Widows

The alley was dark and dingy with no external lighting, and cold, each building shading the next from natural daylight. Dolly slowly progressed down the line of archways. She took her time; she couldn’t see what she might be stepping in, and her eyes had to adjust to the darkness. She was looking for number fifteen. Some arches had no doors on them and the insides were huge caverns of dripping water, cold, damp and musky-smelling like underground cellars. Old, wrecked and rusting cars stood silent like ghosts of the past, windscreens shattered, wheels gone and doors left open. She passed wrecked car after wrecked car, getting more and more filthy, and laddering her tights on a jagged old bumper. In one unused archway, a group of winos lay in a drunken stupor by a makeshift fire in an old dustbin. They remained oblivious to her presence as she walked past.

Eventually Dolly stopped by a green sliding door. Removing the keys Harry had left from her coat pocket, she tried one of them in the padlock. She almost dropped Wolf when the doors suddenly moved toward her an inch or two and a dog with a terrifying growl and a high-pitched bark slammed into the door from the inside. Wolf began to bark, making the dog behind the doors even more aggressive. Dolly covered Wolf’s mouth with her hand; she could hear the dog’s chains rattle as it continued to hurl itself frantically against the door. She peered upward and realized she was at number thirteen. Scuttling toward the next archway, she hoped the dog hadn’t attracted attention.

A faded and grimy number 15 was scratched into the paintwork of a small entrance door built into the larger wooden doors of the lock-up. Harry’s secret place. Dolly tried one key, then another and the small door swung open.

Inside the large, cavernous room, it was eerily silent until the echoing thunder from the trains above filled the space. Dolly closed the door behind her, put Wolf down and switched on a small pocket torch.

By the light of the thin beam she slowly edged forward and, as Wolf sniffed about by the old ghost cars, wagging his tail, she felt sure he could smell Harry. He seemed so excited at the prospect of seeing his master again. When Wolf looked up at her as if to ask: ‘so, where is he?’ her heart sank and she felt Harry’s loss all over again.

This was a ‘man’s place,’ a million miles from the pristine opulence of their Potters Bar home. She could almost smell the sweat and the hard work and the testosterone as she imagined Harry’s men hanging on his every word while he held court. For what seemed like an age, Dolly couldn’t move; she’d never been to this lock-up and she was frightened of what she might find hidden deep in the darkness. Dolly had lived with the knowledge that she’d find out some secret about Harry one day, but she always imagined it would be a younger lover. He was so incredibly handsome and even the best men in the world are suckers for flattery. But what was inside this lock-up... this was a big secret to keep.

As she ventured forward, eyes focused on the furthest dark corner, she didn’t see the puddle filled with thick, slimy, oil-streaked mud and swore as she felt some of the brown water seep onto her feet. She looked down at her ruined shoes and saw Wolf sitting in the middle of the puddle, tail wagging. His little paws now had black, oily socks.

Dolly made her way to the back of the garage, toward a set of large wooden interior doors, also with a smaller interlocking door. Opening it, Dolly switched on the overhead neon strip lights. As they blinked into life, she was surprised to see the annex was much cleaner than the rest of the lock-up. A couple of old wrecks had been pushed against the wall and in the center of the room was a medium-sized van covered with a tarpaulin. As she pulled off the tarpaulin her hand slipped and she winced as she broke a nail. Wolf darted under the van and began frantically digging at the floor — Dolly knelt beside him, ripping her tights again, and looked where he was digging.

Below the loose concrete were slats of wood. Lifting them away, she revealed a two-foot by one-foot hole in the ground containing something wrapped in brown sacking. She hauled the package out and opened it to find two sawed-off shotguns. The handgun in Harry’s safety deposit box was the first time she’d known for certain that he’d used guns, but it hadn’t been a shock to her. In fact, her pulse had raced at the thought that he’d left her something to protect herself with, even after he’d gone. But these guns. These guns were different. These guns weren’t for protection; they were for committing armed robberies. In that moment, Dolly felt closer to Harry than she’d done at any other moment since his death. He’d given her the keys to this place and was allowing her, at long last, to know everything. What Dolly now did with all of this information was up to her and her alone.