Dark Winter (23 page)

She took her eyes off the road for a second and turned to look at me through her light blue sunglasses.

‘The train goes direct from there to Liverpool Street and King’s Cross. Good stand-off location, considering the state of alert around the City.’

‘So they’d rig everything up in King’s Lynn, take the train to King’s Cross, and start sprinkling – maybe even splash some about on the way?’ Suzy indicated to overtake a truck. ‘But wouldn’t a few Malaysians, Chinese or whatever stick out up there?’

What did I know? ‘There are some docks up there, and one or two takeaways. Fuck-face better be right.’

We left the motorway and began to drive through the flat, boring fields of Cambridgeshire. I got the blister pack out of my jeans and threw two more capsules down my neck mixed with by now very warm Coke, then waved it at Suzy.

She shook her head. ‘Had some before picking you up. Listen, maybe Fuck-face knows the ASU, maybe he’s taken the train up – that’s why he’s staying in St Chad’s? Whatever – if he’s right, we get this done quick, you get to sort your shit out, and I get to be in the cadre, know what I mean?’

She nodded away as I pushed the antibiotics into my back pocket, then obviously decided it was time to get off the subject of Fuck-face. ‘So what’s her name, then? How old is she?’

Ignoring the question, I got myself comfortable, but she wasn’t giving up. ‘Come on, I know you want to tell me. Besides, we may not see each other after tomorrow if Fuck-face is right, eh?’ She turned back to the road and gave me some space.

‘Kelly . . . Her name is Kelly, and she’s fourteen.’

‘She’s not your daughter?’

‘No, I sort of look after her.’

‘She could have worse, I suppose.’

A sign whizzed past – ‘King’s Lynn 42’ – and what seemed like twenty miles later another said, ‘38’. The road was elevated in places and there were dykes either side, waterways draining the fenland, and miles and miles of jet-black earth growing spuds or carrots or whatever.

‘So, foster-dad, step-parent, whatever you are, what’s it like having to look after someone else?’

‘It’s all right.’

‘That your great insight to parenthood, is it – all right?’

I pushed the seat back so I could stretch my legs. ‘Here’s what I reckon.’ I turned to face her. ‘First off we buy a town map, find out where this place is, then get into the town and have a look, yeah? What time does it get dark?’

Before she could answer, the moan-phone rang. I passed it across. ‘Here. I’m an arsewipe-free zone, remember?’

She hit the keys and put it to her ear. ‘Hello? Yes, sir, I’m on secure.’ She looked at me and rolled her eyes. He wouldn’t have been able to talk to her if she wasn’t. There was a pause. ‘Oh, no, he’s driving, sir.’ She nodded in response to whatever was being said, then looked at me, her face very serious. ‘Yes, sir, I will.’

Pressing the off-key with her thumb, she passed the phone back to me. ‘The address has been flagged up for two years with Immigration and local plod.’

‘Is he doing anything about it – you know, unflagging it?’

She shook her head. ‘Nope – deniable, remember, Norfolk boy.’

‘Fucking idiot.’

She nodded slowly. ‘Are you ever going to tell me what you’ve got against him?’

We were just coming into the outskirts of King’s Lynn and Suzy pulled into a BP station. You always start an op with a full tank, and in any case we needed the town maps.

As I walked back across the forecourt looking at the folded-out map I could already feel the breeze off the North Sea. King’s Lynn was at the bottom right-hand corner of the Wash. The Great Ouse ran through it, which was presumably how the boats made it into the docks.

We crossed a ring-road lined with DIY, furniture and electrical superstores with a few burger franchises thrown in, and as we followed signs for the town centre things began to change for the worse. It was a sad mix of 1970s concrete and hundred-year-old red-brick housing. The whole place looked as if it needed a massive dig-out and a coat of paint. Quite a few of the shops were boarded up. We passed a huge open-air car parking lot alongside a drab grey concrete shopping precinct, then a few crumbling, peeling Georgian houses.

Suzy was looking as pissed off as I was, screwing up her face and shaking her head, chewing even faster on her nicotine gum as we passed a group of three teenage mums with prams and badly dyed blonde hair.

We kept on the main artery coming out of town towards the bypass. I checked the map. We weren’t far away from Sir Lewis Street now. Huge fuel-storage tanks and industrial pipework started to come up on our left, half painted, half rusting. ‘We need Loke Road – on our right.’

We both saw it. We were just short of the dock entrance as we turned right off the main, alongside a vast area of wasteground. ‘Sir Lewis coming up, over a stream and first left.’

Suzy looked even more depressed as we made our way behind the back yards of Sir Lewis, row upon row of two-up, two-down red-brick terraced houses straight out of
Coronation Street
.

We continued past the target road and Suzy was still complaining: ‘It’s so fucking soulless.’

As I looked down the narrow alleyways that punctuated the terraces I could see washing in almost every yard, and bin liners spewing out their crap on to the street. Somebody in the sixties had made a fortune convincing the residents to shell out on stone cladding and pebbledash. There were plenty of tired for-sale signs stuck to the fronts of houses, along with the obligatory Sky dish, and none of the cars parked on either side of the narrow road seemed to have a registration plate higher than J.

We passed a local store, a handpainted sign for a hairdresser’s, and a pub. Then, within a minute or so, we were surrounded by 1950s council houses and low-level flats. We turned right, towards the railway station.

‘Let’s park up there and come back to do a walk past.’ If you park in a residential area, people expect you to go into a house nearby.

The road signs ran out but we eventually found the station, an old Victorian brick and glass building, with a brand new Morrisons superstore next to it and a Matalan clothes shop. Suzy turned into the Morrisons car park and we sat studying the map to get our bearings.

30

‘It’s an old map.’ I ringed Morrisons. ‘But that’s where we are now, in that open ground. The target is maybe ten minutes’ walk north.’

Sir Lewis Street was part of a six-block grid of terraced houses lying along three roads, each about 250 metres long and parallel to each other, cut across the middle by Walker Street. It backed on to the stream, and was a little longer than the other two. The wasteground stretched all the way from the stream to the main.

Suzy pulled a face. ‘How can anyone survive here? I fucking hate these places.’

I shrugged. ‘People don’t always have a choice, do they?’

We worked out a strategy for the walk-past, not knowing exactly where the target house would be. According to the map, the top of the road was a dead end.

Suzy ripped the corner off and furled it into a pointer. ‘If we walk down Loke, back to the shops we just drove past, and take a right down one of the alleyways, we should be able to work our way down to the dead end of Sir Lewis. If we can get on to it, we can then walk the whole length of the street back towards Loke.’

‘Done. OK, the story is we’re here for a few days’ holiday. We were just taking a walk, we got lost and we’re looking for the station.’

Suzy locked up, double-checking all the doors and making sure the kit in the boot was out of sight.

The parking lot was swarming with cars and trolleys. Suzy and I walked side by side, heading for a gap that led into the housing estate. Suzy slipped her arm through mine and chatted happily about the make and colour of each car we passed. Anything to look natural from a distance as we wormed our way through.

People had made efforts to stamp their individuality on their council houses, and that seemed to piss her off even more. Some had stone lions mounted on their gateposts, gnomes sitting on the front doorstep or fishing beside little ponds; others had bird-boxes with windmills. The smartest had carports. Suzy particularly admired some loose half-bricks in the wall next to a telephone pole. ‘That’ll be the DLB [dead letter box], yeah?’

I nodded as we hit Loke and turned left, going back the way we’d driven, past all the
Corrie
two-up-and-two-downs. A stone panel set into one of the walls said ‘1892’, which must have been the last time anyone had had the decorators in. Through net curtains I could see patterned brown carpets and brass dogs sitting on tiled fireplaces.

Suzy hadn’t cheered up much. ‘I really hate this.’

‘What’s the matter? Don’t you like Norfolk?’

‘I ran off to sea to get out of a shit-hole like this. Look at it, it’s like fucking West Belfast on a bad day. Give me Bluewater and my new conservatory any time.’

I looked around, knowing exactly what she meant – apart from the Bluewater bit.

We carried on down Loke, passing the first two roads that paralleled Sir Lewis. A twentysomething Chinese guy came out of a corner shop with a newspaper under his arm and his finger in the ringpull of a Coke. He knocked back a mouthful, jumped into an old red Lada and drove away from the target road.

Suzy looked up and smiled at me lovingly. ‘D958?’

I nodded, not that we needed to remember the plate. There couldn’t be that many old red Ladas left on the planet.

I took a deep breath. ‘My shit-hole was a council estate. They all smell the same, don’t they?’

She shuddered. ‘Coal fires and boiled cabbage. Hate it, hate it, hate it.’ As if I didn’t know by now.

Sir Lewis was the next junction right. ‘Down that alley?’

We crossed the road arm in arm, turning down the narrow passage a little short of the target road. We could just fit side by side, the backs of the Sir Lewis Street houses on our left. The yards were tiny and washing hung from lines at second-floor level to catch a bit of wind. Old grey vests and very faded blue jeans seemed to be the fashion statement of the week.

Cats or urban foxes had got stuck into the bin-bags, scattering frozen food packets and the contents of hundreds of ashtrays. There was a smell of damp clothes mixed with something like stale tea coming from one of the kitchen windows, and somewhere upstairs a toilet had just been flushed. Some of the yards had doors backing on to the alley, others had been kicked in or rotted away. The houses themselves were just little brick squares.

Walker Street cut across us about forty metres ahead. I could hear TVs in some of the houses, and here and there a dog barked behind a crumbling wall.

We started across Walker, and tried to make out the door numbers on Sir Lewis to our left, but couldn’t see any from this distance.

A little half-moon footbridge spanned the stream and led into the vast, bulldozed area of mud, rubbish and heavy plant tracks that ran for about a hundred metres up to the main drag. Beyond that was the fenceline of the docks, where cranes and fuel-storage tanks daubed with the Q8 logo cut the skyline. Hundreds of new joist-sized planks jutted over the fence; someone like Jewsons must have had a bit of a warehouse there. The whole area of the docks was dominated by a huge white rectangular concrete structure. It had no windows, so was presumably some kind of storage facility.

A group of kids came out of Sir Lewis and bumbled up Walker towards us. They all had crewcuts and holes in their trainers, flicked their cigarettes continuously with their thumbs and couldn’t stop gobbing on to the pavement. We headed down the continuation of the alleyway, splitting up to get past two abandoned Morrisons’ trolleys.

The walk-past would entail far more than just finding the target door. We’d have to take in as much information as possible, because we wouldn’t be doing it again. Once we’d walked past the target, the area would be a no-go for us until we went back in to attack the place. We wouldn’t even turn and look back: lessons learnt the hard way about third-party awareness ensured that wouldn’t happen. Quite apart from curtain-twitchers, we had to assume the ASU had people on stag, looking from windows, or out and about on the street.

Something dawned on me. ‘How do you do a walk-past together? I’ve never done a two-up.’

She seemed quite pleased there was something I didn’t know. ‘Easy. Don’t try to divide up the information. Just do it as if you were on your own. Then we argue later about what we saw.’

We were reaching the end of the alleyway and there was a way out on to Sir Lewis. To our left was
Corrie
-land, to our right, council bungalows and houses that went on for maybe a hundred and fifty before coming to a dead end. We stayed on the opposite side of the road to keep a better perspective on the target, and therefore more time with eyes on, more time to get the information into our heads. We looked at everything, even if it felt as if it wasn’t registering: the unconscious is a total sponge and we could extract stored information from each other.

The first number on the opposite side of the road was 136. That was good: it meant we were at the heavy half of the road. A car drove away ahead of us, scaring a couple of manky old cats.