Vinnie took a few strides down the corridor when Black Vest Man grabbed his elbow. ‘You’re taking people to the UK tomorrow. You can take me.’
‘Full up for tomorrow.’
‘The next time. When’s the next time?’ He tightened his grip.
‘There will be no next time.’
‘What the fuck are you saying? What am I doing here? Why is anyone here?’
Vinnie looked down at the hand on his elbow as something alien. It was withdrawn; Vinnie went on his way.
Black Vest Man walked up to the doctor with the news. ‘You shouldn’t leave your wife here alone. I will have your place tomorrow. Understand?’
Next door in the kitchen, Michael Atherton was deflecting questions and accusations about arrangements to England, and Vinnie realised that if he didn’t make a public announcement, Black Vest Man would. Best to deal with kick-offs at a time of your own choosing. He cleared his throat. ‘Listen to me, everyone… Fucking listen! Those of you who are working, can stay here. Anyone else not coming with me tomorrow, I want you out. No more trips to the UK after that. Clear?’
‘I paid,’ shouted someone. ‘From Iran to London.’
‘I don’t care what you paid. I want you out.’
Vinnie was out the door with Michael hurrying behind, dodging a salvo of insults in five languages. The young man who worked at the flower depot, still clutching his casserole dish, watched them from the kitchen window. He looked in the freezer then the fridge, at the food they had bought; he looked at others, sitting cross-legged peeling potatoes, dipping wilting slices of greyish bread in tinned soup; he decided he would buy himself a takeaway, and after that he would make a phone call.
*
Detective Gavin O’Grady was working his way east to west, meeting and greeting some of the vehicle owners from the ferry company records – for the third day running. DI Katz continued to endear herself to colleagues in Rotterdam via Skype. She had decided that it would be best for her sergeant to meet a number of candidates with the right-sized vehicle on the right ferry to see how his instincts responded. O’Grady thought it a time-consuming and unscientific exercise, and had said so. When Katz had said she wanted anyone who could feasibly have been smuggling illegal immigrants questioned and confronted, he had suggested that this would only spook the culprit, at which the inspector had laughed sardonically.
‘When instead, Sergeant, we should allow another lorryload of people to suffocate to death, as part of a sting operation, where you catch the smugglers in the act of another multiple murder. Is that it?’
And so, he had set forth with a print-out of a dozen registration details, a sat-nav and the latest John Tavener CD. Astonishingly the ferry company didn’t ask owners of small commercial vehicles about their cargo. He decided that he would ask that as an aside. His stated reason for making enquiries would be that their vehicle had been reported as being involved in an ‘incident’ in Rotterdam. He didn’t like dealing with the public much, particularly in their own environment. In this he was no different from most officers, in or out of uniform. Anyone who claimed they loved ‘policing their patch’ was too pedestrian for the smallest of advancements. After a while everyone wanted away from the cast of reality TV, from the sportswear-clad Morlocks. O’Grady was aware how he had tired quicker than most. He had joined the force after a spell as a wildlife warden and had been much happier in the company of birds than the laddish constables at his first station. He got himself a transfer and found female superiors more to his liking. One in particular saw the problem-solver in him, how when most other officers preferred to kick a door in, he liked to unpick the lock. He was given fraud cases, invariably avoided by other officers. And he could always follow the money – when it went into hiding, when it was in disguise, when it divided itself into a thousand parts, like rain – he could tell where it landed. Within eighteen months he was doing it for CID and eighteen months later he passed his sergeant’s exams. For the moment it was as much seniority as he wanted. Management meant grief from either side, no matter how high you climbed. And since he wasn’t tucking anyone into bed at night, he didn’t need the money either.
A third of the number plates he’d run had form, which was par for the course. Some had been to Rotterdam in works vans, some had been bringing in booze, some had been carrying nothing, apparently, including one who’d been making the journey every month to visit a favoured sex worker. He was arriving at his most westerly enquiry, Manchester. The address was curious – a temporary dwelling of some sort. Then when the sat-nav showed him the railway arches he understood what the print-out meant.
He parked the pool car out of view of the yellow barrier at the site’s perimeter. Word in the station canteen was that traveller’s sites were enemy territory. They were ‘off the reservation’. O’Grady wasn’t in uniform and he wasn’t even in his drab standard CID suit, but even in his speedos, he was unmistakably a copper, a ‘peeler’, ‘plod’. On the other side of the barrier two boys, stripped to their shorts, were play-fighting. They were no older than five or six but already they had cute little biceps. They stopped brawling as he passed, everyone smiling under the June sunshine.
‘Alright, fellas?’ he said affably.
They began to march behind him, mimicking his purposeful walk. ‘What do you want here, mister? Eh? Who are ye after?’
It struck him that he didn’t actually know where he was heading. There were half a dozen rows of half a dozen caravans, no numbers, no names. It was Trumpton, an anti-Trumpton.
‘Boys, do you know someone who lives here called Mr Gilheaney?’
‘Who? No one of that name here, mister.’
‘Never fuckin’ heard of him.’
He started off down the first aisle, peering at windows for a friendly face. ‘There’s nothing down there, mate.’
Either side of him a window blind ruffled. Behind him a door jolted away from its frame and a man with a freckled torso sat down on his steps, pulling on his trainers, a cigarette clenched between his lips. When O’Grady looked in his direction the man displayed his back and tugged his door closed. O’Grady did a U-turn at the bottom where some garages waited padlocked and chained. At the top of the second aisle he saw a silhouette, no more than that. Screening the sunshine from his eyes, he advanced. As he did, the silhouette emerged, wearing a black shirt and saggy jeans. The man halted midway down his own street; the two boys ran to him.
‘Can I help you, mister?’
O’Grady recognised the tart quality in the accent. Belfast voices had been present in his upbringing, an anecdote that would have no cachet here.
‘Are you Vincent Gilheaney?’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Can you tell me where I can find him?’
‘No, I can’t.’
The sergeant ripped at a Velcro pocket on the side of his walking trousers; the boys cried, ‘He’s a peeler, a fuckin’ pig.’
O’Grady confirmed as such with his ID. ‘I just need to ask him a couple of questions, about his lorry. Nothing important.’
‘Well, yer see, I can’t tell you where he is because I don’t know.’
The boys took this as an invitation for the peeler to exit. ‘You need to fuck off, mister.’
Other than peelers all settled people had to ask permission to come on the site. They got no further than the barrier without an appointment. He was invading. As the sun relented under cloud, O’Grady saw the faded bruising around the man’s eyes, plus a scab on a pulverised ear.
‘Are you a friend of Mr Gilheaney?’
‘A friend? Two weeks ago, I fought him, bare-knuckle, in front of those garages. When I see him, I’ll tell him you’re looking for him, no bother. Let me see your ID again.’ The traveller grasped O’Grady’s warrant card, reading it slowly. ‘Come all the way from Humberside for a couple of questions about a lorry? You usually write
letters about nonsense like that.’
‘Can I have your name, sir?’
‘No, and don’t call me sir. On your way now.’
He turned on his heels; the boys ran after him and the sun re-emerged. On the way to the barrier he thought about how he could exact some revenge on these people. These cash-in-hand parasites. Why weren’t those boys in school? The Mercedes vans over there, neither of them looked roadworthy. This was a publicly funded den of thieves that considered itself beyond the law and the law was glad to be rid of it.
Back on the motorway Katz came on via Bluetooth.
‘How did it go?’
‘In what sense, ma’am?’
‘In the sense of you finding a people smuggler, Sergeant’
‘It didn’t.’
‘Well, Rotterdam just rang. They’ve had a tip off that a lorry importing flowers is carrying illegal immigrants.’
‘Have they got a registration?’
‘No. But they’re going to put someone on the ferry. It’s due in tomorrow morning at eight. See you at the terminal at 7am.’
Twenty-Eight
Port of Immingham
O’Grady’s black gloss Audi skimmed into the ferry terminal car park and cosied up alongside Katz’s Skoda. Katz’s Spaceback hatchback was a tasteful wax-jacket green underneath a duffel coat of crud. Pausing on her electronic cigarette, she lowered the greyish smear of a passenger window. ‘Get in, Gavin.’
They were both all smiles, as they always were when they hadn’t seen each other for a spell. She was well aware that she looked forward to seeing him but also that she desired the days when he wasn’t around.
‘Do you want to get a coffee?’ she asked.
‘No, I’m fine.’
He’d been up since shortly after sunrise, around half five, taking breakfast on the balcony, telephoto lens on the table. He owned a first-floor flat out in Cottingham overlooking a walled garden that belonged to the aged lady below, which she allowed him to tend but hadn’t expected him to install a pond. She had asked a few times about cutting back the bushes, the shrubs, the ivy and the waist-high grass, but he always replied that he was ‘rewilding the space’. Still, she too enjoyed the birds on the feeders he’d placed by the pond.
He flicked through the photos to show Katz. ‘Lesser spotted woodpecker. First bird most mornings this time of year.’
‘Lovely.’
‘It’s on the red list, you know.’
‘Is that because of its markings?’ she enquired.
He paused, silently astonished. ‘No, what that means is that it’s endangered. It’s currently rare.’
‘Ah. I’m currently feeling a bit endangered myself and what I meant when I asked you if you wanted a coffee was, I’d really like one.’
She ordered a double espresso and a fried egg sandwich; he ordered a fruit tea then she told him about the phone call from her counterpart in Rotterdam. ‘All we’ve been told is that a lorry or a van exporting flowers to the UK is also carrying illegal immigrants. We don’t have the name of the driver or the registration.’
‘Who’s responsible for the tip-off?’
‘Don’t know. Probably a migrant worker in the flower depot.’
O’Grady dunked his tea bag up and down then produced the list of passengers he’d been following up for the last two days. ‘Are any of these names on the ferry?’ he asked.
‘Unfortunately, we can’t get a passenger list. The tip-off came in after the ferry offices closed and it’s due in before it opens. The Dutch have an officer on board but unless they search every vehicle…’
She switched her attention to her egg sandwich.
*
On board the ferry, Hans van Duren, a Dutch plod, or hoofdagent, was moving observantly through every corridor, vestibule and the lounge of deck three for the second time. He was with the deckhand who was sure she had spoken to a man importing flowers several weeks ago. She said she couldn’t describe the face but somehow would know it when she saw it.
‘It wasn’t so much his face I remember, it was… it was… it was his eyes. It sounds odd, but he sounded very emotional about the flowers in his lorry.’
She told Hans she needed time to look, but he refused to let her stand and gawp; presumably he didn’t want the man to know they were looking for him. Probably a drug smuggler. After they had completed a survey of every passenger deck for the second time van Duren took her down to the car deck. ‘This is where you saw him. Yes?’
‘Over there.’
‘Good.’
He asked her to walk to the exact spot. ‘Now I want you to close your eyes, listen to the hum of the engines, breathe in the petrol residue, remember the image of this man, the vehicle he was standing next to.’
‘I remember saying, “What a beautiful smell.” He’d just shut his doors and he started going on how he never tired of it… I can’t really remember his face, I think it was scarred, a hard face because it surprised me how polite he was.’
At that precise moment the face in question was pitted against the wind, watching the shoreline of Humberside materialise in the distance. Vinnie was on the top deck submerged in nostalgia. He remembered another ferry, the one that sailed from Larne to Stranraer when he was beside two other young men, watching the mainland free itself from the mist. It was 1981 and he was going over to work in England. Maggie Thatcher was getting rid of all the lazy bastards, so there was work for Irishmen who could leave English workers standing. Belfast was not a safe place for him. Of the two lads with him one eventually went home after too many fights and the other, as far as he knew, to this day hadn’t got beyond cash in hand and digs. The seventeen-year-old Vinnie had gone to live with his elder sister Kathleen in Manchester. When cancer began to take her, her son Michael grew wild and his father had long given up any pretence of being a parent. In her last months Kathleen asked to be with her own people and a caravan was provided for her on the site. The husband never showed his face and Michael was put in a children’s home. Vinnie wondered what more he should’ve done. Michael wasn’t his son, as the boy kept reminding his uncle, but now, now at least, he was doing right by him. Setting him up, trying to teach him about people. Because Michael was soft; he didn’t know when he was being taken for a ride, like with that Afghan. They would finish with the border-jumpers and get in to something else in Manchester. Open a shop, or a scrapyard. There was plenty to be had.
He pushed himself away from the rail and went to get some breakfast. He gambolled down the stairs, colliding with a deckhand, hauling herself up towards him. He skipped aside, muttering, ‘Sorry, darlin’.’
She took a breath, flushed and dizzy.
‘That was him. Him. That man.’
Van Duren told her to stay put and began following Vinnie whilst casually admiring the sea and the sky. He tailed him to the restaurant and while the suspect was eating van Duren went to commandeer a deckhand’s high-vis jacket and name badge.
Vinnie paced on the edge of the overcast car deck. Van Duren watched him from the other side of the exit-door glass. Then Vinnie advanced, walking, van Duren thought, as if for an audience, which was the way Vinnie always walked.
He shut himself in the driver’s cabin and addressed those members of his cargo coming around from liberal portions of Rohypnol syringed into their water bottles. ‘Everyone okay back there? We’ll be landing in a wee while, then we’ll have you all out of there.’
Someone was weeping.
‘You’ll be as right as rain in no time. Not long now.’
Van Duren nonchalantly patrolled the deck, memorising a number plate.
Back in Katz’s Skoda, O’Grady was reading the debris around the interior the way a detective reads a crime scene. She had once said she needed a spacious four-door to lug her elderly mother around in, but there was no room for her. On the backseats he deduce
d a weekend with friends in Whitby: the waterproofs, walking boots and bright evening blouses, but what about the racket still tucked in its case?
‘Do you play squash or badminton?’
‘Neither, and it’s a badminton racket. Do you play?’
‘I play squash.’
‘Course you do.’
The ferry was in view. One colossal white lorry on top of another approaching on a runway of water.
‘Was there really no one over the last two days who struck you as a suspect?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know what a people smuggler looks like, don’t know the type.’
‘They look like people you can trust.’
Her phone rang. She waved her free hand at O’Grady; he produced a pen and a pad; she recited the registration number.
‘Thank you. And pass on my thanks to the officer on board, will you?’ She turned to O’Grady. ‘Is the registration on your list of visits?’
He already knew it was. ‘Gilheaney… Vincent Gilheaney. Travellers’ site in Manchester. I never got the pleasure.’
‘Where’s he taking them?’ she wondered aloud.
‘Bradford, Leeds. Maybe he drops them at the first roundabout.’
‘They’re money, Sergeant. Illegal immigrants are money. And we should follow it.’
‘But when I suggested we shouldn’t spook him, you said…’
Katz glared at him.
‘Two cars?’ he asked.
‘Two cars,’ she said. ‘I’ll start.’
Katz sent the uniformed officers away whilst O’Grady drove to the first exit of the nearest roundabout and parked up on a verge.
The scattered convoy of vehicles dragged along the Humber road, along Clive Sullivan Way. By the time they got to the bridge, O’Grady had overtaken Katz. Always they left a vehicle, sometimes two between themselves and their subject, and always a vehicle between one another. Both were keenly conscious of the twin dangers in tailing: the ‘swamped environment’ and the ‘fallow environment’. Meaning either so many cars on the road that you lose your subject or so few he rumbles you. Both had completed the police training course; neither, though, had ever followed anyone in a car before outside of an exercise. So far Vinnie was a breeze: he was steady, he didn’t stop for petrol, he even indicated well in advance. Once over the bridge onto the A1077, amidst the unvaried farmland of north Lincolnshire, the traffic thinned out, becoming so fallow there was nothing to leave between him and them. They both dropped back, but for all Vinnie was aware he could have been towing them. He wasn’t looking at his wing mirrors; he was looking into the rear view at the crates behind him. They were beginning to move; they were beginning to cry out – they were, in fact, beginning to speak to one another.
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