Steven Savile - Silver

“Nothing to concern yourself about, sir,” the shortest of the two uniforms said, slamming the car door. He locked it. Trust in their fellow man, it seemed, had yet to reach the local police force.

“It’s a bit hard, sounds like all hell is breaking loose,” Frost spread his arms wide, taking in the whole cacophony.

“Yeah, some sort of outage in the power grid shorted all the alarm circuits. I don’t pretend to understand, mate. I just do what the gaffer tells me,” the taller uniform said, smiling almost conspiratorially.

“Ahh,” Frost said, as though that made perfect sense. “Well you have a good night, guys.”

“You too.”

“You know the deal, no rest for the wicked.”

He went in search of the Monster.

Finding the warehouse wasn’t difficult. Neither was getting close to it. Getting in was a different matter.

The Canning Docks were one of several along the river. Once upon a time, the river had been the heart of the city. While the river thrived, the city thrived. It was a symbiotic relationship. Every import and every export came in somewhere along the waterfront. Huge cranes still towered over the riverbanks, relics of a bygone age when the men in this country had worked with their hands and industry had been dominated by shipbuilding, coal mining and the old trades. But there wasn’t enough trade coming up the river to keep all eleven of the river’s docks working. The flour mill didn’t grind flour anymore; the side of the building advertised itself as The Oxo Gallery. When Frost was growing up Oxo had made gravy granules. It seemed odd to him that now that it was being rebranded as an arbiter of beauty.

It had been decades since the last ship had been built on the river. Likewise it had been decades since the men of the city walked with their heads up, filled with pride and accomplishment. Now their football teams gave them their identity and sense of self-worth. With the collapse of the traditional industries, too many men, in their forties at the time, had never worked again and had finally died, stripped of dignity, beaten by life. Other industries had risen up, of course, ones where these men needed to be able to answer phones and use computers and do the kinds of things the girls in the office used to do. They weren’t making things. They weren’t creating. And because of that, they weren’t happy.

To the left of the access road the iron gates of the steel mill had closed for the last time fifteen years ago. Now the huge shell of the building was in the process of being converted into luxury apartments for kids with too much money and not enough sense. The bonded warehouses that had been the heart of the import trade were boarded up, windows blinded. Inside, no doubt, the floorboards had been torn up and the lead and copper piping stripped and sold on the black market.

Frost slowed the Ducati to a gentle 15 mph, crawling through the labyrinth of alleys around the docklands. It was as though he had driven into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. None of the buildings had survived intact. Walls had crumbled. Bricks wept dust. The cranes might have been the towering exoskeletons of Martian war machines. The tarmac petered out into hard-packed dirt in places. Weeds had started to grow up through the cracks, nature reclaiming this part of the city for itself. He could hear the crash and retreat of the tidal river. He could see the silhouette of th Nicholls Tobacco Warehouse ahead of him. It must have been an impressive building back in the day. Now there was something tragic about the figure it cut in the night. For all its size, for all of its glorious red brick symmetry and its history, it was every bit as redundant as the men who had worked so hard building the ships, hauling the containers, beating out the sheet metal, and grinding the flour. It was a remnant of another time. So perhaps it was good that it was going to find another life, Frost thought, pulling up alongside the gates.

An ostentatious padlock secured the chains that secured the gate. He found it wryly amusing. The chain links of the fence could be bent apart with bare hands and a bit of determination, but the padlock would surrender to no man.

For a building that was supposedly abandoned, there were an awful lot of tire tracks leading to and from the gates. Frost drove on. He had a bad feeling about the place and wasn’t about to go walking in through the front door.

He found a dark, secluded spot out of sight of the warehouse’s windows and dropped the kickstand. He took off his helmet and hung it on the handlebars. He called Lethe.

“So what can you tell me about this place?”

“Not much, to be honest. Like I said, it’s scheduled for redevelopment. The officer of record for the development is one Miles Devere. Yep, the same Miles Devere who was the last number to call James’ wife’s cell phone. So we’ve got a nice little coincidence there.”

“No such thing as coincidence, my little ray of sunshine. What we’ve got is a link. We may not have both sides of the puzzle, but we’ve got the bit in the middle. Tell me more.”

“Devere Holdings has its fingers in a dozen pies all across the city. The man’s something of a property magnet. He’s bought up a handful of the old warehouses and mill buildings along the docks, and not just Canning Dock. He’s got plans in with the planning department for the development of an entire Docklands Village. We’re talking multi-million investment in urban regeneration and land renewal here. He’s claiming huge subsidies from the authorities too. He bought the Nicholls building for a one pound consideration and the promise that he would invest in local labor to rebuild it. That one pound has already brought him in over thirty-three million in government aid, and he’s not had to lift a finger.”

“Got to love big business,” Frost said. “So what, if anything, does Miles Devere have to do with this?”

“Maybe nothing. Like I said, it could just be a coincidence. I’m still looking for the link between Tristan James and Devere. There has to be one. But as of now, I’ve got nothing.”

“Maybe Devere hired him to excavate something?” Frost mused, thinking aloud. What other use would a property developer have for an archeologist?

“Looking for a pirate ship run aground on the muddy riverbank?” Lethe said, chuckling.

“Maybe not.” In the distance, Frost heard a dog bark. A moment later he saw the dark shape of one man and his dog walking through the debris-strewn yard of the Nicholls building. The man’s flashlight roved across the darkness erratically. He hadn’t seen the Monster approaching, but the dog had picked up Frost’s scent. It knew he wasn’t supposed to be there.

Frost crept away from the bike, crouching low to make his silhouette as small as possible. The dog’s bark grew more aggressive the closer it came toward the chain-link fence. He had two choices, get on the bike and get out of there, or shut the dog up. Frost braced himself against a concrete pillar. He watched the beam of light skip across the rough ground. The dog, a sharp-snouted Doberman, strained on its leash, pawing at the ground. Frost eased his way around the pillar, making sure there was as much concrete as possible between him and the devil dog.

The guard said something into his radio. Frost couldn’t hear what. He didn’t need to. The man knew someone was out there. He’d be assuming it was kids playing in the grounds of the disused buildings. Frost closed his eyes and listened. He kept his breathing regular: deep and slow. Gravel and broken stones scuffed, too close for comfort. He didn’t dare move.

What did a disused warehouse need with this kind of security? He hadn’t seen any sign of building materials having been moved onto the site, so there was nothing worth stealing. The dog barked again, deep in its throat. It was the aggressive sound of a hunter that knew its quarry was near. The flashlight beam played across the ground less than five feet from his hiding place.