Secret Asset

6

It was the three men on the street that alarmed her. Doris Feldman was used to all sorts of comings and goings in that shop across the road with all those strange young men—how oddly they dressed; she would never get used to that—but they were as regular as clockwork, and it was always quiet by seven-thirty in the evening.

Doris lived in the small flat above the ironmonger’s shop she still owned and ran in Haringey. As she was fond of saying, she was London-born and London-bred, though she was happy to acknowledge that her father had been foreign, arriving from Minsk when he was barely in his teens, with a sack of gewgaws over one shoulder. He’d had a market stall at first, selling flowers, before graduating to fruit and veg, then when he’d scrimped and saved enough to lease a property of his own, it was the hardware business he went into. “There’s money in nails,” he’d liked to say, even in the years when nails were literally ten a penny.

Never married, Doris inherited the shop when her parents died, which meant nothing much more than some stock and the long working hours needed to sell it. The growth of DIY stores had almost been the death of her small shop, but in this dense and not very prosperous part of North London, not everyone had a car, and her long opening hours and her encyclopaedic knowledge of the stock she kept in the boxes, drawers and shelves of her shop attracted sufficient custom to keep her afloat. “Mrs. Feldman, you are the Selfridges of Capel Street,” one of her customers once told her, and she’d liked that.

But it didn’t help her sleep. Why was it as she entered first her seventh and then her eighth decade, she seemed to have more rather than less trouble getting through the night? Come two o’clock she’d tend to find herself waking slowly until her mind felt clear as a bell. She’d toss and turn, put on the light, turn on the radio, turn off the light and toss and turn some more, then give up—and finally get out of bed. She’d put on her dressing gown and heat up the kettle while Esther, her cat (and almost as old as Doris, at least in cat years), slept in her basket by the stove like a baby.

Which was why, this Friday night—Friday? What was she thinking of? It was Saturday already, three o’clock in the morning—Doris Feldman sat in the armchair warming her hands on her mug and looking out of the window at the street. How this neighbourhood had changed, though oddly, perhaps, it was quieter than it used to be. In her childhood there had been her kind, of course, immigrants from Russia and Poland, mixed with the Irish, who sometimes cut up rough, especially on a weekend night after too much time in the pub. Then after the war, the coloureds. Decent people many of them, but goodness they could make a noise, with their music and dancing and life lived on the street.

Then most recently, the Asians moved in, really the strangest of them all. Quiet people, well behaved—closing time for them meant locking up their newsagent shops, not for them a night out in the pubs. They certainly seemed to pray a lot—she had long got used to seeing the men going to their mosques at all sorts of hours. They’d think nothing of closing their shops right in the middle of the day. But not the bookshop across the street—someone always seemed to be there. People in and out all day long, though they didn’t seem to buy a lot of books.

Yet at night the shop was closed, and there was never any sign of life in the building. So this Friday night as she sipped her mug of tea she sat bolt upright when she saw three men suddenly appear in the street and gather in a huddle by the front door of the bookshop. They were dressed in dark clothes, jeans and anoraks, and one man wore a leather jacket. You couldn’t see their faces. One of them pointed towards the back of the building, another shook his head and then as two of the men stood on either side, looking up and down the street, the third man was right up against the door—what was he doing—fiddling with the lock? Then suddenly Doris saw the door open and the next minute all three men had slipped inside, and the door closed quickly behind them.

Doris sat there, astonished, briefly wondering if she had seen the men or just imagined them. Nonsense, she told herself, my body’s getting old but I’m not going cuckoo. She had never spoken to the bookshop owner, didn’t even know his name, but someone was breaking into his shop. Or maybe not—maybe they were friends. Didn’t look like it. Up to no good, at this time of night she was sure. Plotting, she wouldn’t be surprised, like so many of these young men. She shuddered at the thought, and it was from a sense of duty as well as concern that she got up and dialled 999.

Inside the shop the three men worked quickly. Two went upstairs, and, making sure the curtains were tightly drawn, searched with a torch until they found, at the very back, a square trapdoor in the ceiling which gave access to the loft. Standing on a chair, one of the men pushed away the trapdoor and hoisted himself up with a boost from the man below, who then handed up to him a small tool case. Holding his torch low so it wouldn’t accidentally send light outside, the man in the attic examined the beams until he found one directly above a corner of the large room below. Within sixty seconds he was drilling, a slow process since the drill was underpowered to keep its decibel level low.

Suddenly his colleague was standing below the open trapdoor, speaking urgently. “That was Special Branch. The local police have had a call from a neighbour, someone across the street. She saw us entering.”

“Bugger. What are they going to do?”

“They want to know if we’re done in here. There’s still time to leave before the car gets sent.”

“No. I need at least ten more minutes.”

“Okay, I’ll tell them.”

He went away and the man in the attic resumed drilling. He had just come through the beam and was about to put the probe and microscopic camera gently down the hole he’d drilled when his colleague came back. “The car’s on its way, but they know we’re here. They’re going to go and speak to the neighbour who called. Apparently it’s some old lady.”

“Okay. That shouldn’t be too much of a problem.”

And ten minutes later, having carefully brushed away the sawdust made by his drill, and carefully closing over the small drilled hole with filler, the man jumped down and, getting up on the chair, replaced the trapdoor. “I’m done up there. Anything else need doing?”

His colleague shook his head. “I’ve got two mikes in—one’s in the plug in the corner, and the other’s in the back of the VCR.”

“Have you checked them with Thames?”

“Yes, they can hear them loud and clear. Come on.” They went downstairs and collected their other colleague, who had put three listening devices in place, one above the inside of the shop’s front door, another in the owner’s small office, and a third in the stockroom in the back. Now even the faintest whisper made on either floor would be heard in Thames House.

Across the street, Doris Feldman poured hot water onto a tea bag for the nice young policeman who had rung her bell. He knew all about the strange goings-on across the street, and had even suggested they might want her help. She didn’t see the same three figures slip out of the front door of the bookshop and disappear into the night. But by then Doris was no longer worried.