“One last trick,” Lethe said in his ear.
Frost had no idea what he meant until the first streetlight exploded in a shower of glass. Each bulb detonated in quick succession, sounding like a series of shotgun blasts. Shards of glass fell like jagged rain. Frost walked down the center of the street, feeling like some dark avenger who had stepped out of a B-movie. Lethe laughed in his ear. Darkness chased down the street, passed him and raced on. In thirty seconds the stars in the sky were suddenly so much brighter because there wasn’t a single streetlight burning in the entire city.
“I don’t want to know how you just did that,” Frost said.
“Liar,” Lethe said. “But don’t worry, I’ll let you in on the secret. All I did was redirect some electricity. It’s amazing what you can do with a computer. I overloaded the transformers and something had to give. The bulbs are built to blow. It’s cheaper than replacing the entire wiring. Looked good though, didn’t it? Give me that much, at least.”
“It looked good,” Ronan Frost agreed.
He saw two policemen getting out of a squad car. He walked across to them, pretending to be a curious resident. “Hey fellas,” Frost called out, “what’s going on?”
“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?