by Simon Mason
He thought about his responsibilities to others: to Pyotor, who had learned that you can do two simple things to make one complicated one; to Singh in his overlarge brown suit and beige turban; to his mother, who was so upset; to Uncle Len, who had told him to do the right thing.
His uncle was right. But which thing? Briefly his mind went through a series of interrelated problems; he saw the faces of Pyotor, Alex, his mother, Zuzana. Then he moved away from the window, fished his phone out of his bag, and lay on his bed. Kept his voice low. It was all a case of breaking it down. It was a risk, he had to admit. But he was in too deep.
“Felix, mate. Yeah. Got a little job for you … Nah, said it before, simple for a boy of your abilities.”
“Not that way,” Garvie said. “CCTV at the entrance, remember. Better round the side. There’s a hole in the fence.”
Only Garvie had brought a flashlight. Briefly he thought how much better prepared Zuzana would have been. In darkness they waded through scrub in single file, Garvie leading, Felix next, and Smudge at the back, engaged in his own private battle with the vegetation growing inconveniently next to the path.
They reached the track and went down it to the fence where the hole was and waited a moment in the clearing for Smudge to pull brambles out of his hair and swear himself back to normal.
Before they went on, Garvie drew Felix’s attention to the ground. “Tire marks all down the track. What do you reckon?”
“Van, looks like.”
Smudge said in a muttering sort of voice, “Don’t see why we couldn’t come in a van. Could have saved me swallowing all these leaves. Don’t understand why I’m carrying all the stuff neither.”
He hoicked the rucksack onto his shoulders again and caught up with the others as they went across the little ditch and through the hole in the fence, up the other side, and out onto the access road that lay ahead of them pale as foil between shadows of buildings. They walked down it past the storage facility, past the spot where Vinnie liked to sleep, all the way to the warehouse at the far end, and stood for a moment looking up at it. It was the biggest building on the estate. Vast and rank, it loomed above them, twenty-meter-high brick walls smeared with the filth of ages, sprouting with weeds, dark and silent, its three rows of windows black to the black night sky.
“Looks like something in one of them horror jobs,” Smudge said. “Got nothing in it but zombies probably.”
Garvie turned to Felix.
“You’d be surprised,” Felix said. “Pays no one to make them look good. But you can still use them. Look.”
The double doors at the front were worn and patched, but the padlock shone with a newish gleam. Above the door was a burglar alarm.
“Seco,” Felix said. “Said it before: Not the best, but better than those Safeways down there. Doesn’t look that old to me.”
Garvie said, “Likely to go off in a high wind?”
Felix shrugged. “Can’t tell. Let’s see what’s round the back.”
He led them around the side of the building through deeper shadow and across lumpy banks of feral weeds until they reached the far corner, where a thin-framed fire escape zigzagged down the brick wall like a broken old spring. The tail end of a metal ladder hung down from the end of it, about three meters above the ground.
Garvie bent and fished something out of the weeds and stood there looking at it thoughtfully.
“What’ve you got there?” Smudge peered over his shoulder. “Gardening sacks? Amazing what people’ll chuck away. It’s a new roll too.”
“Come on,” Felix said. “Don’t want to hang about. It’s nearly two now.”
Smudge began to complain. “I hate this bit. Can’t someone else do it for a change?”
“No one else has your big bones, champ.”
Smudge plodded over and sank to his knees like a small, weary elephant, and Felix straddled his shoulders. With Garvie’s assistance, making a series of bass grunts, he rose wobbling under the fire escape.
“Keep still, Smudge.”
“I am still. It’s my legs won’t stop moving.”
At last Felix grabbed the lowest rung and with a quick squirming movement hoisted himself up and around onto the fire-escape base. He let down the ladder behind him and they went slowly up, Smudge commenting in a steady grumble on the height, age, width, and mobility of the fire escape, until they reached the access door at the top and huddled there together on the narrow metal platform perched just below the roof.
“Are we going in, or what?”
“It’s locked, you noddy. Pass me the rope.”
Smudge got it out of the bag and Felix weighed it in his hand for a second, the grapple hanging heavily on the end, and flipped it suddenly onto the flat roof above them. At the fourth go it snagged on the brick lip and he tested it.
“See you, then,” he said, and ran lightly up the wall and pulled himself out of sight.
“Sometimes I think he’s not really human,” Smudge said. “No bones at all.”
Garvie went up after him, and then Smudge, hauled upward, groaning and panting, spilled huffing at last onto the flat roof like a beached tuna. Garvie gave the flashlight to Felix and they went cautiously across the concrete, stopping every few paces to peer at one of the small skylights set in double rows along its length until they were almost at the other end.
“Here,” Felix said. “See?”
They saw. The frame of the skylight was split in two around all four edges.
“It’s been cut and put back. Neat job. Somebody knew what he was doing. Give us a hand.”
They lifted the frame, swung it to one side, and put the glass down gently on the concrete of the roof. Garvie handed over the flashlight and Felix ducked through the gap and flashed the light around. He sat back up with an astonished look on his face.
“Well?” Smudge said. “What’s down there?”
Felix looked at him. “You’ll never guess.”
“Tell me it’s not zombies.”
“Want to guess, Garv?”
“Fur coats,” Garvie said quietly.
Felix continued to look astonished. “Jackpot, Sherlock. Must be a hundred grand’s worth. Your long-fur fox, your rex rabbit, your blue mink—all sorts, looks like. Clever. Pick a spot no one’d think of. Make it secure. Ship them in and out when no one’s looking. I like it. I like it even more now I know about it.” He looked at Garvie. “But how the hell did you know about it?”
“Magee’s a thief. He knows furs. He did a furrier’s a few years back.”
Smudge frowned. “All right. You think he was up here that night trying to knock off a few more. What’s this got to do with Gimpel?”
“Magee likes working with kids. Done it before.”
Smudge’s look of astonishment was so big he might have been miming it. “You’re telling us Gimpel was in on it?”
Garvie said nothing. Felix gave a low whistle. “I get it. Look at the size of the skylight, Smudge. You think Magee could get through that himself?”
Smudge considered the skylight with narrowed eyes. “Gimpel might have been small enough, but it don’t look easy.”
Felix said, “What was that you told us, Garv? He’d started going to gym class, right? His grandparents couldn’t understand it.”
Smudge said, “I don’t understand it, either. I mean, did Gimpel even know Magee, Garv?”
“Jamal says he saw them together outside his shop. Arguing. Maybe arguing about this.”
“They were working together?” Smudge gave a low whistle. “Now that is a turnup. But why would Gimpel do it, though?”
“For a cut, of course,” Felix said.
Smudge considered this. He said, “You’re right. Personal gain every time. A boy like that likes his games. You’ve got your new-edition GTA coming out September, you’ve got your—”
“Wasn’t that,” Garvie said.
“What was it, then?”
There was a silence. Felix said, “Wait. I remember
now.” He clicked his fingers impatiently. “What was that you said about his baby brother? Needs some sort of expensive operation done abroad.”
Garvie nodded.
“He was obsessive about it,” Felix said. “He wanted that money to make the operation happen.”
Smudge whistled. “The little scamp. The cheeky devil. Now he’s Robinson Hood all of a sudden.” He sat back, amazed at himself. “But,” he said after a moment, “Gimpel! Was he really that sort of kid?”
Garvie said sharply, “What sort of kid do you want him to be? He was a kid who stole a gun off Khalid.”
“Well, well,” Smudge said at last. “Told you he was a weirdo. I got an instinct for these things.”
“Another thing about Magee,” Garvie said. “He liked working with kids ’cause he could treat them how he wanted. The last kid died too.”
They all thought about that.
“So what happened here?” Smudge asked. “I mean, in the end nothing got nicked, did it? The coats are still down there.”
Garvie passed the flashlight to Felix. “Lean down far as you can and tell us what you see, Felix.”
Felix poured himself into the hole, clung upside down to the skylight’s rim on two feet and three fingers, and swept the light around with his free hand.
“No bones at all,” Smudge commented. “And funny little claws too, instead of fingers.”
“What am I looking for?” Felix called up.
“The girder under the roof. See anything?”
“Now I can. Marlow Gecko, looks like.”
“What, a lizard?” Smudge said. “A lizard up here? I thought they didn’t like heights.”
“It’s a type of rope,” Garvie said. “Magee must have left it here. What else, Felix? What about the girder below? In the dust.”
There was a pause, then Felix’s voice came up again. “Oh yeah. Footprints. Going along. All the way along. And then … ”
There was a silence. “Then what?” Smudge called down.
Felix flipped himself lightly out of the skylight and sat down next to them. He squinted at Garvie sideways. “Then they stop,” he said. “There’s just shuffle marks after that. And then the edge.”
They all considered this.
“Yeah, but,” Smudge said, “what’s it all mean?”
For a moment Garvie looked at him, thinking how fast Zuzana would have worked it out. He said, “You know what they were up to, don’t you, Felix? Talk us through it.”
Felix scratched his long nose; nodded. “Straightforward enough. Get in through the skylight. Grab the furs. Get out through the fire escape.”
“Hang on,” Smudge said. “What do you mean, ‘Get out through the fire escape’? It’s locked. We tried it.”
“It’s a fire escape, Smudge. Key’s on the inside, in a little red box next to the door. Once you’re in, you can get out. You’re meant to get out.”
“All right. But what do you mean, ‘Grab the furs’? Slippy things like that slipping all over the place. Bulky, too. How many furs do you think you could carry down that old fire escape, Mr. Boneless?”
“Obviously they had something to carry them in.”
“Like gardening sacks,” Garvie said. “Magee runs a landscaping business on the side.”
Felix nodded. “No one’s carrying anything down the fire escape, Smudge. They’d bag them up here and lob them down. Collect them at the bottom.”
“All right. That’s like … a plan. But what happened really?”
They both looked at Garvie. He said, “Something went wrong. You saw that, didn’t you, Felix? What do you think happened?”
Felix puffed out his cheeks, blew. “I reckon he let the kid through the skylight down onto the girder, and the kid goes along, nearly to the end, and then … I reckon he must’ve slipped.”
He looked at Garvie. Garvie nodded. “And?”
Felix thought. “The alarm. Either it was going off already, or he set it off when he fell.”
“And?”
Felix thought again. “He panicked,” he said at last. “Otherwise he could have carried on. It was two o’clock, wasn’t it, just as the police change shifts. Classic maneuver.”
Garvie thought again how much faster Zuzana would have been working it out.
“And then?” he said helpfully.
“They lost too much time with the kid scrabbling about at the end of the rope. The police were on their way. They had to pull out in a rush. They got the skylight back in place, but they must’ve been all over the shop. Magee left his rope behind, dropped the sacks at the bottom of the fire escape. Then they went down the access road to the storage facility. Where that vagrant saw them.”
“So Vinnie was telling the truth after all,” Smudge said. “But why did they go in the storage facility?”
“Magee has a unit there,” Garvie said.
Felix said, “Makes sense. They’d have opened it up on their way here so they could get the stuff in quick before the police arrived. Very neat. They must have gone back to lock it up.” He looked at Garvie. “And then … something else went wrong. For Gimpel anyway. Just before Plod turned up. Some sort of bother.”
Smudge said, “You mean Magee went nuts with him ’cause of what happened up here.”
Garvie said, “The last kid died too.”
“Talk about evil scumbag,” Felix said. “And now they’ve let him out. He’ll be doing a runner any day, I bet.”
Smudge nodded. “Find some other kid to work his evil on.”
Garvie looked at his watch. “Got to get back. Don’t want to be missed. I only made it tonight ’cause Uncle Len got called out. Felix, give me a hand with the skylight.”
Ten minutes later they were walking back down the access road. The rain had held off, but the sky was creased with clouds like an old blanket. Garvie seemed lost in thought.
Smudge said conversationally, “Had Alex on the horn today.”
Garvie gave him a look.
“Banging on about Zuza. Bit one-track, that boy, to be honest.”
Garvie hesitated. “What did he say?”
“She’s been acting funny.”
“Funny?”
“Yeah. Going off seeing other guys. He’s been following her, see where she goes on her own. You know what he’s like.”
Garvie said nothing to that. They went through the hole in the fence and across the ditch and entered the scrub on the far side, and began to push their way along the narrow path.
“Kept going on about Blinkie,” Smudge called. He spat something. “I hate plants, don’t you? Alex seems to think Zuza’s got a thing for him.”
“A thing for Blinkie?” Garvie said sharply. “Nonsense.”
“Don’t misunderestimate the female psychology, Garv.”
He shouted back, “I’m telling you, Smudge. It’s not happening. All right?”
“Bit baffled myself, mate. But I don’t know. I was chatting with her the other day. Though it was more like she was chatting with me, to be honest. I mean, she came up to me. Or at any rate I’d only just called her over, and—”
In the darkness Garvie stopped and turned, and Felix bumped into him, and Smudge bumped into Felix.
“Listen to me,” Garvie said angrily. “It’s Alex and Blinkie we ought to be worried about. Unless you want to see him dealing again. All that about her liking Blinkie is a hundred-percent nonsense.”
“But Zuza said—”
“And stop calling her Zuza! She’s not into Blinkie, all right? What do you take her for? Listen. I know. All right? I know exactly what’s going on. And what isn’t going on.”
After he stopped shouting there was a shuffling in the bushes, then silence. Garvie stood there a moment, then turned and went on rapidly until he reached the old road on the other side, and headed down it, Smudge and Felix following a little way behind, exchanging looks as they went.
At the underpass they caught him up.
With the air of someone deliberate
ly changing the subject, Felix said, “I’ve been thinking, Garv. About Gimpel.”
“What about him?”
“How funny it is, him turning out to be a thief. I mean, it’s not for everyone.”
“No, Felix. Only a chosen few.”
Felix relaxed and the three of them walked on a little way side by side. “I’m not sure he was thinking of turning pro, though,” Garvie added.
Felix nodded. “You’re right. Probably would have been just a one-off. I mean, obviously it didn’t work out that well. And besides—”
Garvie came to a sudden standstill.
“Garv?”
Garvie stared at him fiercely. “What did you just say?”
Felix looked nervous. “Nothing. Just that it didn’t work out so well for Gimpel.”
“No, the other bit.”
“Nothing, Garv. I just said it was probably a one-off.”
Garvie said nothing. Stared at him in disgust.
“Smudge,” Felix said out of the corner of his mouth, “this is your fault; you put him in a bad mood with that stuff about Zuza.”
“Not my fault I can’t shake her off,” Smudge grumbled.
“It’s nothing to do with Smudge. Or Zuza. Nothing to do with you, Felix. It’s me.”
“What about you?”
Garvie shook his head in despair. He groaned. “I’ve been so stupid. It’s as if I’ve forgotten how to think.”
And without saying more he left, and they watched him striding down Bulwarks Lane. As he went he took out his phone, and they heard him say, “Alex? Alex, mate? Call me soon as you get this. Please.” And then he was gone.
The weather continued fine, wide blue skies and golden light. With its warmth it bathed Five Mile, the estate, the dusty claustrophobic buildings of Marsh; it soaked into the thick margin of foliage that bordered Top Pitch, chestnut and elm trees, elder and brambles growing in tangled green profusion, a bushy warren of wild flowers, sun spots, purple shadows, and smokers’ dens.
“Why do we meet here?” Zuzana asked, looking around. “Hidden away like this?”
Leaning against an elm tree, Garvie shrugged; blew smoke upward. “No reason. I was just taking time off after Computer Science.”