The Unquiet heart

THREE

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.

“Tommy, I think you’re right. There must be inside help. Tell me, is there any pattern to this? Do they come on particular nights or weekends or what?”

“They come when I gets a new load in, a good load, silk, or somethin’ they can flog for the most bleedin’ money, that’s when!” He lit another fag from the end of the current one.

“OK. When’s the next good load due?”

“Four days from now. Thursday morning the Clever Girl comes in from Holland.

She’s out of Constantinople through the Med. She drops half the load in the Hague and the other half here. Nice stuff. The best. The bastards will be queuing up to nick it!” He thumped the wooden gate so that it shuddered.

“Not this time, Tommy. Maybe not this time. If I can have a crack at it. Me and a few mates of mine will spend the night here.”

“I’ve tried that myself. Nothing. Not even a bleedin’ mouse.”

“Of course not. You’re not hard to spot, Tommy. They just wait for you to give up and then it’s back to business.”

He was nodding furiously and smoke was coming out of his mouth like the Royal Scot. “I knows, I knows. What you gonna do, then?”

“I don’t want you to tell anyone, not even your foreman. Not even your wife!”

“So what’s the plan?”

“Some of my mates were Special Services…”

Back at the office I phoned the landlord of the George and left a message for Midge, one of my part-time, as-and-when, don’t-tell-the-taxman employees who worked for beer money and had no problem spending it. They’d been stretched in the Forces and found it hard to settle down to a proper job. Like me. Midge would get word out to the others. I needed three, though I would have preferred twenty.

I thought for a long time about making the second call. The plan I had in mind was dangerous. No, not dangerous; risky. I know Midge and co would be up for it, but why should I complicate matters by bringing a bint in on the act? A reporter at that? They would curse me black and blue. I decided to start with some small fry and see how she reacted. I picked up the phone and asked the operator to connect me to the news desk of the Daily Trumpet.

“You’ll have to speak up, Danny!”

She sounded like she was at a Rangers match. “I want you to meet a friend of mine. Mama Mary.”

“A nun?”

“Not Mother, Mama Mary. A very different line of business.” And how.

“Where?”

“Soho.”

“So she runs a whorehouse?”

“She calls it her pleasure palace.”

“You’re selling me into slavery?”

“Mama Mary has her fingers on the pulse. If it’s illegal, she knows of it.”

“The Trumpet’s favourite kind of woman.”

We agreed a time and a date, and I hung up, but my smile lasted a while longer.