I can’t quite scratch the itch just now. ‘Not sure. What about this one, day after tomorrow?215 Feathers.’
‘Must be a sex thing. Dirty old man.’
‘I mean, maybe. Would you write a sex thing in your diary if you were in hiding in your country place in fear of your life?’
Em gives a shrug, as if to say,Men. But she has something else to show me too. ‘Look at the inside back page.’
I flip to it. Crossed out, there is a series of initials – none I can identify – with sums of money appended to them.£12.4m. £7.3m. £3.8m. £9.1m.I look up. Em gives me a nod, as if to say:That’s right, Al. Now you see what the stakes are.
‘Bloody hell. What is all this? What was Davy up to?’
‘Who knows. But there was clearly a lot of money sloshing around his life. Would it be the worst thing if we managed to work out where some of it went? Even if it means asking a few awkward questions?’
‘It won’t be in stacks of fifties in his flat.’
Em shrugs. ‘Only one way to find out.’
‘The police might be there.’ But even as I say it, I know that that detective won’t have got the address from Mrs P. There was something conspiratorial about the way she told me, as if the place might contain some information that wouldn’t reflect well on Davy but which she trusted me with anyway. God knows why people put so much faith in me. Maybe I looked like her nice nephew or something.
‘I have a strange feeling I know which one of us will be going in,’ I say.
Em smiles again.
You’ve heard of ‘poor doors’, I’m sure? They’re the back entrances to the crap bits of swanky blocks of flats, the entrances reserved for you and me. You won’t be surprised to hear that Davy’s secret London flat, a high-rise ultra-prime block of converted Battersea, has a poor door and a not-so-poor door (a splen-door? A Di-oor? Needs work).
Most of the building is fancy-pants flats. I’d guess the starting-gun prices are £1m for a studio, double it if you want a couple of bedrooms. The poor doors tend to crop up when developers can’t get away with exclusively building luxe homes. The council extracts a promise that on top of, say, five hundred swish apartments for the rich, the grudging developer will include fifty – all right, forty, thirty-five once we’ve left room for the triple-height aqua-gym – normal flats for normal people.
If you’re walking into the building on the fancy side, you’re walking among people who didn’t just pay silly money – this is Battersea, everyone did that – you’re now among people who have paid the kind of cash you only ever see written on giant prop cheques from the lottery.
I saw recently aGuardianlong read all about how appalling poor doors were, because they weresegregation, and actually disgraceful when you think about it. The counterpoint: if it wasn’t for the flats they get suckers to pay big money for, most developers would be building no affordable flats at all. I’d rather they knocked up at least a few places that some poor flipping nurse or teacher or whoever might be able to afford than none. The real answer is a revolution, of course, but I haven’t the time to organise one, and even if I did, with my luck I would 100 per cent be the first one guillotined when the snake got around to its own tail.
Personally, I’m a fan of poor doors. For one thing, they offer a much more convenient route into a block of flats – far fewer cameras and gatekeepers. And there isalwaysa way of getting from the normal bit of the building to the absurdlynice bit. Might be an unadvertised staircase, might be a fire escape, but there’ll be something. For example: the developers usually build to the assumption that the eventual management company will be contracting all its cleaning out to one firm. Granted, the cleaners might be paid to spend more time polishing the swanky bits, but the same people will be scrubbing the floors. They’ll be on exactly the same crummy subcontracted wage wherever they are.
Andthatmeans I simply have to get in through the PD, work out where the cleaners’ special tunnels are, then wriggle through to the bit with the expensive, generally empty homes. Usually you won’t be noticed, and even if you are, you’ll have your hi-vis on. And once you’re in the nice bit of the building, it’s just a matter of getting through a flat’s front door.
Plus, once you’re in, you can whip off your hi-vis, walk out past the reception at the luxury door, and deliberately greet the receptionist, who will automatically fill in the blanks and assume you’re a new resident. Do that a few times and then, once you’ve nicked a pass, you can start walking in through the marble entrance, and that feels great.
This is the Al Method of Interloping Central London Prime Apartments. It’s never failed me yet. The only downside is that most flats have just one door. It’s easy to panic if you hear a key in the lock and realise you have no time whatsoever to pack up your stuff, nor a good escape method. Most windows in these places don’t open; even if they did, you could reach the ground floor in three seconds flat but you wouldn’t be in great shape to walk away.
One solution is to open the hatch to the stopcock or gas meter or whatever when you’re inside a home. It’s the barest fig leaf of an excuse, but if you’re in your hi-vis, youmightget away with telling the owner you’re here from the power company to adjust the polyphase doodah because there have been warnings from central office of a dangerous leak of gas, or electricity, or whatever. The owner will be alarmed for at least thirty seconds – you’ve put them in a hot state, just like I did with Mr Lethbridge when I introduced myself as the police – and you can use that time to clear up and clear off.
Final thing on poor doors: a few years back, the bloody developers started reading theGuardianand realising they were copping some reputational damage, so now they’ve replaced them with poorfloors. They work almost the same way: everyone comes into the building via the same hall, but the people in the really nice flats are on separate floors of the building, accessed by separate lifts. These have made my job harder, and as such I can confirm they are highly regressive and actively harmful to my radical pro-equality agenda.
Back to Dead Man Davy’s flat. Jonny’s with me this time. As before, I’ll blag; Jonny will get us into the flat itself. He’s found photos of the inside of the building on Instagram, and while I don’t recognise the keypad system on the doors, Jonny has dismissed it as almost embarrassingly off-the-shelf. He disappeared into the Tottenham Court Road electrical supply swamp for two hours, and came back with a big thumbs-up, so at least one of us is confident.
I’m nervous, but there again there’s that feeling of … what is it? Intrigue? Oh, God, I’m clearly losing it. Focus, Al. There is nothing to be interested in here except saving your own skin. The thought of staying out of prison for a murder I didn’t commit helps me concentrate.
We found the cleaning station OK, run by a harassed woman in her mid-forties who couldn’t find any record of us being booked for the afternoon shift (unsurprising), but who was so short-staffed and so used to chaotic management from above her that she was willing to hand us our kit with no questions asked. Rule 13:Play dumb.Most people are so used to dealing with idiots that if you pretend to be one, they’ll probably do everything for you out of the desire for a quiet life.
Our new boss gave us detailed instructions about which corridor to clean first, in the ‘poor’ bit of the building. My job now is to get us to the fancy half. We’re currently in the corridors, pushing our cart aimlessly and nodding like idiots at any other maintenance people we see. The other advantage is: we’re in cleaning gear, masked and gloved, so no fingerprints and no CCTV footage.
Jonny’s in a chatty mood. ‘Who’s your money on so far?’
‘What?’
‘Davy. Out of all the possibilities, who do you think did it?’
‘Jesus, Jonny, I don’t know. Probably Mr Bowling Ball, who’s apparently convinced that we’re involved somehow and is trying to track us down and murder us so we don’t blab.’
