I looked up.
‘Empty.’ He dragged the box towards me so I could see. As he did so the rug shifted, revealing the jagged edge of a floorboard.
I stared at the dark space to the side of the board. There was just enough room to slip a hand around it. Harry followed my gaze.
‘Go on,’ he said.
I crouched down beside him and slid my fingers past the rough, cold wood. I gripped the board. Lifted it. It gave easily. Harry let out a long, slow whistle. He leaned over my shoulder, peering into the space beneath.
‘Do you think it’s a hiding place?’ I asked, pulse quickening.
‘What’s in there?’
I felt into the darkness. My hand lit on a slim, flat piece of plastic, the size and shape of a credit card.
I drew the card out and shone a light on the front of it.
It was yellow, with a logo made up of intersecting cubes and the words Ed Evans Storage written across it in blocky caps.
Harry took the card from me and flipped it over. A magnetic strip ran down the back. ‘It’s a key card,’ he said, ‘to a storage room or . . . or a locker.’
I took the key card back. ‘Ed Evans Storage,’ I read out loud. ‘I’ve never heard of them.’
‘Me neither. Shall I check them out?’ Harry pulled up the browser on his phone. A moment later he showed me the screen.
‘Their website says they have two storage facilities, one in Birmingham and one in an industrial estate in Walthamstow.’
‘Walthamstow is only an hour or so away,’ I said.
‘I know,’ Harry said, peering at the phone again. ‘According to this, the storage place there will be closed right now, but there’s got to be a way in.’ He stood up. ‘Let’s go and check it out.’
‘Wait,’ I said, jumping to my feet. ‘There’ll be millions of lockers, you’ll have no idea which one this opens.’
‘I know.’ Harry pushed his way past a folded lounger, heading for the door. ‘We’ll just have to try all of them until we find the right one.’
‘But it might not contain anything to do with PAAUL,’ I protested, feeling into the gap under the floorboard again. It was empty. ‘There might be PAAUL stuff somewhere else.’
Harry stopped. His expressive face registered impatience and confusion. ‘You’re right,’ he conceded, ‘we don’t know if this card will give us anything to do with PAAUL, but we need to find out, don’t we? I thought that’s what all this investigating was about?’
I let out a frustrated sigh. It was 8.35 p.m. If I left with Harry now to go on some wild goose chase to Walthamstow I’d have to give up my exploration of Dad’s house for this evening.
‘I can go on my own,’ Harry said, reading my concerns. ‘You stay here, carry on looking.’
I shook my head. No way could I trust Harry to be alone with the storage card.
Harry gave an exasperated sigh. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You’ve got all my stuff. Keep my wallet and keys and tablet and computer. Let me take my phone and a bit of cash. I’ll call you when I get to the storage place. Deal?’
‘Call me as soon as you’ve taken a look,’ I said. ‘The very next minute.’
‘Okay,’ he said.
‘I’m serious. As soon as you’ve seen what’s in the storage place?’
‘I promise.’
‘And whatever you find you have to bring straight back to me,’ I said. ‘I’ll go to the police and say you stole the card if you don’t.’
‘Agreed.’
We hurried back into the house. As we passed through the kitchen I took a small knife from the block. The metal blade felt cold as I touched it.
‘You might need this to force a lock to get inside the storage place,’ I said, handing it over. ‘And don’t forget to call me. I want to know what you find as soon as you find it.’
‘I promise that the very first thing I do will be to send you a picture.’ Harry grinned, then raced off.
I fetched a proper torch from the house and went back to the summer house. With the better light I could see a row of boxes tucked in the corner of the room. The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that the storage card was probably old and disused – a dead end. Maybe it had even slipped under the floorboards. The boxes in front of me were a much better bet for finding a connection between Dad and PAAUL. I shoved the tiny wrought-iron table in the corner out of the way and resumed my search. I tried not to think about Harry as I worked but it was impossible.
Did he mean what he said about helping me?
I couldn’t trust him, obviously, but suppose he really did like me? Suppose he had decided to let me choose what we did with what we found? Could I seriously turn Dad over to the police?
What would Auntie Sheila, who idolised him, say? Or Uncle Graham, who hated him? And how could I tell Lucy any of this?
My thoughts in turmoil, I ransacked box after box, searching carefully past old swimming togs and loops of discarded electrical wiring and memories that threatened to rip my heart open if I stopped and let them.
HARRY
It took Harry just over an hour to get to Walthamstow, then another fifteen minutes to find the industrial estate containing Ed Evans Storage. Fran filled his head – the way she’d looked, furious and vulnerable in her sweater and jeans – and the way she’d listened to him . . . against her own will, he’d sensed. But she had listened and she’d let him help her and if he could just find out what was in the storage locker and bring it back to her, surely he would have proved he meant what he was saying.
He forced himself to stop thinking about her when he reached the industrial estate. He had to focus now. Do whatever it took to get what he’d come for.
It was almost 10 p.m. and a Sunday evening so he wasn’t surprised that the place was deserted. Trees and a muddy ditch half full of water marked the western boundary of the estate and the gloomy lighting and the silence gave the row of industrial sheds a spooky feel. According to the diagram at the entrance, Ed Evans Storage was at the furthest, darkest end of the estate. Harry bent down, feeling for the small kitchen knife Francesca had given him earlier and which he had tucked inside the top of his boot. It felt strange not to have his keys and his wallet, but the knife did at least make him feel slightly more confident. It was small but sturdy – and the blade was sharp. Lucy’s earlier warning to be careful flashed into his head as he hurried towards the storage facility.
Harry kept to the cover of the trees. A row of terraced houses was just visible through the branches. Lights were on in some of the homes. They seemed to belong to another world, far removed from the still darkness of the industrial estate. A minute or two later and Harry reached Ed Evans Storage. He stood, peering through the trees at the building. It was a square-fronted shed with a bright-blue front door, just like all the others in the row. He scouted around the outside. There was no window, no other entry point he could see, but it didn’t matter. If Harry could just force his way past the front door, he’d be inside, no problem.
He was about to take a step out of the trees, towards the shed, when a uniformed security guard emerged.
Harry shrank back, heart racing.
The guard lit a cigarette and puffed away, blowing smoke rings into the night air. He was older than Harry, late forties at least, and not as tall. But he looked bulky and muscular. If it came to a fist fight, Harry wasn’t at all sure he could beat him. Anyway, it couldn’t come to that. Harry’s priority was to get in and out of the storage facility without anyone seeing. He couldn’t risk the guard raising an alarm.
After a few minutes the guard stubbed out his fag and went back inside. Harry waited a moment, his heart still thumping, then crept over to the front door. He peered in through the small wire-mesh window. The guard sat with his feet up at a desk a few feet away. He was sideways on to Harry, his fingers tapping on the landline phone in front of him and totally absorbed in whatever was on his computer screen.
Beyond him was a door marked storage
. That must be where the key card in Harry’s pocket would find its home. That was where Harry needed to be. He just had to get past the guard.
He checked the time again then ducked into the shadows and took out his phone to text Fran that he’d arrived. If everything went tits up in the next two minutes, he wanted her to know that he was here, doing his best to keep his promise to her.
There was no signal.
Great. Harry sighed. He’d have to try again later. If he waited any longer, he might lose his nerve.
Making sure the phone was on silent, he shoved it in his pocket and hurried around the corner. His throat felt dry as he took the watch off his wrist. Checking the time, he set the alarm to sound on repeat in one minute then laid it on the ground and hurried away, to the shadows at the side of the building.
He stood in the silence, waiting. If this went wrong, he could well be arrested. He gritted his teeth. He wouldn’t let it go wrong. Trying to count down in his head, the alarm still surprised him, blasting into the night air on full volume.
Harry held his breath. It wasn’t the first time he’d used a watch in this way but he couldn’t remember a time when the consequences had mattered more. After several long seconds, the security guard appeared, grumbling to himself. Harry grinned with relief as the guard hurried towards the sound of the alarm, letting the front door swing shut behind him.
Swiftly, silently, Harry sped out of the shadows, catching the door before it shut. As the guard disappeared around the corner, Harry slipped inside. He raced past the desk and straight through the door at the far end.
He was in.
FRAN
I worked my way through the summer house, checking in every possible receptacle and behind every scrap of furniture to make sure nothing else was hidden. I tapped against the walls and the floor, dragging the junk that had been dumped here out of the way each time. After an hour I was covered in dust and grime and I had found nothing.
I tried calling Harry but his phone went straight to voice mail. Was he still on the tube? Or out of range? Had he actually gone to the storage place in Walthamstow? Or had he run off to write his story about Dad after all?
No. He wouldn’t have done that – apart from the fact that he’d sworn to me he wouldn’t do anything without my go-ahead, there wasn’t a story yet. Perhaps I’d been stupid to let him take that key card. Still, I had all his belongings, including the keys to his flat. I could do what I liked with them. And there had been something so genuine about the way he’d looked at me earlier . . . Surely I could trust him?
Exhausted and frustrated, I wandered over to the gap under the floorboards where we’d found the key card. Had we missed something? I carefully patted the whole way round, as far as my hand could reach. It was definitely empty. I gave the wooden plank below the removed floorboard a frustrated shove. To my surprise it shifted in my hand. Just a fraction, but enough to suggest it had been laid on top of another board. I reached further, struggling to find its edge. There. I lifted the top board as far as I could, feeling underneath it. Nothing met my grasping fingers. There wasn’t room for anything much, anyway, certainly nothing with any bulk. And then my hand touched the edge of a small, flat plastic bag. Holding my breath, I pulled it out.
HARRY
Harry shut the door softly behind him. He couldn’t be seen from the entrance lobby in here, but he must make as little sound as possible once the security guard came back from his expedition to find the source of the alarm. Harry could still hear it, a muffled distant peal.
Ignoring the sound, he focused on what was in front of him. He was standing at the head of a long corridor. Two doors on either side stretched ahead. Which meant four rooms, each potentially containing the storage locker that the key card in his pocket would open.
Outside, the alarm on his watch stopped trilling. Already?
Shit. The security guard would be coming back inside at any second. There was no time to lose. He tiptoed along the corridor, opening every door in turn. As he’d feared, each one led to a room full of containers. These varied from big metal boxes the size of large cupboards to smaller boxes that resembled squat gym lockers. Every container was labelled with an ID number and the letter A, B or C. A quick scan confirmed that the letters were allocated according to size, with the bigger containers marked as ‘A’s and the smaller ones as ‘C’s.
Harry studied the key card from the summer house. A ‘C’ was printed in the corner. Harry darted from room to room. The ‘C’ containers were no more than a metre square. There were lots of lockers in each room and Harry had no idea which one his key card would open.
He could hear the security guard stomping back inside, slamming shut the front door. Harry refocused his efforts, trying to be as quick and as quiet as possible. Creeping to the start of the first room, he held the magnetic strip of the key card to the plate on the locker just above the number. It didn’t open. He tried the next. And the next. Working systematically he covered the entire room. No joy. He moved next door to the second room and began again, checking each locker in turn. He was halfway along his first row when footsteps sounded in the corridor outside. Harry froze, the key card clutched in his hand.
He whipped around, his eyes fixed on the door.
With a soft creak, it started to open.
FRAN
My heart lurched into my mouth as I peered down at the transparent plastic bag I’d taken from under the floorboards.
It was the size of the bags they make you put your toiletries in at airports and it contained a small white envelope with typed print on the front:
Jeremiah 1:5–6
What did that mean? Was this a reference to another bible verse, like the one I’d been sent from Corinthians? The envelope wasn’t sealed, the flap simply folded over. I felt inside and drew out six scraps of paper, clearly torn from different sheets. Each scrap was torn at the edges and creased, as if it had been folded and refolded several times. I studied them in turn. Each one contained two typed words . . . except that they weren’t words at all, just a jumble of letters. I frowned. What did they mean? Was each scrambled word a separate code? Or did the six separate bits of paper add up to a message of some kind?
They must mean something, or else why would whoever had hidden them here have gone to so much trouble?
Perhaps the clue was in the bible reference. I looked it up on my phone. Dad, Jacqueline and Lucy always used the New International Version of the bible, so that was the version I picked:
Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.
‘Alas, Sovereign Lord,’ I said. ‘I do not know how to speak: I am too young.’
I frowned. I’d come across the first part of this quote several times before. It had cropped up in several of the anti-abortion posts Harry had led me to. If I’d had any doubts before, they vanished now; this was definitely something to do with PAAUL.
And, as I was in Dad’s house, this meant yet another connection between Dad and PAAUL.
I leaned against the lounger cushion with the red-brown bloodstain, forgetting how earlier I’d recoiled. I shone a light on the scrambled letters on the top piece of paper, frowning as I tried to make sense of them:
uwdh bBprsawh
My head spun, filling with memories of spy films and codebreaking methodologies involving machines and number sequences and references to specific lines on specific pages of specific books.
I glanced back at the bible quote. Could this be a book cipher? It beggared belief. After all, this was Dad whose jumbled words I’d found, not some code-cracking genius from Bletchley Park. Still, maybe PAAUL insisted on using encryption for security reasons.
I stared back at the two words on the top scrap of paper. I knew how book ciphers worked, they were easy to crack once you had the relevant line from the book and almost impossible if you didn’t.
I grabbed a pen from my bag and jotted down the exact words
from the bible quote. With a basic cipher you just had to allocate each letter in the given line its own letter of the alphabet. In this case the first letter was ‘B’ so, presumably that was really an ‘a’ while the second letter ‘e’ was actually a ‘b’.
I worked my way to the end of the bible quote but ran out of letters after I reached ‘u’. Hoping against hope I tried to fit the letters I’d found to the words on the first scrap of paper. They made no more sense than they had before.
Frustrated, I studied the other scrambled words. The capital ‘B’ appeared several times, as did capitals for ‘A’ and ‘I’. I looked back at the line from Jeremiah. There were capital ‘B’s, ‘A’s and ‘I’s in that too.
I sat up. Suppose the five capital letters in the bible quote each corresponded to a letter of the alphabet too?
I started on a fresh piece of paper, writing out the quote and allocating letters as I had before but this time with the capital ‘B’ from ‘Before’ given an ‘a’ and the lower case ‘b’ from ‘womb’ allocated a ‘p’.
I went back to the first scrap and its jumbled words. According to my reworked cipher the ‘u’ was a ‘j’, the ‘w’ an ‘o’, the ‘d’ an ‘h’ and the ‘h’ an ‘n’.
john
The first word unscrambled itself in front of my eyes. Holding my breath I worked on the second word: bBprsawh. It took a few minutes to tease it out, my heart drumming against my ribs as my eyes searched frantically for the alphabet match, but soon I had it: paterson
John Paterson
I blew out my breath, my fingers tightening around the six pieces of paper. This was one of the names from Harry’s research . . . one of the abortion doctors he was convinced had been killed by PAAUL.
HARRY
Harry darted behind the end of the row of lockers. The security guard was just a few feet away. And getting closer. Harry held his breath as the man chatted away on his phone. Light danced over the metal tops of the lockers opposite. Shit. The guard must be shining his torch up and down each row. Harry flattened himself against the lockers, hoping the man wouldn’t come any closer.
The Black Sheep Page 16