scruffiness. Nothing much to appeal to a five-year-old girl and an eight-year-old boy, either. There had been a cinema once, but it had closed down ages ago.
The billboards at the newsagent’s door were recycling old headlines, ROYALS BLOW IT AGAIN and OOPS, SAYS TORY MP. He went inside and studied the front page of the Independent. MI5’s new role caught his eye.
‘Not again,’ he muttered.
He bought the paper and stepped back out into the sunshine. His eye passed over the electrical goods in the shopfront next door, then scanned the estate agent’s, a gloomy little window filled with curling pictures of fading hopes, desperately straining to attract someone to pull them out of the pit of negative equity or divorce settlement. He paused as two elderly people blocked his path, struggling to drag a defective stepladder out of their car, and while he waited for them he watched the owner of the bicycle shop on the other side of the street setting up a rack of kiddies’ bikes on the footpath. Apologising profusely, the couple manoeuvred their burden through the door of a DIY shop, stumbling on the uneven pavement. The tree roots had done it, he noticed, and in odd places the council had pulled up the concrete paving slabs around the trunks and patched the footpath with tar. Scruffy.
His next destination lay beyond the unisex hair salon, with its improbably glamorous photographs of stunning heads of hair. Not quite a deli, Butler’s was a half-decent grocer’s shop with an interesting if unreliable range of goods.
‘Morning, Mr Butler.’ He nodded, pleased to have the shop to himself. ‘Fresh delivery of your steak and kidney pies this morning?’
‘I’m afraid they’ve let me down again, Mr Brock.’
‘That’s no good. You know I rely on your steak and kidney pies.’
The grocer shook his head sadly. ‘Not for much longer, Mr Brock.’
‘What?’
‘I’m packing it in. Had enough.’
‘You can’t do that. Are you ill?’
‘Not me, but the business is. Got a bad dose of the Sainsbury’s. You’ll have to get in your car and go down the Savacentre for your pies in future, same as everyone else.’
Brock scratched the crop of his short grey beard. He’d been coming here for years, since the days when it had been a butcher’s shop, with a frieze of brightly coloured tiles around the walls portraying the heads of animals-bulls, lambs, pigs, chickens-smiling cheerfully down on the customers engrossed in selecting prime cuts. He’d never tried the Sainsbury’s pies, but he was certain they wouldn’t be the same.
‘Well, I’m very sorry to hear that, Mr Butler, I really am. What’s going to take your place?’
‘A charity clothes place, so they tell me. Oxfam or some such.’
The shops petered out beyond Butler’s, their place taken by insurance offices and car showrooms crammed together. The Bishop’s Mitre sat brooding among them, a dour 1950s pub that no amount of half-timbering and geranium window boxes could cheer up. Brock looked at his watch. Good timing. He hadn’t had the chance of a relaxed weekend pub lunch in ages. Inside, in the gloom, an off-duty crew from the fire station further up the high street were having a quiet pint.
Brock stood at the bar and opened his paper to see what MI5 were up to now. Before he’d even ordered his ham sandwich and pint, the phone in his pocket started chirping. He recognised DS Bren Gurney’s voice.
‘I don’t think I need this, Bren.’
‘A sighting of North, chief. Sounds promising.’
‘Really?’ There had been a rumour, barely that, that Upper North was back in the country. The possibility killed his appetite.
‘You remember Pauline Lewins? The bank job in Ilford. One of the last ones he pulled before the big one in the City. Manager shot dead.’
‘Yes of course. I remember Pauline.’
‘Well, she works at Silvermeadow now.’
‘What’s that? A retirement village?’
‘Blimey, chief. Where’ve you been? It’s a bloody great shopping centre out in Essex, on the M25. Pauline reckons she saw North there this morning. I’ve been talking to her, and I reckon it’s a possible. If it is him, he seems to have changed his appearance a bit. She’s working on a portrait at the moment, and we’re going through the security tapes from the shop where she works.’
‘Where are you?’
‘K Division, the divisional station at Dagenham, Hornchurch Street. Know it?’
‘I’ll find it.’
‘It’s on the edge of a bloody great housing estate. Don’t go in there whatever you do. There’s a security access to the station off the high street. I’ll be at the gate.’
‘I’ll come right over. And Bren, let’s keep this as restricted as possible, eh? That includes the locals. The name North doesn’t get mentioned.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I thought. They’re up to their ears in their own problems anyway, from what I can gather. There’s a WPC who brought Pauline in. She knows what’s going on. I’ll have a quiet word with her.’
Brock followed Bren’s instructions to the AUTHORISED PERSONS ONLY rear entrance to the Hornchurch Street station, where he stopped and spoke into a speaker on the wall. The metal gate rolled up after a moment, and he drove through and down into a basement carpark where Bren was waiting for him. They went up to a room on the third floor where he recognised Pauline Lewins sitting with a uniformed woman whom Bren introduced as PC Sangster. Pauline smiled weakly in recognition at Brock, as one might at a surgeon whom one had fervently hoped never to see again. He sat and they talked quietly for a while.
She explained to him that she loved Cuddles, and he, noticing that she had put on some weight over the years, thought that she, plump, soft and friendly, was perfectly suited to a job in a soft-toy store. Despite her recent shock, she still had the warm, rather shy smile he remembered, made all the brighter, he noted, by new front teeth. In answer to his enquiry she explained that, although she still sometimes became weepy without any apparent reason, and remained a little self-conscious about the scar on her upper lip, her confidence and happy disposition had largely returned. And this was at least partly thanks to Cuddles, where she had learned to get behind a counter again and deal with strangers without dissolving into hysterics. Cuddles was a reassuring place, she told him, selling delightfully reassuring soft toys, and located in the safest and most reassuring heart of the largest shopping centre in the Home Counties. So when she heard that voice again, halfway through ringing up a pair of fluffy tiger cubs, she had just sort of seized up.
‘You remember the voice, Mr Brock?’
‘Oh yes, Pauline. I remember.’
And who wouldn’t seize up, he thought, hearing it again after all that time?
The first time she had heard it, four years ago, she had been working in a bank in Ilford. One morning she had opened up the front door for business as usual, and was immediately confronted by three men who pushed their way in, locking the door behind them and pulling masks over their faces. One of them took hold of her and rammed the muzzle of a gun into her mouth, so violently that it knocked out her front teeth and split her lip. Using her as a hostage, they had forced the other staff to hand over money and then lie flat on the floor. No one offered any resistance, but the robbers maintained a violent and aggressive manner, especially the one holding Pauline, who seemed to be the leader of the gang. He was very agitated and excited, screaming at the bank staff to try making trouble so that he could show them what he would do to them. His ranting terrified the staff and several of the women began to cry. Finally the branch manager-Fairbairn, Brock remembered-had felt obliged to try to calm the man down. He had looked up from his position on the floor and told the man to kindly stop shouting and be reasonable.
There was immediately a terrible silence. All the witnesses subsequently commented on it, as if this was a signal of some kind that the robbers recognised. The man holding Pauline went very still, then smiled down at the manager, withdrew the muzzle of his pistol from Pauline’s bleeding mouth, bent down, held it six inches from Fairbairn’s upturned face and pulled the trigger.
The three men then calmly walked away, locking the front door behind them. Because of the masks, the other staff weren’t able to identify the gunmen, but Pauline had had a clear view of their faces at the moment they had pushed in through the front door. She gave a particularly vivid description of the man who had held her, his wild unblinking grey eyes, the smooth pink skin on his left temple and cheek where it looked as if he had been burned,
