. She looked pissed off and seemed to blush, but she nodded in acquiescence too.

  “Right. You want to see Kevin Walsh?”

  “Yeah, that’s him, absolutely,” said Jess with just a little too much enthusiasm.

  “This one hasn’t been with me long,” Eva explained with a condescending air.

  “I’ll get him for you. Who shall I say is here?”

  “It’s regarding your air-conditioning service contract.”

  “And your name?”

  “Sadie Gordon.” The same name she had written on the lanyard badge. The clock above the reception said 11:24am. The day was ebbing by. Surely Dan would live today. Marka was slow and cruel. Surely they had at least today.

  The receptionist called Kevin Walsh, and surprisingly, there was no question and answer session about their unexpected visit. Eva glanced around, looking for a sign of the man who tried to mow them down. Nothing. So far so good – she hoped. There was also the possibility Walsh and others were quite keen to meet these two women. There was no way to know or prevent any harm if they knew what Eva and Jess were up to.

  Kevin Walsh appeared from a room out the back of reception. He was tall with spiky hair, somewhere in the region of forty, and had a big kipper tie on with a serious set of stripes. He gave them his standard issue business smile then a still wider smile when he noticed these women were prettier than his usual visitors. Eva and Jess reciprocated with smiles as wide as the Thames.

  “Hello, Mrs Gordon?”

  “Miss, actually. Call me Sadie.”

  “Right. Good to meet you. You may as well come back here to my office and we can talk. It’s noisy out here with all the ringing telephones.”

  Sure it is, thought Jess, eyeing Walsh’s grin. A lone phone rang, then rang off.

  They went to Mr Walsh’s private room, an untidy office with lots of plans on the wall along with a coloured project management GANNT chart full of coloured stripes and dates. Immediately, Jess began to scan the plans for the layout of the building while Eva watched the man, smiled appropriately and waited for him to talk. Walsh smiled and stared with a sparkle in his eye like a little boy on Christmas morning.

  “So, Miss Gordon - Sadie. How can I help you?”

  Sadie Gordon was a confident lady indeed. While Kevin Walsh lounged back and folded his arms behind his head, Sadie nodded to request a seat on the edge of a desk and Walsh nodded back. Sitting on the desk opposite Walsh allowed the hem of Eva’s skirt to rise just a few millimetres putting her knees at the centre of an alluring picture just in front of Walsh’s face.

  “Okay. Here it is. Let me be really honest with you, Mr Walsh.”

  “Call me Kevin.”

  “I didn’t come here today about your air-conditioning service.”

  “No? You don’t look like our usual repair team, I must say.”

  “We are here to offer you the most cost effective air-conditioning system on the market today.”

  “Really? You are sales people?”

  “More like consultants.”

  “Well, I think I could spare a little time to listen to your pitch. I’m not saying we’ll buy anything. Not yet.”

  “Let’s see if I can persuade you of the facts, Kevin.”

  From this moment, Eva began to freewheel in the kind of technical jargon people could only make up when under pressure. For improvisation, she was daring, and at times almost ridiculous, receiving curious checking glances from her PA.

  Eva asked if he knew about the terms of the buildings current air-con system, and how it was laid out. Soon, the man got out services plan to show them how their system worked and where it was laid out. As Walsh talked and tinkered through the hanging files of a filing cabinet, Jess took two snaps of a floor plan on her Smartphone. When the man was sufficiently rapt- looking attentively into the eyes of Sadie Gordon, air-conditioning sales consultant extraordinaire, Jess took another picture of the services plan.

  “Miss Gordon ,we’ve got another meeting, in 30 minutes,” said Jess, doing her best subservient bit.

  “Oh, Jeez. Is that the time already?”

  Walsh looked at Jess with frustration all over his face. He was getting somewhere with this Sadie girl, he just knew it. Jess let out the smallest smile, and Walsh didn’t look pleased.

  “Well, you didn’t sell me on anything today, ladies. Not on the air-con anyway.”

  “Can we book in and see you again
?”

  “Absolutely, Sadie. I tell you what, next time bring me your brochure and talk me through the range and how it works. How about that?”

  “Sounds great, Kevin. I’ll call ahead next time.”

  “No problem. Make sure you book me in.”

  Twenty minutes of strenuous flirting while talking about air-conditioning had taken its toll on Eva. Her head felt light and empty, but at least they had the building plans. Eva said Kevin should not see them out as they were going to the ladies room before departure. They waved a grinning Kevin Walsh off as they approached the toilets, and then walked past them through a set of red double doors under a stairway. The hunt was on.

  At the back entrance, a tall man wearing motorcycle leathers nodded at the security guard by the lectern. The guard nodded back. The man did not sign in. He left his helmet at the desk without saying a word or receiving a reply, and walked down the corridor, pausing to look through the porthole windows of the two red doors. He couldn’t see anyone that way- the two women had already turned a corner into another part of the building beforehand. Fate had bought them just a little more time.

  A moment after the man in bike leathers entered the building, the back door opened again and a wide figure in a suit filled the door frame. The security guard shifted and stood taller.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  “No, you can’t,” was all the man said. The security man noticed that there was an Irish lilt in his voice and a tattoo like a crop circle peering over his tall white shirt collar. The security man was gone, and so had the man with the tattoo.

  White Star Gazette’s main purpose was transport and logistics. The Dagenham distribution centre was teeming with machinery, forklift trucks, men in bright orange and white uniforms hurrying about between vast bays of boxed merchandise and stacks of mechanical packages swathed in plastic wrapping. Eva guessed that most of this operation would be legal, but as it belonged to the notorious Marka, a percentage of this still had to be a hard drugs operation. As they passed a row of windows looking into the inside of the warehouse, Eva reckoned that if just half of one per cent of what they saw was contraband, the place could supply half of the junkies in the South East. But drugs and crime wasn’t Eva’s game today. They moved on looking at Jess’s mobile, her fingers pinching the image of the floor plans wider to enlarge them on the screen. “There’s no basement as such, but it looks to me that there is a canteen and some storage rooms, and a depot with a delivery area by the back wall – there are some store rooms over there. The offices upstairs could house him too.”

  “Could be, but for some reason I don’t think they would risk letting any of these staff know about it. One of them could, perhaps two, but only them. If I’m right, it would rule out the offices upstairs. These people have no need to know about Marka’s criminal hobbies. It could only harm him if they knew. I think we need to check the most discreet spaces we can find in this building.”

  “Discreet? There are some spaces which look like small rooms over in that area. It looks like a lift shaft. What about the lorry ports – the delivery depots?”

  “No. I don’t think so. Too busy again. Look at those places back there.”

  They leaned close to the window and peered down the lanes of activity towards the vast green doorways at the back. Light poured into the cavities beyond them, while another was filled with the gaping dark mouth of a truck waiting to be filled. “They are no good.”

  “So, on this floor it’s the utility cupboard and maybe this engineering room space near the lift shaft.”

  “It’s the utility room. They wouldn’t keep him in an easy-access cupboard with all these staff round. This doesn’t feel right. I don’t like it. We got attacked by the biker too.”

  “It could have been a coincidence. He might just have been another arsehole. There are a lot of those about.”

  “Could be, but it wasn’t that. I don’t believe in coincidences, remember. I thought we were getting closer. If the biker was meant to get us, that’s bad for us because they knew we were coming – which is bad for Dan too. We might be wasting our time and be in a trap here. It’s too late to back out now. We have to check this place.”

  Jess moved down the corridor until they found a space with staff lockers, a sweet vending machine and a drinks dispenser. Further on were a set of information boards containing the usual staff bulletins with a roster of names and photographs. Jess pushed on towards the end of the corridor. “Through here. The lift at the back of a warehouse like this is for moving stock as well as people.”

  They came to a set of double doors, the old school hospital variety – the kind which were floppy and overlapped and easy to push open. They walked out into a vast echoing stadium of noise, beeps, rumble, growl and hubbub with more than two hundred people operating banks of machines, engines, forklifts and vehicles at the edge of the building. People in uniform sped past without paying them any attention, and a few were in vehicles like Golf buggies. The scene reminded Jess of the activity of the Death Star in Star Wars – a colossal space full of futuristic activity.

  Not far beyond them were six ultra-tall units full of cumbersome packages. The units were tall enough to dwarf a terrace of town houses, but in this place they barely reached the ceiling. The brushed steel edifice of a lift shaft shyly gleamed at the end of one of these terraces.

  “Over there,” shouted Eva, over the noise.

  They moved quickly, but they were spotted. A man in a high-vis coat, and hard hat now came towards them. He held up his hand flatly in the traditional police stop sign and Eva paused, her mind of whir of plausible stories to cover their presence.

  “When you people come down here, you’ve gotta wear the high-vis gear, understood? How many times do we have to say it?”

  “Sorry,” said Eva.

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it. Next time I see you down here like this, I’ll report you to Carl Davies. Clear?”

  “Crystal.” Carl Davies – she’d seen the name among the photographs and corporate nonsense on the bulletin board. Carl Davies. Scary. Whatever.

  “Put them on then!”

  “Where?”

  “There, for God’s sake! Over there,” he pointed to another line of lockers and a row of grubby looking high-vis jackets hanging behind them in a line on the wall. Eva and Jess shared a quick look and moved away to put them on while the job’s-worth eyed them before walking away shaking his head. They took a hat each and then got on their way, happily darting through the gaps between moving buggies and people, down the aisle which led to the metal lift shaft.

  Back in the corridor at the window which overlooked the whole operation, they could not see the man in biker leathers standing at the glass. He saw all the high-vis jackets, the busyness, the gigantic shelves, forklift trucks and shook his head with a tut. Twenty feet back in the corridor behind the biker, standing behind a fire door, the man with the tattooed neck stood peering through; alternating his gaze between the busy warehouse and the man in leathers. He waited until the biker moved on and then followed, maintaining his distance all the way.

  The lift shaft had the widest door Eva had ever seen. It was of the concertina type which folded away to one side, but this door was so wide and high that she imagined it could contain two pallets stacked on top of one another, hold two across and four deep. It was larger than many of her client’s offices and rivalled her own floor space. The lift was empty with no one guarding it. Eva checked one side and then the other, finding an unmarked door set into a wall at the back of the lift shaft. She opened it. It was dark inside. This felt like the ideal room to keep a prisoner, but not quite perfect. This space was not secure. An automatic light blinked twice and flashed on, illuminating a small space with more doors at the rear. The doors had locks, and they looked industrial strength.

  The biker knew what the ladies were looking for, who they were, and that they were in the wrong part of town. Dagenham was barely London at all, more like the edge of Ess
ex. The captive was safely hidden away. The courier walked along the corridor, considering the office units upstairs and the fact he hadn’t seen the women in the depot. He took a right through some doors into a corridor leading to the stairwell. Twelve seconds later, the big man stood at the point where the biker had just been before he turned out of the corridor. He paused and looked again out into the massive warehouse at the steel tower which housed the lift shaft. He saw men and women out there in their high-vis jackets and hats, and he remembered the two women he’d seen who hadn’t seemed at all important a moment before. And then he noticed the steel toed safety boots the staff were wearing, every single one of them, including the important looking ones. The two women – had they been wearing safety shoes? He couldn’t remember, but his gut feeling, the imprint of the memory, told him they hadn’t. The man smiled and walked towards the plastic swish doors out into the cacophony of business beyond. Terry one, courier nil. He looked about quickly and saw the wall full of dirty high-vis coats, moved towards them and grabbed one, topping the look with a plastic hat. He was good to go.