51. The Depot
In which nobody knows very much…
The KS Depot had no website and no sign on the road. It had taken Gosie most of the morning to establish this, and in the end, they found it the simple way, by waiting in Pernilla Ågren’s street until a pale grey van came round the corner and then following it.
The van went out past the edge of the town to a long, low building of corrugated metal, painted the same grey as the van, with a roller door open at one end and a small office door at the other. Above the office door, no bigger than a letterbox, were the letters KS in white.
@EmpressaurusKitty parked the hire car beside the van and looked at the building for some time. “It is a shed,” she said.
“It’s a depot,” said Gosie.
“It is a very large shed.”
Kitty got out first, walked across the yard and in through the roller door without waiting for either of them.
Empressaurus and Gosie walked in through the office door. Inside they could see into the depot, which was one long room with a concrete floor and a row of strip lights. It was full of parcels in cages and on pallets and on a line of steel rollers that ran the length of the room, where four women in pale grey jackets lifted them off one at a time, turned them over, read something on each with a handheld scanner and set them down again on another pallet. Every so often a scanner gave two short notes and the woman holding it put that box to one side. Nobody talked much. A radio on a shelf was playing something in Swedish to nobody in particular.
Nobody looked at Kitty, who walked along beside the rollers, stepped over a sack of padded envelopes and disappeared behind a cage.
The office itself had a counter, a till, a kettle, and a stork behind the counter with her reading glasses pushed up onto her head. The counter was branded Kvinnor Skickar in the familiar white lettering on a grey background.
A card by the till said Signe. She looked at Gosie, then at Empressaurus, then over their heads at the door, as if a third person might yet come through it.
“Collection or delivery?” she said, in English.
“Neither,” said Gosie. “I’m looking for a crate.”
“We have a great many crates.”
“This one came from Britain. Wooden, about so big.” Gosie held her paws apart as far as they would go, which was not very far, and Empressaurus held her arms out to show the rest of it. “Stained glass. It came to Umeå in the last few days, addressed to Pernilla Ågren.”
“I can’t tell you anything about it,” said Signe.
“You haven’t looked.”
“I don’t need to look. I cannot tell you if it came here, or if it did not come here, or where it went after, or who it was for.” She said it in the same tone she might have used for the opening hours. “Not you. Not anyone.”
“Why not?”
Signe took her glasses from her head and put them on the counter. “Because some of the women who send things through us are hiding from someone. If a man comes to this counter and says he is looking for a box his wife has sent, and he describes it very well, and he is very polite, what do I tell him?”
“I’m not a man,” said Gosie.
“No. You are a gerbil, and I don’t know who sent you.” Signe looked at Empressaurus. “Or you.”
“Nobody sends me anywhere,” said Empressaurus.
“I don’t need an address,” said Gosie. “Only whether it’s still here.”
“That is also an address.”
“When it arrived, then. Just the date.”
“No.”
“Then how would anyone ever find out?”
“With a court order,” said Signe. “A Swedish one. It goes to our lawyer, and our lawyer reads it for a long time, and then perhaps somebody is told something. It has happened twice in eleven years.” She picked up a pen. “Even then I could not tell you very much, because I do not know very much. Nobody here does.”
“Somebody has to know where the parcels go.”
“The machine knows.” Signe nodded through the glass towards the rollers, where a scanner gave its two short notes again. “Every box has half a label. Every woman who hands a box on keeps half a receipt. The machine reads the halves, and when two halves match, the box has arrived where it should and the woman is paid her postage. The women out there lift boxes. I answer the door.” She put her glasses back on her head. “That is how it is meant to work.”
“Thank you,” said Gosie.
“You are welcome to buy some tape,” said Signe. “People often do.”
Empressaurus bought some tape.
They stood in the yard beside the hire car. A second grey van pulled in, reversed up to the roller door and a woman got out and began unloading it without looking at them.
“I bet they’d talk to MyrtleLion,” said Gosie.
“Why?”
“Nobody at Talmere asked MyrtleLion who’d sent her. They assumed she was in charge. They asked her to sign things.”
Empressaurus turned the roll of tape over in her hands, looking at the white KS logo that repeated along the grey tape. “MyrtleLion isn’t here,” she said. “And Sweden isn’t Portland.”
Gosie did not answer that. She looked at the car, and then at the roller door.
“Where is Kitty?” said Empressaurus.
They walked to the roller door and went into the depot. The four women went on lifting and scanning. The radio had moved on to the weather. Gosie went down one side of the rollers and Empressaurus down the other, looking behind the cages and under the pallets and along the sack of padded envelopes.
Kitty was at the far end of the building, past the last pallet, where a single wooden crate stood on its own against the back wall, apart from everything else in the room. She was lying along the top of it, full length, asleep, with one front paw hanging over the edge of the lid.
Under her paw, pressed into the join where the lid met the side, was a seal of violet wax, broken clean in two.
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/51-the-depot