on the road to want to be distracted by anyone just now. Without a shared word on the path they each knew they must follow, he now pointed the sure-footed auto down suburban avenues and into town streets, the route at last diverting from that they had arrived by.
At one point she gasped, to the effect that a blue flash had been glimpsed turning up ahead.
‘How is he going so fast?’ asked Grey, her animal yelp jolting him from his concentration.
‘Are you joking? It goes like a bomb, just so long as you never need to break.’
‘Lord help us. I’m slowing down anyway, now we know where he’s going.’ For they were nearing the plant and so there seemed little doubt now.
As he lifted slightly off the pedal so a wave of tiredness hit him. He opened the window a little and was glad of the blast of cool air. The conviction came and stayed that this case would be over soon, he knew that now.
‘Sorry?’ she asked, for he had been murmuring.
‘Oh, nothing.’
‘Well anyway, I think we’re nearly there now.’
They left behind the rows of houses old and new, those streets of bus shelters and lamppost and dog walkers that could be anywhere in England, to pass instead what looked like playing fields ringed with eight-foot wire fencing. These open spaces though were interspersed with stripped concrete, the grass in-between dotted with odd-shaped buildings and constructions, and the whole wide expanse stretching back behind its fence as far as they could see.
Past the entrance of the airfield, for all its size still only a part of what it had been in the War, began the trickle of tired huts and patched-up hangars which made up the oldest, lowest earning corner of the industrial park. The roads themselves changed too at this point: from rain-glistened tarmac to beige concrete slabs that gave a railway-like ker-chunk, ker-chunk sensation as they drove across the seams.
The men outside Aubrey Electricals were visible some way away, and so numerous that any hope the forces controlling the site had had of containing the protest within the pavement had evidently proved untenable. A green-overalled swarm filled the whole road, and as long along it, at least in Grey’s direction, as to block the gates of several other facilities. As he slowed, Grey saw that between the other two arms of the T-junction Aubrey’s faced traffic still flowed; which while a danger in itself, served to push the crowd this way. Included in the blockage were the entrance and exit gates of their neighbouring haulage company; a representative of which approached the car.
The man began,
‘You won’t get through this way, mate. I reckon the traffic’s moving them toward us. I’ve never seen so many blokes out. Look at them all — it’s like Villa Park on a match day! I hope our lot don’t go out in sympathy. If you back up, and keep hanging left, you’ll come out nearer the gates. Though if I were you, I wouldn’t even try!’
‘Thank you,’ offered Grey, as the man, guessing they were police, continued, ‘And do us a favour will you, get them out from in front of our doorway? I’m sorry for them,’ he said, Grey noting the sympathy in his voice, ‘but if we don’t start getting some of these lorries out, we’ll be going under too.’
Grey promised to do all he could, as urged on by Isobel followed the man’s directions. They led down backstreets and service roads each as short and unremarkable as each other. They passed one small works with not a window all along its one side. ‘What a place to spend your days,’ he said. Around the corner sparks flew from a foundry’s open door. But for a lorry waiting for the haulage company gates to clear, they saw no other traffic.
Soon they were nosing out onto the main road, this new vantage point offering a clearer view of the crowd scene and the police operation in progress.
With intermittent traffic still passing through at least a part of the T-junction, the activity at the front of the building was contained in this direction. What that part of the protest not forced along the minor road lacked in breadth though, it made up for in concentration. Though not yet confrontation, for however volatile and voluble were the figures in green, there seemed to have been no engagement with those fewer figures present in black.
‘No cars parked out front of the building today,’ noted Grey.
‘Wuthertons aren’t daft,’ Isobel replied. ‘And look, they’ve closed the big doors.’
The Aubrey’s office building acted as a gatehouse, traffic passing through its archway to the courtyard and factory beyond. Grey had never seen the great wooden doors shut up in daytime though, and it felt very wrong to see them so.
Grey paused before tackling the straight, short run to the besieged entrance, gathering his wits before pushing at the green membrane through which they would have to squeeze to gain entry.
‘Has he already gone through then?’ asked Isobel as they waited, her question answered when across their path appeared the large blue car, it moving slowly on toward the jostling, singing mass if men.
‘He must have come a different route,’ she said.
‘This is going to be worth watching,’ muttered Grey, as he put all thoughts of heading that way himself on pause to see how this attempt panned out.
However foresightful it may have been of the administrators to untether and lock the great gates, and though it aided the police in keeping the men out of the plant, it did mean that those officers called in to keep order found themselves pushed back against an unforgiving wall of brick and timber, offering no easy escape route.
Constable Chohan, chief amongst those men and women had, in stationing himself before the closed arch doors, placed himself at the heart of the commotion. The logic of the disturbance defeated him: of course the men felt cheated, of course they wanted the money they were owed; but all they really wanted was to be allowed to come in and keep working for the firm they loved and which they knew to be in trouble. That they were only held back from doing so by some bureaucracy over an insurance certificate added to the absurdity; and left Ravi thinking those in charge at the plant were acting as their own worst enemy.
Such thoughts were quickly put aside though, as a vehicle turned off the main road and approach the crowd. Yet even as his hand moved for his radio to alert his officers, he saw the protesters part like the Red Sea before him; and so it felt only decent and proper to honour the truce, by lowering his guard and banging on the doors for them to be opened for this impressive vehicle to pass.
‘They still remember him,’ said Isobel in awe as she and Grey watched. No sooner was the big car let through, than the police had but a moment’s grace during which to get the heavy doors shut again; while the men, who had stood in near silence during the pause, resumed their vocal and collective request to gain admission to the building.
‘Dad loved working for him,’ she added. ‘He said he was the best boss he’d ever had. Even after everything… Anyway, come on!’
It would later cross the Inspector’s mind that he could have stopped the big car there and then, and avoided having to enter the plant all together, for it was only its driver that he wished to speak to; but so processional was its passing, so stately its entrance, that he had a strong intuition that any attempt to have interrupted simply wouldn’t have ended well.
Chapter 32 — Crossing the Threshold
Lost in the moment, Grey gunned the car in first to the fringe of the crowd and the spot where the Jaguar had first caught people’s attention; yet where the men had greeted Grey’s predecessor with respect, not only did they this time refuse to part, but as he nudged the car through them it became surrounded. It was as though the protestors treated this second invasion of their patch of ground as an affront — an offence for which Cornelia’s car was punished with a hastily constructed placard banged on the bonnet, and done so with a force that left the manufacturer’s badge cracked and a line scratched diagonally across the hood. There was even one wholly inappropriate shout of, ‘Scab!’
‘This isn’t a picket,’ Grey moaned, ‘we all want to get in!’
‘Well, why don’t you get out and explain that to them?’ was Isobel’s unhelpful reply. He did try to, just managing to get the door open enough to stand,
‘Get the doors open!’ he called to the officers acting sentry,
