The old night-club at the end of the pier had been shut since I was a kid. I had out-lived numerous plans for its revival and, as I grew into middle-age, news of its development, reported at least twice a year in the local paper was read with the same cursory glance afforded to village cricket scores and ladies darts leagues.
The manager had disappeared in mysterious circumstances but the police never found a body. He'd been cut into little pieces and fed to the fish, the rumour went round at school but, common theory was, he'd run off with somebody else's wife and the bank holiday's takings to somewhere more exotic than Deal. South America, the Caribbean, Brighton perhaps.
It was then some surprise to me when my agency received written instructions to handle the sale of The Zebra Club on behalf of a client living in a nursing-home in Cliftonville, who provided legal documents and a set of keys to prove ownership.
Eager to see inside, I swapped my viewings for that morning and took the new girl, Megan with me to see it. On the walk along the seafront to the pier, she confessed she'd once broken in through a window as a dare but, it was too dark to see a thing.
"It gave me the creeps." She said.
There were over twenty years between us but, we'd both grown up in the same town and knew what it was like to have nowhere to go. When I was her age, my friends and I would drive to clubs down the coast in Dover or Folkestone. Where did she and her mates go now, I wondered.
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