Page 44 of The Impossible Fortune (Thursday Murder Club Mysteries #5)

Tia keeps finding new bits of metal about her body, and apologizing each time. Coins, a Zippo cigarette lighter, earrings, a nose ring, a hair clasp.

‘A lot of it is religious,’ says Tia. ‘A lot of the jewellery.’

The security guard grunts. Tia knows that he can’t put a tick on his computer until the machine stops beeping. Just her luck there’s a new guy on today.

‘Just turn the machine off,’ says Tia. ‘Or we’ll be here all day – it’s always playing up. I won’t tell anyone.’

‘I’m not supposed to,’ says the guard.

‘Jesus made us with free will,’ says Tia.

‘I suppose so,’ says the guard, and flicks a switch. Tia walks through the metal detector again.

‘No beep,’ says Tia, and continues on her way. The guard flicks his switch back on again. And that’s why you should pay people properly.

Tia descends the ramp that takes her to the wide concrete apron surrounding the warehouse and walks over to the loading-bay doors. Is she excited? Tia guesses so. There’s a bit of adrenaline, but not as much as she is used to. Something is troubling her.

The loading-bay doors are currently wedged open because Hassan has parked his fork-lift truck directly under the closing sensors.

If a supervisor spots it, he’ll shout at Hassan and move along.

Tia walks into the warehouse and takes the two guns from her overalls.

As she passes Hassan, she slips him one of the guns, and she then makes her way to the cleaning cupboard.

She places her pass on the keypad, and the cupboard clicks open.

Tia’s pass is issued under the name ‘Tracey-Ann Corbett’ and the photo on it is not hers.

Nobody has, as yet, noticed. Mainly because no one has, as yet, looked.

She wheels out her cleaning trolley and puts her gun into one of the compartments.

Any thrill yet? Not that she can make out.

This should be the biggest score of her life?

The start of even bigger and better things, the turning point?

After this, school is out: she’s a real-life, grown-up gangster now.

Perhaps she’s nervous, and that’s taking the edge off the thrill?

She once did a painting of a horse for a school competition, and she won and was called up on stage by the deputy head, who gave her a prize.

She was so nervous standing up in front of everyone, she nearly threw up.

And now look at her. Times change; you grow up.

The delivery should be with them in the next five minutes or so and, preparation all done, Tia decides she will kill some time by doing some actual cleaning.

She enjoys it, enjoys making something dirty, clean.

She wouldn’t do it for the money they pay her, but it’s good work.

Perhaps not at a hotel, where there’s time pressure, and people feel they can make a mess, but here, where people are neat and tidy, and no one’s up in your business every five minutes, it’s not so bad.

Hassan enjoys driving the fork lift too.

If they hadn’t decided to rob the place, they might have found interesting careers here.

And perhaps that’s just it? Wheeling a trolley with a gun inside it. Waiting to point it at a guy just doing his job. Can that be right?

Tia has been thinking about careers recently.

She is good at a lot of things. She has a creative imagination, she is organized, people like her.

But how does one go about getting a job?

An actual job? Connie has been encouraging, obviously sees something in her, but perhaps one day it would be nice to do something that wasn’t illegal.

Stealing stuff, selling drugs, protection rackets, it’s all cheating really, and it would be nice to start something from the ground up, actually to back herself.

Pay tax, employ people. Compete on a level playing field.

Paint horses or something? But where are those jobs? They always seem to be taken.

Tia feels for her gun. If you have to point a gun at someone, you’re not making a proper living. You’re scaring people, and that’s easy. ‘I will kill you if you don’t give me your money’ seems an over-the-top way of making money.

It’s like the people who run this warehouse. If you can’t afford to pay your staff proper wages, you’re cheating. You’re not making an honest living. You’re stealing.

Look at the place. There must be companies paying good money to ship their stuff to and from this warehouse.

Tia bets there are brochures with photos of the security systems. The brochures will show the metal detectors and the sensors and the security guards, all of which fall down when you don’t pay proper money.

You don’t need a gun to do sales. Tia could do sales.

It’s just talking to people, isn’t it? Tia likes doing that.

Outside the warehouse, she hears the delivery lorry clear the two security posts, drive down the ramp and make its way towards the warehouse. Make a bit of money, make Connie proud.

Make herself proud? As she sees the lorry driving under the security grille, it doesn’t feel that way.

The truck parks up, and the driver waits for two uniformed guards to come out of the secure unit at the heart of the warehouse.

Benny and Bobby, they’re called. Tia has tried to have as little as possible to do with both of them, and they’ve been quite happy with that arrangement.

Bobby and Benny are uniformed but not armed.

Worst of all worlds for poor Benny and Bobby.

Strictly speaking the driver should have stopped the second he saw the security grille was open.

Anything out of the ordinary you stop. That’s how Tia would run this place.

Pay people properly, ask them to do their job properly.

She knew the driver wouldn’t stop though.

He’ll have too many deliveries to make today.

No one can afford to stop these days. Every minute is precious when people won’t pay you a living wage.

It’s why delivery drivers leave your parcels on the doorstep even though you’re in.

Going too fast and cutting corners is the only way to make your money on any given day. Miserable for everyone.

As Bobby and Benny approach the truck, they call Hassan over, and he drives the fork lift up to the back of the vehicle.

The driver jumps down from his cab with an iPad, and there is some banter, presumably about football.

Someone beat someone, and it has reflected poorly on Bobby’s masculinity. He’s taking it well though.

Benny, masculinity still intact by some quirk of the weekend’s football results, checks through the paperwork on the iPad and signs his name with a fingernail. Hassan jumps down from the fork lift and makes his way around the blind side of the lorry. Here we go, then.

Tia pulls out her gun. She screams, ‘Everybody on the floor!’

Benny, Bobby and the driver whirl towards her. None of them gets on the floor. They just look at each other. Hassan is now in the cab of the lorry.

Tia fires a shot into the roof. ‘Everybody on the floor!’

Reluctantly the three men sink to their knees and then lie flat on the floor.

‘A cleaner with a gun?’ says Bobby.

‘I don’t think she’s a cleaner,’ says Benny.

‘We know you,’ says Bobby, looking up.

Tia points the gun straight at him. ‘What’s my name, then?’

‘We know your face,’ says Bobby.

‘I doubt that very much,’ says Tia.

‘Just steal the truck,’ says the driver. ‘I get the day off if you steal the truck.’

Tia ties up the men one by one. She takes their phones as she does so.

Hassan has got the lorry started, and she jumps up into the cab.

There’s not a great deal of point in tying the men up – by the time they’ve driven the truck through the security gates the alarm will be well and truly raised – but it’s good practice to tie people up. Might come in handy for next time.

Next time? Tia puffs out her cheeks. Really?

Do this again? Hassan drives the lorry over the apron and up the ramp.

At the point he should slow down he speeds up, and the lorry ploughs through the security posts, then makes slightly tougher work of the outside security gates.

Guards, including the man who let Tia smuggle her guns through not fifteen minutes ago, go through the motions of starting to chase the lorry, but, by this point, Hassan is gunning it towards the Coast Road.

It couldn’t have gone a great deal better. Half a million-odd in the back. There’s an old car park down on one of the estates by the power station, and Hassan has parked a van out of sight there. They’ll transfer the watches across and head straight for Connie’s.

There is a red light up ahead, and Hassan stops for it.

Very wise. There won’t be police looking for them for the next couple of minutes, but there will always be police on the lookout for people driving through red lights.

The lorry stops, and the moment it does the cab is filled with a piercing alarm.

Tia looks at Hassan. He puts his foot down on the accelerator, but the lorry won’t move.

A red smoke now begins to fill the cab, and they hear an electronic voice broadcasting:

This vehicle is being stolen, please contact the police. This vehicle is being stolen, please contact the police.

At the junction of an industrial estate and the Coast Road, there is not much foot traffic.

No ‘have-a-go heroes’ to make a citizen’s arrest. Hassan is trying to open the cab doors, but they have locked shut.

The same with the windows; Tia and Hassan are trapped.

Tia braces herself in her seat and swings both her legs with full force at the windscreen.

Her legs bounce back, shooting pain through both. She takes out her gun.

‘If that windscreen is bulletproof,’ says Hassan, ‘you’ll kill us both.’

‘Yeah,’ says Tia. ‘But if it isn’t, I won’t.’

She pulls the trigger and the windscreen shatters into a sea of diamonds. Tia and Hassan drop through the windscreen onto the road below. A little crowd is forming now, taking photos. Tia runs over to them and points her gun at the photographers.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she says, taking the phones.

Hassan has run across the Coast Road and down into a pedestrian underpass that leads towards the power station.

Plenty of places to get lost around there.

Tia runs west along the Coast Road until she finds a turning into a residential road.

She sees no cameras and, as sirens start to sound in the background, she hides in a small bus stop.

Tia can’t go back to Connie’s, she knows that.

If she’s spotted and followed, leading the police to Connie is a greater crime than stealing a few watches.

And she can’t get on a bus: they all have cameras.

It wouldn’t take long to track Tia’s movements.

Looking along the residential road, Tia sees the South Downs rising above her and decides the only thing to do is walk. No cameras on the South Downs.

Head down, Tia moves up the road towards the hills.

What’s on the other side? No idea. A stream of police cars has turned into the industrial estate.

As Tia reaches the end of the road, she sees a stile leading onto one of the paths across the Downs.

She is wearing cleaning overalls with bright pink Crocs, and has a loaded gun in her pocket.

But people wear all sorts of things when they’re out walking.

For the first time today, Tia feels a thrill. As she approaches the stile, however, a silver Tesla blocks her path. The passenger-side window opens, and she sees a familiar face.

‘Connie!’ says Tia.

Connie opens the door and beckons her in.

‘Seat belt,’ says Connie, and throws the Tesla into a three-point turn.

‘When I was ten, my mum said I could walk to school by myself. I felt so grown up. She told me years later that for that whole first year she followed me to school. There was a whole group of them, the Mums. Just making sure we were safe.’

‘I messed up,’ says Tia.

‘Ah, you tried your best,’ says Connie. ‘And you shot out the window of a security lorry. That’s got to count for something.’

Connie pulls out onto the Coast Road and drives them back past the abandoned lorry.

The road onto the industrial estate is taped off already.

Tia looks out of her window and sees that the area around the power station is also crawling with police.

Hassan won’t make it far. But he also won’t tell the police anything.

‘I don’t know if this is for me,’ says Tia. ‘I didn’t really enjoy it.’

‘I get it,’ says Connie. ‘If armed robbery was for everyone, there’d be chaos, wouldn’t there?’

‘I think I need to get a job,’ says Tia.

‘I’m not the person to ask,’ says Connie. ‘But what I do know is that you need somewhere quiet to hide away for a few days.’

‘I can go back to South London,’ says Tia. ‘Someone will put me up.’

‘I’ve got a much better idea,’ says Connie, as she turns off the Coast Road and heads inland.