Quickly he dialled the number he’d copied down on his hand. He expected to be given the run-around, but Detective Whitehouse – who turned out to be a woman, and whom he’d clearly woken – listened to his ramblings without interruption. Not pausing to draw breath he told her how Helen’s mother had died, mentioned the company she worked for, as well as the hit-and-run.
‘I think my father might be involved, at least with the hit-and-run.’ A sick feeling churned in the pit of his stomach as he said it, knowing that he might just have condemned his own dad. ‘I’ve been tracking her phone, and the GPS coordinates show that she’s at his warehouse. I’m on my way there now,’ he added.
‘Whatever happens, you stay outside. Got it? We will be there.’ All sleepiness had gone from her voice now, and Jason heard the jangling of keys. Then she hung up.
Warehouse 14 was on an industrial estate backing onto an elevated over-ground railway near a postal sorting office and a large fruit and veg market. Behind loomed Battersea Power Station, its four chimneys bone-yellow against the sky as if a giant animal had keeled over and died.
The warehouse was a modest storage facility at the end of a row of identical buildings, with a sectional door designed to fold to one side when open, and square windows at the top, too high to look inside.
The place bore signs of not having been used in a while. Disintegrating cardboard boxes and crates were stacked in front of the door, and the air smelt rotten. Something dark and nimble scurried among the boxes, and the shiny black button eyes of a rat stared back at them before it scuttled away.
Helen picked up a ball of shredded packaging from the ground. It was fresh and springy, so someone must have been here recently.
‘Let’s hide behind those bins over there,’ she said to Charlie, and both of them ducked instinctively as her words echoed back from the empty buildings.
The road ended in a wire fence behind the warehouse and was sparsely lit by sodium yellow street lamps. They hid behind a row of bins. Here the smell was stronger, coming from a woollen blanket which reeked of wet dog. A tramp’s hidey-hole perhaps.
Time ticked away slowly. It was uncomfortable to crouch down, but neither of them fancied sitting on the ground which was even more disgusting than the blanket. They didn’t speak, and in the silence the realisation stole over Helen that coming here was a bad idea.
What if they had misunderstood the e-mail, and it wasn’t happening tonight? What if delivery had been arranged for another place? What if they were caught? The thought made her shiver.
The drone of a van, like a purring tiger, was almost a relief. It swung around the corner, then headed straight for where they were hiding. For one long moment Helen feared the driver was going to ram into them, but then the van stopped and reversed towards the warehouse. As it reversed, she noticed a Bulgarian country sticker on the bumper.
Three men climbed out. One unlocked the back of the van, the other the warehouse. The door rattled back, and the whir from the automatic opening mechanism drowned out what the men were saying to each other.
They all seemed to have dark hair with an olive-skinned complexion – although it was difficult to tell in the yellow light – and wore trousers and short black leather jackets. One of them also wore a tunic over his trousers which reached to his knees. Indians, she thought, or maybe Middle Eastern.
The men unloaded a large crate about five feet high and wheeled it inside the warehouse on a sack barrow. A few minutes later they returned and unloaded another crate the same size. After another half hour of unloading a few other boxes from the van, and a lot of what sounded like swearing, the men locked the warehouse and drove off.
She and Charlie waited a while to make sure they were gone, then slipped out from behind the stinking bins. The men had put the rotting cardboard boxes back where they lay before, and the only evidence that anyone had been here was a few more scatterings of packaging material.
‘How do we get in?’ Helen asked.
‘There’s got to be another door, or a window somewhere. Let’s go round the back.’
Charlie was right. Helen tried the glass-panel door, but it was securely locked. So were the two casement windows.
‘Bugger,’ she muttered, although she’d expected it.
‘There’s gotta be a way,’ said Charlie, and went around the side to check for windows higher up.
Impatience got the better of Helen. She stepped back and rammed a Doc-Martens-clad foot through the glass in the door. A crunch and the glass shattered, but she was now stuck with one foot through the glass and some very dangerous-looking shards surrounding it.
Charlie came back, her mouth wide open. ‘And the alarm?’