Who Sent Clement?

by Keith A Pearson

  It’s an invite I’m only too happy to accept.

  We both exit the car simultaneously, and as I climb into the passenger seat, I push the driver’s seat back so Clement can squeeze his legs beneath the steering wheel. He clambers in and fights with the seatbelt. Once he locks it in place, he looks across at me.

  “You alright, doll?”

  “I think so.”

  He removes his sunglasses and puts them in the door pocket. A quick check of the sat nav screen and he rams the Fiat into gear.

  “I’m in charge now, you bossy mare.” he growls.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “I was talking to your robot friend.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  I’m thrown back in my seat as we dart from the drop off lane, Clement keen to see if the Fiat can do warp speed.

  Five yelled expletives, two indecent hand gestures, and three minutes later, we arrive at the car park. I then have to give Clement instructions on passing through the automatic entry system which dispatches our ticket and raises the barrier.

  We circle around and find an empty bay at the far side of the car park. Clement turns sharply into it and cuts the engine.

  I can finally breathe again.

  “Well, that was horrific on just about every level.”

  “Never mind, doll. We’re here now.”

  “And now all we have to do is break into a disused tube station, and find a small bar of gold that may, or may not, have been hidden there over forty years ago.”

  “That’s the spirit. Piece of cake.”

  “I was being sarcastic.”

  We clamber out of the car and retrieve the rucksack from the boot. Clement throws it over his shoulder as if it weighs nothing, and we stride purposefully in the direction of an exit sign.

  The exit leads out to a quiet backstreet. We turn left, and under darkening skies, make our way towards Byward Street.

  I really hoped the walk would take longer, but we turn onto Byward Street barely two minutes after leaving the car park. Even at this time of day, the traffic is relentless.

  “I thought there would be less passing traffic. It’s not ideal is it?”

  “Doesn’t matter, doll. We just walk straight up to gate and hop over.”

  “What if somebody sees us?”

  “This is London, not some quiet backwater. Nobody will give us a second glance.”

  I wish I had his confidence.

  We approach the original entrance we inspected yesterday and wait for the traffic lights to change. Clement takes the opportunity to glance casually up and down the street. If he has any concerns, they don’t show on his face.

  “Soon as we get across, don’t stop and don’t look around. Just follow me. Clear?”

  “Clear.”

  As the lights change, the traffic grinds to a halt. Clement moves off the kerb and I follow.

  We reach the other side and he suddenly stops, bending down to tie a lace on a boot that has no laces.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Just buying a few seconds until the traffic moves on.”

  I fight the overwhelming urge to look around. I guess Clement is right in that it’s a tell-tale sign you’re up to no good.

  The lights change and the traffic begins to flow again.

  “Let’s go,” Clement orders.

  Almost as if he’s on a stroll in the country, he approaches the gate and steps over it, disappearing down the stairwell a second later.

  Oh, crap. My turn.

  I can feel a hundred pairs of invisible eyes staring as I approach.

  Do not turn around.

  Even though the gate is low, I clamber over it with all the grace of a heavily pregnant hippo. Once I’m on the other side, I waste no time in scampering down the stairs, out of sight of the invisible eyes.

  By the time I reach the bottom, Clement’s arm is already buried in the rucksack and he pulls out the bolt cutters. A weak bulb glows from behind a plastic casing above the door. Probably a health and safety measure, rather than a convenience for those up to no good in the dark recesses of the stairwell.

  “Once these are open, it’s plain sailing, doll,” he says, nodding towards the wire mesh doors.

  “You reckon?”

  He doesn’t reply but turns his attention to the padlock. He carefully locks the jaws of the bolt cutters around the steel loop of the padlock.

  “I hope these are up to the job,” he mumbles.

  He draws a deep breath and positions his hands on the rubber grips. With his elbows jutting out to the side and a string of veins bulging in his neck, he begins to squeeze the handles together.

  I’m surprised how little resistance is offered by the steel, or maybe I underestimated Clement’s brute strength. The metal loop snaps and the padlock falls to the floor with a dull clunk.

  “That was easier than I imagined,” I whisper.

  “Decent bolt cutters, doll. You could do some serious interrogation with these.”

  My mind conjures up an image of David Sterling, tied to a chair as I snap away at his bony fingers.

  “Maybe we’ll hold on to them until Thursday, just in case.”

  Clement smiles down at me as he tucks the bolt cutters back in the rucksack.

  “We’ll need the lamp from here on in. You okay holding it?”

  “Let’s save the battery, just in case we’re in there for a while.”

  I activate the torch on my phone. “This will do for now.”

  “Bleedin’ hell. That thing does more tricks than a two-bob whore.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  He pulls one of the doors open. “After you.”

  “No, I insist.”

  He bends down and snatches the broken padlock from the floor. “Best not leave any evidence behind.”

  The rucksack is then hoisted back onto his shoulder and he steps beyond the door. I follow him in and he pulls the door closed behind us.

  “The actual station entrance is the other side.”

  I hold the phone out, illuminating the subway walls and dark floor stretching ahead of us. We move slowly, the noise of the traffic above us fading away with every step. The air becomes increasingly stale, tinged with an undercurrent of damp and vintage urine.

  With no point of reference, it’s hard to say how long the subway stretches, but the torch eventually catches a bright red ‘No Entry’ sign directly ahead of us. A dome mirror, fixed to the wall at head height, reflects weak light from a stairwell to the left. I presume it leads up to the main entrance on Byward Street.

  “That’s got to be the door into the station,” Clement suggests.

  The door is solid wood, painted black, with several warning notices fixed to it. There can be no doubt that unauthorised personnel should walk away, backed up by the fact the door is secured with a mortise lock, and a steel clasp fixed with another padlock.

  Clement puts the rucksack down and retrieves the bolt cutters. The padlock receives the same treatment as its counterpart at the other end of the subway, and falls to the floor with a metallic thud that echoes around us.

  “One down,” Clement says to himself as he returns to the rucksack.

  My contribution is limited to torch holding as I try to follow Clement’s movements through the darkness.

  “Should we use the lamp now?” I suggest.

  “Nah. It’ll bleed too much light up the stairs. Anyone passing by up there will see it.”

  He removes the toolkit from the rucksack and extracts two screwdrivers and a pair of pliers.

  “I need light on the lock, doll.”

  I oblige and move closer to the door.

  There are four screws holding an aluminium plate to the front of the mortise lock. Clement methodically unscrews each one before switching to a smaller screwdriver. He appears to undo a screw at the base of the handle before tugging it away, leaving a metal shaft in its place.

  The metal plate is removed to reve
al the inner workings of the lock mechanism.

  “I can see why they added a padlock,” Clement mutters. “This lock is as basic as they come.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “Very.”

  It’s tricky to see what he’s doing as he sets about the lock mechanism with a pair of pliers and a screwdriver. It doesn’t take long, and he then stands back from the door and twists the metal shaft with the pliers. With his free hand, he forces the screwdriver into the gap between the door and the frame, prising it open.

  A wave of musty air bursts from the darkness.

  “I’m impressed, Clement. Where did you learn to do that?”

  “Misspent youth.”

  He puts the screwdrivers and the pliers back in the toolkit, and returns it to the rucksack.

  “Think we’ll need this now, doll.”

  He extracts the lamp and places it on the floor, just inside the door, facing into the darkness.

  “Switch her on doll. Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”

  I lean over and switch the lamp on.

  “Shittin’ hell,” Clement groans.

  30

  A metal staircase leads down to an empty space, and as best as I can tell in the limited light, it’s about thirty feet square. It reminds me of a derelict house we used to play in as kids; bare brick walls, exposed rafters, and a complete absence of any features to hint at what purpose the space once served.

  It’s safe to say it’s not what I imagined, nor Clement, judging by his reaction.

  “This used to be a tube station?” I ask in disbelief.

  “It was.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “No idea, but it looks like they’ve stripped everything out.”

  “Surely that’s not good? What if they inadvertently removed the gold?”

  “Then we won’t find it. But this place was closed long before the Baker Street job so if Harry did stash the gold down here, it was probably like it is now.”

  “So, we’ve got to search every corner?”

  “Yeah, but it would make sense to start where the ticket office was located.”

  “And that was where?”

  “Can’t tell from here. Grab the lamp.”

  Clement plucks the rucksack from the floor and we step onto a steel platform. He pulls the door closed, entombing us in the dank, airless chamber.

  I grab the lamp and direct it towards the metal staircase in front of us. It looks worryingly makeshift, bolted together God-only-knows how long ago. The guard rail, if you can call it that, is a single scaffolding pole, fixed to the treads with rusty brackets. From our position, it’s easily an eight foot drop to the concrete floor below.

  “Be careful, doll,” Clement advises as he tentatively takes the first few stairs.

  A tumble down a set of rickety stairs would nicely sum up my fortunes over the last week. I heed Clement’s advice and take them one at a time, each step greeted with a metallic creak.

  Slowly and steadily, we make our way down.

  The magnitude of our task becomes all too apparent once we reach the bottom.

  “Where the hell do we start?” I murmur.

  “Process of elimination.”

  “Eh?”

  “Give me the lamp.”

  I hand it to him and he moves towards the centre of the space. He holds it up, and slowly scans the beam from right to left across the far wall.

  “There. Look.”

  I edge over to where he’s standing and look up at the wall.

  “See those?” he says.

  “Ohh, yes.”

  There are two advertising posters fixed to the wall; both heavily faded and beyond tatty. It’s impossible to make out any detail, or colour, but the text on both posters is still just about readable. The left poster advertises an Irish whisky, from a company called Jameson & Son. Beyond the title text, the rest of it is too faded to read. The poster on the right is slightly more legible, with Julie Andrews printed in white letters along the top, above the word Hawaii.

  “Is that a movie poster?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve never seen it. Have you?”

  “I saw the trailer, and trust me, that was bad enough.”

  “Well, as interesting as the posters are, they’re not going to help us establish where the ticket office was located.”

  “They are, doll. They wouldn’t put posters in a ticket office would they? So, it can’t have been positioned against this wall.”

  “No. I suppose not.”

  He continues to scan the beam across the wall until it meets a dark, square aperture in the far corner, about seven feet wide. A set of iron scissor gates stretch across the void.

  “Must be the stairs down to the platform.”

  He moves the beam onto the adjacent wall and scans nothing but bare brickwork.

  “Don’t think it could have been here as it would have been too close to the stairs.”

  “So, excluding the section where we came in, it must have been here,” I suggest, pointing to the wall on our left.

  “Yeah, I reckon so.”

  A low rumbling noise suddenly leaks from beyond the gates in the corner. It quickly builds into a symphony of grinding, squealing, and clacking, gaining in volume. A wave of warm, stagnant air bursts from the darkness, followed by rapid flashes of light like paparazzi outside a West End nightclub.

  “Jesus, Clement. What is that?”

  He shakes his head, as the ground beneath us vibrates.

  Seconds pass and the performance peters out.

  “Using my powers of deduction, and seeing as we’re in a bleedin’ tube station, I’d guess that was a train.”

  “Yes…erm, of course. Sorry, I’m a bit jittery.”

  “Shall we get on?”

  “Right. Where do we start?”

  “Good question.”

  Clement casts his gaze up the high wall, bordering the left side of the space. His moustache receives a couple of strokes before he picks up the lamp and heads towards the corner. He places it on the floor, about four feet from the wall, angled upwards.

  “If I were in Harry’s shoes, and seeing as there’s no obvious place to hide anything in here, I’d have removed a couple of bricks, chiselled a space behind them, then stashed the gold in there. Once you put the original bricks back, nobody would notice unless they were really looking.”

  I stare at the wall, thirty feet long and about sixteen feet high. I then turn my stare to Clement.

  “You have got to be kidding me? There’s almost five hundred square feet of bricks — it’ll take all night to check them all.”

  “No it won’t. I doubt he brought a ladder with him so it can’t be above head height. That’s half the wall we can forget about.”

  “Oh, that’s alright then,” I groan. ”Just a thousand-odd individual bricks to check then.”

  From the very moment Clement suggested we go in search of Harry’s fabled gold, I knew it was a long shot. Perhaps I’ve allowed myself to get carried away in the excitement of the hunt, and reality has taken a back seat to fantasy.

  But now, standing in this dark, musty void, staring at a wall of damp bricks, reality is firmly back in the driving seat.

  “You just gonna stand there, doll?”

  Weighed down with negativity, I let out a deep sigh and reluctantly shuffle across to Clement.

  “God, this is ridiculous,” I groan. “Even if there is a bar of gold in here, we’ll never find it.”

  He folds his arms and frowns down at me. “What were you expecting? Did you think we’d waltz in here and find it sitting on a little table in the corner?”

  “Well, no, but this is hopeless.”

  “Fine. We’ll call it a day then. We don’t have to do this.”

  “Don’t we?”

  “Course we don’t. We could just give up and be back in the car within ten minutes.”

  I don’t know how to respond to that state
ment.

  “Strikes me, doll, you’re pretty good at giving up.”

  “Sorry?”

  “All those books you never finished.”

  “What’s my writing got to do with anything?”

  “You fancy the idea of writing a book, but when it comes down to it, it’s just too much like hard work ain’t it?”

  “If you’re trying to make a point, Clement, I’m not getting it.”

  “Same problem. You like the idea of finding Harry’s gold, but you don’t wanna put the graft in.”

  “That’s not fair,” I protest. “It’s just…”

  “Just what? Look, doll, this is no different from your problem writing a book. You start at the beginning and keep going until the end. Head down, keep moving forward. Nothing complicated about it.”

  I fidget with my fingers, grateful Clement can’t see my cheeks reddening in the gloomy light.

  “Or, you give up and look for an easier way; one that probably ain’t there. Nothing worth having comes easy, doll.”

  Another passing tube train breaks the uncomfortable silence. Clement leans up against the wall, waiting for the din to end, and to see if I pick up the gauntlet.

  Clement possesses a number of traits which annoy me, but I must admit I do admire both his determination and pragmatism. They’re traits which have sadly been lacking in all the men in my life. Well, at least my adult life.

  The sound of the tube train ebbs away and the silence returns.

  “Shall we get started then?” I chirp, doing my best to sound enthusiastic.

  “Sure?”

  “Positive.”

  Clement hands me a screwdriver which I stare at blankly.

  “All you gotta do is work along the line of bricks, jabbing that into the mortar every few inches. If Harry did remove a couple of bricks, there won’t be any mortar, or he’ll have probably packed it out with dirt. Either way, you should notice a difference when the tip of the screwdriver hits it.”

  I stare at the wall and try to calculate how many linear feet of mortar we’ll need to work along.

  “Doll, don’t,” Clement chides, as if reading my mind. “Let’s just get on with it.”

  Perhaps I’d feel more positive if there was a definitive answer waiting for us at the end of our arduous task, but there isn’t. All we have to go on is Clement’s theory, and that itself is based on another flimsy theory. Nevertheless, it looks like we’re set to search a haystack for a needle that might not even exist.