what the stuff was for, but Hagar’s people weren’t gonna blow the location. This geezer kept coming along in a van to pick stuff up as soon as it was finished. I don’t know where he went, but there’s a couple of decent clues.’
Warren paused for dramatic effect, which made Fay look pissed off.
‘First up, the van was unusual. It was a white Transit, with two navy stripes coming up one side, across the roof and down the other. And it must have originally belonged to some company because you could see a name sprayed over.’
Fay shook her head. ‘So it’s a white van. Hagar’s crew are bound to have sold it on or dumped it by now.’
‘Most likely,’ Warren agreed. ‘But if you stop interrupting, I’ll get to the juicy bit. The van was going back and forth, picking up stuff and delivering it to the grow house. But a few times that van made the round trip in ten minutes.’
‘Five minutes there, five back,’ Fay said thoughtfully. ‘At thirty miles per hour, that’s still a two and a half-mile radius from your cousin’s workshop.’
Ning shook her head. ‘It’s not. Where in London can you drive at a constant thirty miles per hour for more than a minute or so? By the time you count for junctions, traffic lights, you’re not gonna get much more than a mile in five minutes.’
‘I guess,’ Fay said.
‘Most important, that van was fully loaded,’ Warren added. ‘It took at least ten minutes to load up with wood each time. It was probably faster unloading at the other end, but even if they drove flat out and had a team of guys unloading, they can only have driven two minutes maximum.’
Ning pulled out her phone and opened the calculator app. ‘So,’ she said, as her fingers tapped the screen. ‘Two minutes’ driving, and let’s say the average speed was fifteen miles per hour. That’s a radius of half a mile from your cousin’s workshop.’
Fay looked at Warren. ‘Get Google Maps on your laptop.’
Warren seemed to have got over his angst about the girls being in his house as he led the pair from the kitchen to his bedroom.
‘Oooh, very nice,’ Fay said, as Ning did a 360, taking in a neat room, with a big LCD on the wall and framed photos of giant wooden rollercoasters.
‘Strange choice of pictures,’ Ning said.
Warren sounded a touch embarrassed. ‘I’m a bit of a coaster geek. Like, going on websites where people talk about the biggest and fastest rollercoasters and stuff and I belonged to this club. I hardly do any of that stuff now though.’
Fay wasn’t listening and had opened the lid on Warren’s laptop. ‘Where’s your cousin’s workshop at?’
Once they found the workshop on Google Maps, Fay printed a page out and Warren got a compass from his school pack, worked out the scale and drew a half-mile circle around it.
‘Still a lot of streets,’ Fay said, dejectedly. ‘Searching them all would take days, and it’s not like a grow house is gonna have a sign out front saying, Spliff grown here.’
Ning sounded more enthusiastic. ‘We know it’s a big building,’ she said, as she turned to Warren. ‘How much space do you reckon all of that trellis would take up?’
‘More than would fit in a normal-sized house,’ Warren said. ‘And there were forty-eight banks of lights.’
Ning nodded. ‘We should be looking for a commercial building. Disused factory, warehouse, or something like that.’
‘I’ll scan the Google sat view and see what comes up,’ Fay said.
‘They were picking up and dropping that trellis and banks of lamps in broad daylight,’ Warren noted. ‘So I reckon they must have been able to park the van on a secluded driveway, or reverse into a garage.’
Fay switched to satellite view and zoomed in on a street in the top-left corner of Warren’s circle. The view was full of the roofs of terraced houses. She dragged the map downwards until she came to a T-junction.
‘I’ll mark off the streets on the printout,’ Ning said, picking up the printed map, before grabbing a pen off Warren’s desk and stripping the cap with her teeth.
Over the next couple of hours, Warren, Fay and Ning huddled over the laptop screen. When they found a large building, they’d switch from satellite to street view. They inspected churches, schools, shops and police stations, but amongst these unlikely locations for a marijuana grow house, they found sixteen places that seemed large enough and had a secluded driveway.
Saturday