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
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
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.
She pulled gently on my jacket arm. ‘Don’t forget to count.’
I nodded, and groaned to myself. I hated the counting bit, but it had to be done. Eighty-eight was coming up. It was pebbledashed and had a solid white door. To the right of it was a single bare aluminium double-glazed window, a sealed unit with a smaller skylight at the top, which opened outwards. There was an identical unit on the floor above.
Three cars were parked more or less outside: a red Volvo, P reg; a green Toyota, C reg; and a black Fiesta whose plate I couldn’t see, but it had a VDM of two red go-faster stripes down the offside.
No immediate signs of life. The curtains were drawn behind nets. There was no smoke from the chimney, no milk outside, no post or newspaper sticking out of the mail-box, and both skylights were closed.
As we got closer I took Suzy’s hand and we crossed at an angle, not looking at the target, just meandering. The nearside of the Fiesta had stripes too. A couple of small house fronts later, we were passing the door. There was no noise, no light, nothing. The windows were grimy, the net curtains knackered. The window lock was a simple handle. The door paint was peeling, and the lock was just a dull brass Chubb lever with an ancient B&Q-type imitation brass handle above it – though who was to say there weren’t a couple of dead bolts thrown on the other side?
We passed the door and I started to count. One, two, three . . . each house we passed, I pressed one of my
