Gordon Ferris - The Unquiet heart

“Eve, it’s a deal. If anything comes up, I’ll give you a call, OK? My rate is twenty pounds a week. Can your paper cover that?”

“Fifteen.”

“Eighteen plus expenses.”

She nodded and grinned and stretched out a hand. We shook. Like a regular business deal. She crammed her thatch under her beret again and skewered it to her head. I saw her to the door and watched her spiral down the stairs. I would have whistled as I walked back to my desk but it would have echoed after her, and she would have read too much into it.

I thought about the warehouse prospect and wondered if I should have mentioned it. I decided to see how my meeting went this afternoon. Then I might call and let her in on it. And, if I was honest, it wasn’t just about the money.

Tommy Chandler was short but wide. His barrel chest was constrained from exploding by taut red braces. He ran a warehouse in docklands that had largely escaped the bombs. Having one of the few intact depots should have been making Tommy a lot of money. In theory he was – but before he could bank any of it, it was disappearing. Tommy had rats in his warehouse, man-sized, and they were eating his goods. Tommy had called me a couple of days ago at his wits end. I’d agreed to go down and take a look.

It took three buses to get from my office near the Elephant across Tower Bridge and down Wapping High Street. I went upstairs not just to have a fag but to get a view crossing the bridge. It does your heart good to see the cranes bobbing all along the river. I know the docks got a hammering, but give or take some missing teeth in the river frontage, plenty of warehouses were back in business – one of them my prospective client’s. I got off in the Commercial Road and walked down the cobbles to Wapping High Street, glimpsing the river through bombsites as I went. Tommy’s yard was bustling; a horse and cart were backing up to the warehouse doors, while a van roared and squeezed me against the big wood gates on its way out. I had no doubt Tommy was the one shouting out orders. He took me inside.

“Why can’t the police stop it?”

Tommy snorted. His beefy hands pushed at his shirt sleeves in frustration. A permanent cigarette hung from his mouth and left a yellow trail up his short moustache.

“Fuckin’ coppers!” he wheezed. Tommy was a self-made man; he’d left behind none of the vocabulary of the docker.

“They come ’ere, and they ponce about and they fuckin’ throw their ’ands up in the air and say they can’t do nothin’. What are we paying these ponces for, that’s what I want to bleedin’ know?”

Tommy was pacing up and down a tiny glass office tucked into a corner of the great wood and brick building. He looked as if he was warming up for a bare-knuckle fight. Though if his chest was as bad as it sounded he wouldn’t make the first bell.

“What security measures have you taken, Mr Chandler?”

“It’s Tommy. Come on. I’ll show you.” He stormed out of his little office like a bull at a rodeo and we did a grand tour. He took me up ten flights of stairs to the top level. Despite his girth and his sixty-a-day habit he seemed to be breathing easier than me. Which would disappoint old Les at my gym. I was trying to get back to my levels of fitness in my army days by going to Les’s a couple of times a week. He was a welterweight contender before the war and now coached young kids from a big room above some shops in the Old Kent Road. Twenty minutes with a skipping rope and five rounds in the ring was still leaving me weak as a kitten. But it was a start. Maybe I needed to increase my fags to Tommy’s level.

We walked over to one of the floor-to-ceiling gaps and looked down on to the great worm of the river. It was a long way to the deck of the waiting ship that sat with belly open to the plundering arms of the cranes.

Cargo boats were now returning in growing numbers from around Britain and from America and the Far East. Each of the warehouses tended to specialise. Across the river at Butler’s Wharf and Jacob’s Island, sailing clippers had been landing tea and spices from the East India Company for the last hundred and fifty years. Now, squat iron hulks rode the oily swell and burped grey smoke from their funnels. On either side of Tommy stood a coal warehouse and a scrap metal trader. Tommy took in silks from abroad and sent out cottons and lace from the north to every corner of the British Empire, what was left of it.

I watched his great cranes swing and groan, and fumble deep into the metal holds like giant fishing rods. The bales were pulled in through double doors that studded the warehouse walls from river level to where we stood, five storeys up.

Groups of flat-capped men shouted and cursed below us, signing directions at the crane drivers like tic-tac men. They manhandled each haul through the doors into big barrows, then pushed them off into the building’s entrails and stored them in dark corners. It reminded me a bit of the coal mine my dad worked in, but at least these men could suck in fresh air.

I could have watched this ant heap for hours, but I was running to keep pace with Tommy. Wheezing all the way, he led me down to ground level. We scampered across the yard and emerged on Wapping High Street through huge wooden gates.

For a minute or two we watched horse-drawn carts and groaning lorries bounce along the cobbles, carrying loads around London and on up country on goods trains.

“Them horses are on the way out, you know. Bleedin’ shame. Look at them beasties. Lovely. My dad had four. Great bleedin’ Clydesdales. Big as fucking warehouses themselves.”

We turned our backs on the road and traced the route in and out, starting with the gates. They rose in solid slabs of wood twenty feet in the air and about the same in width. Tommy showed me the courtyard side of the gates where spars of metal crisscrossed and reinforced the backs. He’d had huge new padlocks fitted.

The keys were kept in a safe and only Tommy had the combination. Not even his three senior foremen had access. He pointed them out to me: Sid, a runty bloke with a set of dentures nicked from a horse; Stevie, a taller version of Tommy himself; and Albert, who’d left one of his arms behind at Dunkirk and used his hook to menace the dockers.

“An’ I’ve got a team of night watchmen that patrols the whole bleedin’ place every night of the week. And dogs loose in the yard. Alsatians that would rip your balls off and ask questions after.”

“And still…?”

“An’ still stuff gets nicked! It fuckin’ vanishes like piss on a fire, it does.

Nobody sees nothin’. Nobody hears nothin’. It’s a fuckin’ miracle. Houdini couldn’t do no better.”

I began to have my own thoughts, but wanted to hear his. “So what do you reckon?”

“If’n I knew that, sonny Jim, I wouldn’t be bleedin’ asking your expert bleedin’ advice, would I?”

“You’ve had longer to think about this than me, Tommy. I’ve got some ideas but I’d like your insights.”

He studied me with his raging eyes, and lit another fag and jammed it in the corner of his mouth. Then he fingered his braces, stained from his fat thumbs.

He pulled the elastic out and let them slap against his chest. Maybe the pain calmed him down.

“Fair ’nough. Here’s how I sees it. It’s an inside job and my own men are robbing me blind. Must have spare keys. Maybe the locksmith’s in on the act.

They just walk out the bleedin’ front door. Nex’ thing they’re floggin’ it down the lane, as bold as you like. As though their old ma had found a bit of cloth in her attic an’ didn’t have no use for it.”

His face was going purple at the thought of it. I stopped him before he blew up like a Zeppelin.