Behind Closed Doors Read Online Free PDF Page B

through?’ I said.
    â€˜Guess so,’ said Shaughnessy.
    I left him and went to meet my West Hendon client.
    I was running late but midafternoon traffic was light on the Edgware Road. I put my foot down to catch up.
    I got off the North Circular a little before four and followed signs that took me through an industrial park and brought me to a haulage depot with a gate sign that displayed the name HP Logistics. My client was the owner, a guy named Harold Palmer. He’d not given much over the phone other than that he had some urgent work.
    The depot was housed in a defunct machine-tool factory, constructed of dirty yellow brick with inset mesh-reinforced windows. The building had been converted to a warehouse, with offices and an HGV maintenance shop at one end. Out beyond the loading bays I could see tractor units parked up.
    The depot was secured by twelve-foot mesh topped with razor wire and cameras, but the uniformed pensioner who hobbled out of the gate-house notched the image down to Dad’s Army. With twenty thousand square feet of transit warehouse behind the wire I figured they’d use a different crew at night. While the pensioner checked a clip-board I watched a solid guy with a razor cut and dark glasses watching me from inside the office. This one looked more the part. His shirt-sleeved stance and calm observation suggested someone who maybe ran Palmer’s security. The pensioner ticked my name and sent me through.
    I parked in a visitors’ spot at the side of the maintenance shop. A metal door opened onto a flight of stairs that climbed into the upper reaches of the building and summited at a door that swung outwards, threatening to knock you all the way back down. Beyond the door the corridor dog-legged into a reception area fronting a sixty-by-thirty office. A dozen clerks with headsets jabbed at keyboards under spitting fluorescents in a working environment that suggested high staff turnover. The reception desk was manned by a fifteen-stone woman whose main purpose seemed to be to frighten callers back down the stairs. She continued battering her keyboard without noticing me. Either her job description said to ignore visitors or she’d already marked me as a nobody, the way a good waiter knows the lower-class diner.
    When she finally looked up it was with the welcoming expression of a boar disturbed at its toilet. The look was enhanced by a fretwork of frown lines that would have made a rhino swoon.
    I announced myself and Rhino ran a finger down a desk diary and told me I was six minutes late. I didn’t ask if this included the two minutes she’d had me on hold. We just skipped the small talk. She pressed a button and spoke my name, then waved me at a door and I went through to see the boss.
    Harold Palmer was a big man behind a bigger desk. The flesh I could see above the surface, combined with my knowledge of icebergs, put him at close to twenty stone, with a face hardened by decades of clawing for market-share in the trucking business. More of the company policy for warm welcomes: Palmer skipped the handshake. He just gestured towards a collection of chairs by the door. I walked back to grab one. The office space would have made a city tycoon agoraphobic, but the bare walls and metal cabinets said that Palmer hired cheap when it came to interior designers. Not a potted plant or sales chart in sight. What did get my attention were the panoramic windows that gave him a god’s eye view over the maintenance bays on one angle and the warehouse on the other. The maintenance window showed two Volvo units being serviced down below. The glass was single-glazed to let the din of air tools through. Muzak for the trucking business.
    My seating choice was between a couple of wooden chairs that made me wonder if a church hall was missing furniture or a frayed leather swivel that was mostly lumps but had the benefit of castors to save me from lifting. I rolled the swivel out in