The Elephant Girl (Choc Lit) (41 page)

Strange, he thought.

On the top landing he knocked on Lee’s door. After a moment there was a muffled reply, and he pushed it open just as Lee was sitting up in bed, rubbing his eyes.

‘Whassup? Fay okay?’

‘Concussion and a fractured hip. Plus some other trauma, but they reckon she’ll recover.’

‘G-good. I’m glad.’ Lee swung his legs out of bed and reached for a pair of tracksuit bottoms from the back of a chair.

‘You haven’t seen Helen and Charlie anywhere, have you?’ Jason asked.

‘They w-were here earlier. Didn’t they c-come back with you?’

‘Shortly before me, but they must’ve gone again.’

‘It’s in the m-middle of the night!’

‘You’re telling me.’ Back on the landing he recalled the nurse’s message from Fay.
They’re up to something.

Probably. But what? And where were they at half past one in the morning?

A feeling of dread crept up on him. Had they discovered something and decided to look for themselves? It was exactly the sort of thing Charlie would do, just go for it and bugger the consequences. And Helen? He knew the answer to that. If she thought she was getting closer to what she needed to know, whether real or imagined, that anger he’d always sensed in her, lurking right below the surface, would propel her forward despite any dangers. He’d felt deeply uncomfortable about the meeting with the dog owner in the pub, but nothing like he was feeling now.

Or had it been the other way around? Had trouble come after
her
? Cold sweat trickled between his shoulder blades, and his heart was pounding.

He returned to the kitchen where he’d left his phone and dialled Helen’s number, but it went to voicemail after a couple of rings. Either she couldn’t hear it, or she’d switched her phone off. Hesitating for a moment, he weighed up his concern for her safety against the invasion of her privacy, then sent the text message beacon he’d configured her smartphone tracker to listen out for. Obviously it wouldn’t work if she really had switched hers off, but he hoped she hadn’t. And if she realised he was tracking her by GPS, he hoped she’d understand his reasons. He waited a few minutes, then finally her phone pinged back its location.

‘Yes!’ He punched the air, relieved. ‘I’m a genius!’

Then he saw the location and frowned. His father used to have a warehouse almost in that spot, but how accurate the tracker was he couldn’t tell.

A coincidence? He didn’t think so.

The moment had come where his loyalties would be put to the test, just as Helen had predicted, but she’d been wrong in assuming he would hesitate.

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?’

‘Did you see a box on the wall?’

‘No, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.’

‘Hear anything?’

Charlie shook her head. ‘I suppose not.’

‘Look,’ said Helen, ‘do you think you could give me a hand here? Otherwise I’ll cut myself when I pull my leg out.’

Charlie pulled her sleeve over her hand to protect it against the glass, and removed the more vicious fragments. Then she lifted Helen’s leg out of the hole. ‘Okay, I’m impressed,’ she said, ‘but next time, check it isn’t double-glazed, all right? You were lucky today.’

Helen grinned. ‘You’re just jealous.’

‘Wha’ever.’ Charlie put her hand through the hole and turned the latch on the inside of the door, and it swung open. They were met by a curious smell, a mixture of oil and wood chippings, spices mingled with the mustiness of clothes kept in a cupboard for too long.

They found themselves on a small landing, with a loo on one side and an office on the other, and a narrow set of steps leading down to the main part of the warehouse.

A large torch sat in a recharger by the door. Helen grabbed it and flicked it on. The cone of light illuminated a path among the boxes stacked high, and she was reminded of one of those cramped grocery shops in India which sold just about everything.

Everywhere a jumble of vastly different items spilled from cardboard boxes and wooden crates: clothes, cushion covers, rugs, exotic spices, kitchenware, juice cartons, tinned food, a variety of statuettes and a whole box full of tacky plastic flowers. There were even several suites of wicker chairs and tables stacked high on top of each other against one wall. It was an Aladdin’s cave for shoppers who liked cheap and tasteless imports.

And then there were the two crates standing upright in the centre of the warehouse.

Charlie pointed to the crates. ‘There’s the delivery. Wonder what it is. You can hardly smuggle something as big as that, so maybe that’s not it.’

‘Did the e-mail say anything about smuggling?’

‘No, but I still want to see what it is.’ Charlie found a screwdriver in a cardboard box full of brittle-looking tools and used it to lever the lid off the front of the crate. The sound of the nails grinding against the wood as the lid reluctantly gave way set Helen’s teeth on edge.

‘Could you hurry up, please? I really don’t like this.’

‘Keep your hair on. Didn’t you say your aunt was in Amsterdam?’

‘And the warehouse owner?’ said Helen.

‘We’ll be fine.’

It was cold in the warehouse, and Helen wrapped her arms around herself. ‘We won’t find anything, you know. If it’s another one of Letitia’s “copies”, we can’t prove it. Not unless an army of antiques experts are let loose on it.’

‘Don’t be so negative.’ Charlie loosened a last difficult nail, then tossed the bent screwdriver aside with a frown. Together they lifted the lid away, and Helen dug out the packaging material. The finely shredded wood almost crumpled in her hands, and her throat went dry from dust and something else, anticipation perhaps.

Inside was an Indian sandstone pillar a little under five feet high and two feet wide, shaped like the Hindu god Shiva. She ran a hand over the weathered surface and experienced a sudden longing for India, for Joe and her job at The Sundowner. Stepping back, she clutched her mother’s elephant pendant and the silver medallion Mamaji had given her. Everything had seemed so much simpler back then.

‘Here’s a different one.’ Charlie had opened the next crate with another screwdriver, revealing a second statue, this one the Hindu elephant god sitting in the lotus position on his throne. As Charlie removed the lid, the statue rocked ominously on its plinth.

‘Careful,’ said Helen, ‘it might topple.’ She found a piece of wood and wedged it underneath the crate.

‘What are they?’

‘Statues from a Hindu temple. Probably part of a pillar. That one there.’ Helen pointed to the first crate, ‘is the god Shiva, the destroyer. This one’s Ganesh, god of intellect and wisdom, and my favourite. Some also call him the Remover of Obstacles.’

‘That should keep him busy. You seem to know a lot about it.’

‘I lived in India for two years. It’s hard not to become fascinated.’

‘Really? You never told me.’

Helen shrugged. It seemed so long ago now.

‘So, are they real?’ asked Charlie.

‘Well, they’re not Scotch mist, are they?’

‘No, I meant, are they genuine?’

Helen chewed her lip. ‘I think they are. A while back, maybe a year ago, some ancient pillars were stolen from a temple. There was a big hoo-hah about it, but they never found them. Probably because they’d been smuggled out of the country immediately, perhaps by a company like the one that owns this warehouse. There may even have been some bribery involved. It was on TV.’

‘You speak Hindi too? Is there no end to your talents?’

‘I don’t. Someone summarised it for me.’

‘Are they valuable?’

‘They’re irreplaceable to the people who lost them. It’s not about money, it’s about belief.’ Helen let go of the amulet and the pendant, which felt suddenly hot in her hand. ‘They’re very old, ninth century I think, so, yes, in monetary terms they’d fetch a fortune from a collector.’

Charlie snorted scornfully. ‘If it’s such a high-profile case in India, Letitia’s running one hell of a risk. They’re way too recognisable. Even she can’t be that stupid.’

‘Who isn’t that stupid?’

Chapter Thirty

Letitia’s cut-glass voice rang out across the warehouse just as the overhead lights came on, and they froze into living statues. On the steps behind Letitia were two men, her chauffeur and someone Helen hadn’t seen before, a short, rotund Indian man with a moustache. Perhaps the owner of the warehouse.

Whoever he was, his bulk was blocking their only way out.

Charlie stepped closer to Helen, clutching the screwdriver in her hand, and Helen felt the cold metal against her trouser leg.

‘Don’t,’ she whispered.

Charlie ignored her. ‘We know all about your scam,’ she shouted.

Letitia came towards them, all perfume, pearls and Hermes handbag. ‘Do you indeed? That’s really not terribly convenient.’

‘We know how you’ve been at it for years, selling off stolen antiques as copies and pocketing the change.’

‘Shut up, Charlie,’ Helen hissed.

‘What an imagination you have. I’m just a businesswoman.’

The Indian man came up beside Letitia and stabbed a chubby finger at them. ‘You
know
these burglars? Who are they?’

‘It’ll be all right, Mr Singh. I’ll handle it. One of them’s my niece, the other …’ Letitia made a dismissive gesture.

‘It’s all on your computer,’ Charlie continued, undaunted. ‘There’s nothing you can do. Right now copies are winging their way to every agency I could think of. The Met, FBI, Interpol, they all know what you’re up to. Probably on their way here now.’