Silvermeadow Read Free

once, but it had closed down ages ago.
    The billboards at the newsagent’s door were recycling old headlines, ROYALS BLOW IT AGAIN and OOPS, SAYS TORY MP. He went inside and studied the front page of the Independent . MI5’s new role caught his eye.
    ‘Not again,’ he muttered.
    He bought the paper and stepped back out into the sunshine. His eye passed over the electrical goods in the shopfront next door, then scanned the estate agent’s, a gloomy little window filled with curling pictures of fading hopes, desperately straining to attract someone to pull them out of the pit of negative equity or divorce settlement. He paused as two elderly people blocked his path, struggling to drag a defective stepladder out of their car, and while he waited for them he watched the owner of the bicycle shop on the other side of the street setting up a rack of kiddies’ bikes on the footpath. Apologising profusely, the couple manoeuvred their burden through the door of a DIY shop, stumbling on the uneven pavement. The tree roots had done it, he noticed, and in odd places the council had pulled up the concrete paving slabs around the trunks and patched the footpath with tar. Scruffy.
    His next destination lay beyond the unisex hair salon, with its improbably glamorous photographs of stunning heads of hair. Not quite a deli, Butler’s was a half-decent grocer’s shop with an interesting if unreliable range of goods.
    ‘Morning, Mr Butler.’ He nodded, pleased to have the shop to himself. ‘Fresh delivery of your steak and kidney pies this morning?’
    ‘I’m afraid they’ve let me down again, Mr Brock.’
    ‘That’s no good. You know I rely on your steak and kidney pies.’
    The grocer shook his head sadly. ‘Not for much longer, Mr Brock.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I’m packing it in. Had enough.’
    ‘You can’t do that. Are you ill?’
    ‘Not me, but the business is. Got a bad dose of the Sainsbury’s. You’ll have to get in your car and go down the Savacentre for your pies in future, same as everyone else.’
    Brock scratched the crop of his short grey beard. He’d been coming here for years, since the days when it had been a butcher’s shop, with a frieze of brightly coloured tiles around the walls portraying the heads of animals—bulls, lambs, pigs, chickens—smiling cheerfully down on the customers engrossed in selecting prime cuts. He’d never tried the Sainsbury’s pies, but he was certain they wouldn’t be the same.
    ‘Well, I’m very sorry to hear that, Mr Butler, I really am. What’s going to take your place?’
    ‘A charity clothes place, so they tell me. Oxfam or some such.’
    The shops petered out beyond Butler’s, their place taken by insurance offices and car showrooms crammed together. The Bishop’s Mitre sat brooding among them, a dour 1950s pub that no amount of half-timbering and geranium window boxes could cheer up. Brock looked at his watch. Good timing. He hadn’t had the chance of a relaxed weekend pub lunch in ages. Inside, in the gloom, an off-duty crew from the fire station further up the high street were having a quiet pint.
    Brock stood at the bar and opened his paper to see what MI5 were up to now. Before he’d even ordered his ham sandwich and pint, the phone in his pocket started chirping. He recognised DS Bren Gurney’s voice.
    ‘I don’t think I need this, Bren.’
    ‘A sighting of North, chief. Sounds promising.’
    ‘Really?’ There had been a rumour, barely that, that Upper North was back in the country. The possibility killed his appetite.
    ‘You remember Pauline Lewins? The bank job in Ilford. One of the last ones he pulled before the big one in the City. Manager shot dead.’
    ‘Yes of course. I remember Pauline.’
    ‘Well, she works at Silvermeadow now.’
    ‘What’s that? A retirement village?’
    ‘Blimey, chief. Where’ve you been? It’s a bloody great shopping centre out in Essex, on the M25. Pauline reckons she saw North there this morning. I’ve been