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He turned to his sergeant. “Sean, caution him.” Gardener then nodded to the two PCs to take him away. Ignoring Pollard’s protests, Gardener turned and walked towards the shop. Reilly followed.
Inside, Gary Close explained that the shop was exactly as he’d left it.
“Did you disturb someone, Gary?” Gardener asked, glancing at the mess.
“Only myself, sir. I thought something moved over that side of the shop, and I fell over into that lot. Turned out it was my reflection.”
Reilly laughed. “What do you do for an encore, Gary?”
Gardener grinned. “Don’t worry about him, he’ll grow on you.”
All three moved further in, toward the counter. Gardener glanced at the note. He had no idea what it meant. He studied the monitor, which now appeared dead. It was very old, cube-shaped, in gunmetal grey with a grille on the side. He couldn’t see any buttons. It had to have worked somehow. He leaned over, but saw nothing to prove his theory.
“How was the monitor operated?” Gardener asked Close. “Could you see?”
“No, sir, I didn’t really check, to be honest. I was more interested in what it was showing me.”
“Did the body on the screen move naturally?”
“How do you mean?” asked Close.
“Did it look staged, like a film?”
Close appeared to think about the answer, casting a doubt in Gardener’s mind. Finally, he replied. “It didn’t look like a film.”
“So you don’t actually know if any of this is real, son?” asked Reilly.
“It looked real to me, sir.”
Gardener figured the young PC’s body language of shifting his hands and feet around meant he was now doubting what he’d seen.
“I understand, Gary,” said Gardener, “but in all honesty, we’re MIT. We should really only be called out if you find a body.”
Close appeared disappointed but stood his ground. “I know what I saw, sir. Something about all of this doesn’t sit right with me, and I still think I did the right thing in calling it out.”
Gardener nodded. “Okay, we’re here so we may as well have a look.”
Gardener glanced over the coun
ter and noticed the trapdoor in the floor, held in place by a padlock. “Sean, what do you make of that?”
The Irishman leaned over. “Why would you want a padlock on a trapdoor?”
“My thoughts exactly. What do you think he has down there?”
“Cash? Some of these old school guys don’t trust the banks.”
“Can you blame them, the mess they’ve made of the economy?”
“I can’t imagine anything of any value down there, sir,” said Gary Close. “Most of the old shops in the town have deep cellars. We have problems with flooding.”
Gardener threaded his way behind. As he crouched down, he recognized the padlock as an expensive model attached to what resembled a bomb-proof hasp with round-headed bolts.
He stood up and peered around the shop, noticing an ABUS stand full of padlocks. He searched behind the counter and spotted a discarded packet tucked behind a small stool, a hard plastic, shrink-wrapped one that had been cut open to obtain the lock it had obviously housed. He picked it up.
The packet informed him it was an ABUS 190 series, which had a high-strength steel body that could not under any circumstances be bolt-cropped. It was also a combination lock with a 4-digit pin number, re-settable to one’s choice of code using a special security key, preventing anyone from changing the combination at a later stage.
“Looks like there’s definitely something private down there, Sean. Question is, what? Does the owner keep his takings down there? Or his really expensive stock?”
