by Esme Devlin
“This is it, I’m positive.”
It wasn’t the last one, so it has to be this one, right? I remember the big tarmac strip in front of the warehouse. I remember the doors, and I remember where he pushed me up against the wall and I kissed him.
I feel the heat rising in my cheeks and quickly shove the thought out of my head.
“Maybe park around the back? If anyone does come, we don’t want them to know we’re here before we know they’re here.”
“Aye. Good thinking,” she says, doing a U turn in the car park and driving around the back of the building.
The sun has almost completely set now and we probably have ten, maybe twenty more minutes of daylight at most.
We get out of the car, Stevie takes the torch and I take my phone, which can double as a torch too, and we head back around to the front of the building.
Of course it’s fucking locked.
Why would they leave it sitting unlocked?
“Do you have an actual plan or are you just making this up as you go along?” She giggles at me, shaking her head.
“I’m making this up as I go along. There must be a window,” I tell her, gesturing for her to follow me while we walk around the building.
There are windows, but they’re the sash in case type. Little wooden squares around rectangles of glass, the kind that has the thin wire running through it to prevent the exact thing we’re trying to do.
“Fuck,” I pronounce.
“Come on, lets keep checking,” she says, her tone hopeful.
We reach the side of the building where we parked the car and just as I’m about to give up hope, I spot a window that’s not like the other ones. It’s smaller than the rest but it’s a single UPVC window. Double glazed? Fuck-knows, I’m not a glass expert.
“We need to smash it,” I tell her.
She walks away and starts looking around on the ground for a stone, a rock, a brick, anything that we could use. I do the same, heading over towards a grassy area and using my phone for a light.
“Lace,” she shouts.
I turn around and she produces in her hand what can only be described as a pebble.
A fucking pebble.
I laugh at her anyway, because if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry.
“You need to do better than that or your dad’s torch is getting launched through it.”
“He’ll shit,” she says with a giggle. “You should see how excited he gets when we have a power cut and mum starts lighting up the Yankees. Boys and their fucking toys. Found one!”
I stand up and head over to where she’s stood, staring down at something a couple of feet in front of her.
“That’ll do,” I tell her, giving her a nod.
“You’re doing it,” she says. “It’s practically half yours by law, isn’t it? They can’t do you for criminal damage if you own half the building.”
Hmm. Never thought about it like that. I pick up the rock and it’s heavier than I expected, but not unmanageable. I go back to the window, holding it in two hands, aim, and throw with all the strength I can muster.
The window shatters instantly, a jagged hole appearing where the rock went straight through. The rest of it is intact, and I use my elbow to bash out the rest of the panel, just like I’ve seen in the movies.
“You need to give me a footy,” I tell her. “Then pass me the torch, and I’ll pull you through?”
“Aye, alright.” She nods and bends down below the window, making a basket with her fingers which I step on. I use the hoody to cover my hands and hope that the fabric is enough to stop any leftover shards from breaking the skin.
The room is almost pitch dark, but the faint smell of bleach mixed with piss that lingers in the air indicates we’ve likely broken into the bathroom.
More specifically, the men’s bathroom.
I take the torch off Stevie, then I hand her my hoody for extra protection before grabbing a hold of her wrists. She pushes her feet into the wall, and I pull her through, catching her so she doesn’t faceplant the potentially pissy floor.
“Okay Nancy, where to now?”
“Fuck knows,” I murmur, pulling my phone out of my back pocket and shining a light on the situation in front of us. Pointless really, because as soon as Stevie turns her torch on, the phone might as well be a tea-light. “Honestly the place is a maze. Let’s try to find that room I was telling you about and start there. Or if we find the big main room, I reckon I’ll remember the door.”
She nods and follows me out of the bathroom. We wander about for a while, but the corridors all look the same.
“Try some doors?” she suggests.
“Go for it. They were all locked last time I was here.”
“Well, if I was a secret, I would most likely be behind a locked door.” She gives one of the handles a shake and then huffs when it doesn’t open. “What do you think they do here?”
“I’m not sure,” I tell her, trying a door myself and having no luck. “The first night I came here I thought it was disused. Everything seemed old and worn apart from that room... I thought maybe they did it up and used it as like a... grown-up version of a tree house.”
“A grown-up version of a treehouse?” She snorts and I kick myself. “They’re not the fucking Lost-Boys, Lace.”
“Yeah, okay smart-ass. You know what I mean,” I bite back.
“Honestly, I worry about you sometimes. Most of the ti—”
I cut her off just as one of the doors open. “Bingo.”
We head through and we’re in the main part of the warehouse, although obviously it looks much different tonight than it did the first night.
Stevie shines the torch up into the rafters and a couple of pigeons take flight. I jump a mile high and Stevie lets out a “Fuck!” before clutching her chest with her free hand.
“You alright there?” I tease, even though I got as much of a fright as she did. “I think that’s the door over there.”
We make our way across the room to the door I’m almost positive was the one I found that night.
It’s completely dark inside, but there’s a strip-light above our head and doors on either side and I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember getting to the end of this corridor and hearing the faint sound of voices. “This way.”
When we get to the room, I stop in the open doorway. “I see what you mean now,” she says, shining the torch from wall to wall.
“You were sat over there on that bench with Calvin.”
“I don’t remember any of this.”
I look over and spot the two doors I was thinking of. Maybe they’re just a place to store booze, but equally it could be an office.
It could be anything.
I make my way over to the one on the left and Stevie follows behind me, lighting the path.
I was correct in my initial guess; it does appear to be a place they store alcohol. I open up a couple of boxes, using my phone for a light, and it looks like glass bottles of whiskey. I pull one out and show Stevie. “Do you think they sell this stuff?”
“They used to, it’s possible they still do,” she tells me. “Prohibition was different here, back in the day. It was done on a town by town basis, depending on what the town voted. My da’ says they got the whole town vote for it and then made their own peatreek so they could sell it back to the townspeople.”
“Peatreek?”
“Like moonshine. Fucking genius, eh?”
I laugh, not quite sure if genius is a word I would use.
Doesn’t surprise me though.
I open a few more boxes, finding only more bottles, and then Stevie shouts me over. Putting the whiskey back in the box, I head to where she’s standing. “Pass me the phone, will you? This thing is too bright.”
I do as she says, and when she shines it inside the box, I think we should buy a lottery ticket on the way home.
Documents.
Old and yellowed, with crease marks and tatty edges, but documents none
theless.
“Here put it down on the floor so we can both go through it,” I tell her.
She nods and the pair of us crouch down to sift through the box.
Most of them are faded. I open up a metal biscuit tin and see a pile of old black and white photos. From the looks of the people in them, they were taken during or not long after the war.
“Look at this guy,” I turn the photo towards her and she peeks over my shoulder.
“He’s like a young Marlon Brando,” she says. “Fucking ride.”
I giggle and put the photo back in the box, returning my attention to the documents inside.
“A map,” she says.
I shuffle over, and she shines the torch down at the discolored piece of paper. The writing at the top is so old and flicky it’s impossible to read what it says.
“Do you think this is the town?”
I watch her as her brows furrow and she bites down on her lip, then licks them. “Hard to say. I mean if it is the town, it’s old. If that’s the high street,” she points to what looks like the main road on the map. “Then this would be the shopping center here, that was built in the 70s I think and there’s nothing but fields there.”
“It looks way older than the seventies.”
She nods.
“No, I think it is the town. The cemetery, there, that’s still used to today. That would be the church, and there, that would be the place we went for coffee that day.”
My eyes follow her finger as she points out different landmarks that haven’t changed.
“Shaun’s house,” I tell her, pointing to a far corner some distance away from the main town.
“Aye,” she agrees, nodding her head. “What’s that line though? And all this stuff?”
“Caves?” I suggest. The area she’s pointing at looks like someone has outlined splodges, irregular and different sizes and completely at odds to the straight, neat lines of the buildings. I remember she told me about smuggling and spices and all the stuff way back, it would make sense that they’d have somewhere to store it.
She shakes her head. “The beach would be that way,” she says, pointing in the opposite direction. “More likely mines, but that doesn’t make much sense either. The nearest coal-pit would be somewhere over here, and that’s not shown.”
“What about this line?” I hadn’t noticed it at first, not until she pointed it out. But now I’ve seen it, I can’t unsee it. It’s like it was done in a different ink from the rest of the map, as if someone had come along later and added it. Maybe a county border or something, but surely that wouldn’t chop off a quarter of the town? It runs right through the splodges too.
My eyes drift over to see what’s on the other side of the line. “Would this be where my house is, today?” I point to the place on the map on the other side of Shaun’s house.
“Aye. Liam’s dad had all those houses built… and look there’s his estate there.”
“You said Shaun’s side, his dad, his friends owned half the town. Could that be what the line means?”
She shrugs while her eyes trace over the map. “I think you might be right.”
Just then, a banging noise in the distance has the both of us shooting up off our feet.
“Fuck was that?” she hisses.
I shake my head, crouching down and shoving the biscuit tin back in the box. “Come on.”
She pushes my phone in my hand and puts the box back where she found it, flicking her torch off.
“The football won’t be finished yet?” she whispers.
I gesture her with my head to follow me and cover the phone light in my hand, in case whoever or whatever made the bang is waiting for us in the ‘treehouse’. We enter the room and I stop dead for a few moments, trying to hear movement, footsteps, anything to signal we’ve been caught.
What was our excuse again? A party.
I don’t feel like a party will cut it, considering we smashed the window to get in.
“If we get caught, we say we’re retracing your footsteps, trying to figure out what happened to you that night, okay?”
“Okay, good thinking,” she whispers back.
As soon as she finishes, I hear it. Footsteps. Clip clip clip, just like my heart which is currently hammering inside my chest.
Then all of a sudden the lights go on, and the room is illuminated by that same hazy red light that takes me straight back to that night where Shaun was sitting on the chair right next to me, like a fucking king ruling over his court.
“Fuck are you two doing here?” It’s Doeboy, he stands in the door with his legs apart and his arms folded across his chest.
“Fuck are you doing here?” I reply quickly.
The more time I have to control myself before I outright lie to his face, the better.
“It’s my warehouse,” he says.
“Really? I thought it was Shaun’s, which makes it mine, don’t ya think?”
He narrows his eyes on me and takes a step into the room. “Suppose,” he says nonchalantly. “Does Shaun know you’re here, though?”
“No. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell him.”
He laughs now, flashing me a grin. “Why the fuck would I do that?”
“Because we’re trying to find out exactly what happened to Stevie that night, and since I can’t be sure for certain that he wasn’t at the bottom of it, I’d rather not alert him to our little investigation.”
“You two are fucking nuts.” His body relaxes, and he laughs again while he shakes his head. Is he buying it? “Listen, I get what you’re trying to do but keeping this from Shaun wouldn’t end well for any of us. He’d kill the lot of us in our sleep. Actually, maybe not you, Lacey. But it’s a bad idea. He didn’t do it, and I’m surprised you think he would, to be honest.”
“I’m not saying I think he did, I just can’t say for sure that he didn’t,” I tell him.
“Well, either way, you’ve no business being in here yourselves. I’ll see you both out.”
He turns and nods towards the door and I look at Stevie, who flicks her eyes towards him and follows.
I fall into line behind her because honestly, I think we’ve gained everything we could have from our little adventure.
We’ll try to piece it together tonight when we get home.
Doeboy lets us out at the front door and we have to walk around the building in the pitch dark to retrieve the car. I don’t know if he’s noticed the smashed window, but if he did, he doesn’t mention it.
“So the map,” Stevie says, the second the car is back on the road.
I was going to wait until we were home and comfortable in our pajamas before I started giving what we found any serious thought, but she seems keen to get straight to business.
“Just say that line does signify who owns what,” she says.
“Okay…”
“When Doeboy said he’d kill us all in our sleep, it got me thinking about why he doesn’t just kill the lot of them.”
“I don’t think Doeboy was being serious?”
“Really? I do. But the point I was making — what if it’s the land? They kill McGuiness, the land just goes to Liam.”
I think about it for a second. “No, you’re right. We thought it was about his company, because that’s why he was trying to run my dad out of town… but what if destroying the company was just a way of destroying them, so they could buy their land?”
“Exactly.”
“But why would they need his land too? You saw the map, they already own most of it. Three quarters of the town.”
“Maybe they’re just greedy,” she says with a shrug, checking her rear-view mirror.
Silence spreads over the car as the both of us go deep into our own thoughts. It does make sense. In fact, right now, it’s about the only thing that makes sense. But what we’re missing is the motive.
“Was or is there anything on his side, besides the big estate, that Shaun’s family could want?”
; “Nothing comes to mind. I mean there are houses, Bankton is on Liam’s side, but they have enough houses.”
“Those splodges. The line cut right through the center,” I say. I’m not sure if I’m making a point here, more just pointing out something I noticed.
“The coal pits that aren’t coal pits? Could be that, but they’re oilmen now. There’s no money in coal, not anymore.”
“What if they’re something else? Could we go there? I mean, without the map, would you know the rough area?”
“Maybe,” she says. “But don’t you think we’ve done enough investigation for one night? If Doeboy does tell Shaun, and they are up to something there, then how would we explain that one? Let’s go home and check it out on an actual live internet map first.”
“Yeah, good thinking,” I tell her.
This could be absolutely nothing, but at least it feels like we’re making progress.
I just hope the risk of Shaun finding out will be worth the reward.
Chapter 18
SHAUN
“I just had a call from my dad.”
It’s Thursday. Took the police longer than I anticipated, what with Tony’s dad helping to push things along, but at least it’s done now.
“Aye?”
We’re standing in the car park at the end of the day. I could tell by the way she was walking over to me that she had a bone to pick, and I have a feeling I’m not going to be disappointed.
“From the police station.” Her eyes narrow on me while she hisses the words.
I’m trying not to smile because I know it will just set her off, and she hasn’t been the same with me since the weekend. She needs a good fucking consummation, in my opinion, but what do I know?
“Sorry, did you want me to go and drop off his toothbrush or something?”
She flinches and then quickly recovers, pushing my chest with her little hand. “What the fuck have you done?”
I shrug her off. “He got what he had coming. You’ve known for a while now what we wanted. I’d like to say it was a shame your dad got dragged down with the ship, but he made his choice, didn’t he? Or have you forgotten about that?”