Dolly and Wolf had melted into a stag party crowd at the top end of Barnet Road and then she’d hailed a cab toward Liverpool Street Station. As the cab drove south, Richmond’s unmarked police car passed them going the other way, doing a circuit of the immediate area. Dolly smiled as she stroked little Wolf, who was curled up by her side. She could feel the adrenalin coursing through her body. She liked the way it made her feel close to her Harry.
In the rearview mirror, the cabbie watched the way her eyes had followed Richmond’s car as it passed. He’d had enough people in the back of his cab to know that Dolly was either on the wrong side of the law or was on her way home to her husband after an evening with her lover — and Dolly’s age suggested to him that she was dabbling in criminality.
Unaware of being watched, Dolly was mumbling to herself: ‘We showed him, Wolf, didn’t we, darling? Yes, we did. We showed him!’
At Liverpool Street Station, Dolly paid with the exact change, cash she’d put into her coat pocket for speed. Preparation would be everything from here on in. After a quick look round to make certain she hadn’t been followed, Dolly carried Wolf down the backstreets to the big arches behind the station. Here there was a row of lock-ups, mostly used by British Rail for storage, but some hired out to car mechanics for repairs.
The alley was dark and dingy with no external lighting, and cold, each building shading the next from natural daylight. Dolly slowly progressed down the line of archways. She took her time; she couldn’t see what she might be stepping in, and her eyes had to adjust to the darkness. She was looking for number fifteen. Some arches had no doors on them and the insides were huge caverns of dripping water, cold, damp and musky-smelling like underground cellars. Old, wrecked and rusting cars stood silent like ghosts of the past, windscreens shattered, wheels gone and doors left open. She passed wrecked car after wrecked car, getting more and more filthy, and laddering her tights on a jagged old bumper. In one unused archway, a group of winos lay in a drunken stupor by a makeshift fire in an old dustbin. They remained oblivious to her presence as she walked past.
Eventually Dolly stopped by a green sliding door. Removing the keys Harry had left from her coat pocket, she tried one of them in the padlock. She almost dropped Wolf when the doors suddenly moved toward her an inch or two and a dog with a terrifying growl and a high-pitched bark slammed into the door from the inside. Wolf began to bark, making the dog behind the doors even more aggressive. Dolly covered Wolf’s mouth with her hand; she could hear the dog’s chains rattle as it continued to hurl itself frantically against the door. She peered upward and realized she was at number thirteen. Scuttling toward the next archway, she hoped the dog hadn’t attracted attention.
A faded and grimy number 15 was scratched into the paintwork of a small entrance door built into the larger wooden doors of the lock-up. Harry’s secret place. Dolly tried one key, then another and the small door swung open.
Inside the large, cavernous room, it was eerily silent until the echoing thunder from the trains above filled the space. Dolly closed the door behind her, put Wolf down and switched on a small pocket torch.
By the light of the thin beam she slowly edged forward and, as Wolf sniffed about by the old ghost cars, wagging his tail, she felt sure he could smell Harry. He seemed so excited at the prospect of seeing his master again. When Wolf looked up at her as if to ask: ‘so, where is he?’ her heart sank and she felt Harry’s loss all over again.
This was a ‘man’s place,’ a million miles from the pristine opulence of their Potters Bar home. She could almost smell the sweat and the hard work and the testosterone as she imagined Harry’s men hanging on his every word while he held court. For what seemed like an age, Dolly couldn’t move; she’d never been to this lock-up and she was frightened of what she might find hidden deep in the darkness. Dolly had lived with the knowledge that she’d find out some secret about Harry one day, but she always imagined it would be a younger lover. He was so incredibly handsome and even the best men in the world are suckers for flattery. But what was inside this lock-up... this was a big secret to keep.
As she ventured forward, eyes focused on the furthest dark corner, she didn’t see the puddle filled with thick, slimy, oil-streaked mud and swore as she felt some of the brown water seep onto her feet. She looked down at her ruined shoes and saw Wolf sitting in the middle of the puddle, tail wagging. His little paws now had black, oily socks.
Dolly made her way to the back of the garage, toward a set of large wooden interior doors, also with a smaller interlocking door. Opening it, Dolly switched on the overhead neon strip lights. As they blinked into life, she was surprised to see the annex was much cleaner than the rest of the lock-up. A couple of old wrecks had been pushed against the wall and in the center of the room was a medium-sized van covered with a tarpaulin. As she pulled off the tarpaulin her hand slipped and she winced as she broke a nail. Wolf darted under the van and began frantically digging at the floor — Dolly knelt beside him, ripping her tights again, and looked where he was digging.
Below the loose concrete were slats of wood. Lifting them away, she revealed a two-foot by one-foot hole in the ground containing something wrapped in brown sacking. She hauled the package out and opened it to find two sawed-off shotguns. The handgun in Harry’s safety deposit box was the first time she’d known for certain that he’d used guns, but it hadn’t been a shock to her. In fact, her pulse had raced at the thought that he’d left her something to protect herself with, even after he’d gone. But these guns. These guns were different. These guns weren’t for protection; they were for committing armed robberies. In that moment, Dolly felt closer to Harry than she’d done at any other moment since his death. He’d given her the keys to this place and was allowing her, at long last, to know everything. What Dolly now did with all of this information was up to her and her alone.
Without touching the shotguns, Dolly wrapped and replaced them in their hole in the ground. She slowly stood. It’s all here, she thought as she looked around; everything Harry used in his robberies — the cars, the vans, the cutting tools, the gloves, the shotguns. This was all hers now. Dolly reached into the pocket of her oil-stained coat, brought out her diary and opened it to the page of shorthand notes she’d made after leaving the bank. Everything Harry needed to commit the next robbery was in those ledgers, in her diary and in this lock-up. She clicked her pen open and drew a strong, bold tick next to her note, ‘2 S-O’; two sawed-offs. As she smiled down at that tick, she could almost feel Harry smiling with her. ‘That’s my girl,’ he’d say.
Dolly walked through the rest of the cavernous, dank, warehouse. It was enormous. She headed toward a small room at the far end, which looked as though it had been built out of old partitions from a legal office. The once polished wood was now badly peeling and the cracked windows were cobwebbed and dusty. She turned the handle on the grubby door and stepped inside. Looking down at her hand, she saw that she’d picked up oily fingerprints in almost the exact same pattern as her own. She imaged they were Harry’s actual fingertips touching hers.
The office was stark: a sink and a small portable gas stove, a desk, a couple of mismatched wooden chairs and numerous girlie pictures stuck to the wall. Used mugs and moldy half-eaten biscuits told Dolly that this was where Harry and his team must have planned the robbery that went so terribly wrong. Dolly picked up the dirty mugs and took them over to the filthy sink. She turned the taps on and they made a knocking sound as the pressure built, trying to force the water through the pipes. Suddenly a brown rusty liquid spurted out, bouncing off the porcelain and onto her coat, causing her to jump back. She dropped the mugs into the sink, cracking two and snapping the handle off the third — three broken mugs: Harry’s, Terry’s and Joe’s. The tears Dolly had held just beneath the surface for so long welled up and, in the privacy of Harry’s office, she allowed them to flow. The relief was so overwhelming that she felt lightheaded and weak, gripping the sink for support. She fought the emotions but it was no good; the floodgates were opened and there was no closing them. Her devastating sadness at losing Harry was sapping her strength and she struggled to keep herself upright as she gripped the cold porcelain sink. With her head bowed, she could see Wolf sitting at her muddy, oily feet and she suddenly remembered a moment when Boxer had been at his lowest ebb, living in the gutter, and Harry had pulled him out. ‘All I see is dog shit,’ Boxer had said to Harry through his drunken haze. ‘Wherever I look, all I see is dog shit.’ Harry had lifted Boxer’s head and replied, ‘Then look up, Boxer, my old mate. If your head’s down, dog shit’s all you can see. So, look up.’ Of course Harry hadn’t been Boxer’s mate at all, but he always knew the right thing to say.