A Gingerbread House

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘Don’t tell your Mum,’ he said and relief flooded me from head to toe. ‘It would break her heart.’ Then he ruined it. ‘She meant nothing, Tash.’

  I scrubbed my face with both hands. ‘Are you seriously going to sit there and pretend that phone was for an affair? Because how do you think I found it? It rang.’ He was watching me closely now. ‘I answered it. And the guy on the other end thought I. Was. Mum. So obviously I don’t need to. Tell. Mum. Because. She. Knows.’ I felt tears begin to prick at me and I sniffed them away. ‘Look, all you need to do today is write your passwords down for me. I know the business. I can take over.’

  ‘You can’t seriously expec—’

  ‘You want me to go for my other option? Which is I call the police.’

  ‘You wouldn’t.’

  ‘I’d rather not,’ I admitted. ‘That’s why I’m offering you a lifeline. Don’t be stupid. Don’t be an even bigger moron than you’ve been. I’m letting you go.’ I had thought he’d cave, or bargain. Or possibly explode. I didn’t understand why he was being so calm.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll play along. In this fantasy where you’ve caught me doing something – God knows what! – why are you letting me go?’

  ‘Because I don’t want BG to go under. I need its money. I need the profit to undo what you did.’

  ‘Still playing along, what does that mean?’

  ‘I’m going to set up a foundation.’

  ‘Who do you think we are? Bill and Melinda—’

  ‘To raise funds—’

  ‘We’re a medium-sized transport business, Tash.’

  ‘We’re nothing, Dad. I’m a medium-sized transport business. You’re retired.’

  He wasn’t quite so calm now. His breath was beginning to sound in the back of his throat. I had never understood before what was going on inside his head when he made that noise, but I could make a guess this time. He was beginning to believe me. ‘You can’t just hand over a business,’ he said.

  ‘You can.’

  ‘What about Bazz?’ There it was again, that amused look in his eye. Bazz was dead wood. We both knew it and we never said it.

  ‘Bazz can stay on like he is now,’ I said. ‘Whatever it is you call him.’ I would spin that tale to get this done, then I’d cut him loose afterwards. If the only job he was competent to do was sweep the warehouse, he’d be a warehouse sweeper for the going rate. If he didn’t like the going rate, he could join the union and fight for more. ‘I want the passwords right now, the signed papers in a week and a list of which employees need to be let go with a fat bonus and which can stay.’

  ‘What?’ He was frowning deeply.

  ‘I want a list of anyone who falsified a docket. Or drove one of the lorries. Or even the lads on the wash who cleaned out after.’

  ‘Tash, I’m not being funny, what are you talking about? What dockets? Drove what lorry? Cleaned what, for God’s sake?’

  And this time I knew he was being absolutely sincere. I felt the floor shift under me as if it was a boat, as if it was the bottom of a forty-foot container on a ferry from Calais. Had I got this wrong? Was he innocent? Was none of it true? I stared at him and my life seemed to drift casually towards me again, there to be grabbed and lived if I only reached out for it. My daft dad, my annoying mum, my deadbeat brother all back again. My ordinary, good enough, infuriating, perfect family. When I spoke again my voice was shaky.

  ‘I thought,’ I said, ‘you were bringing migrants in from Europe. In our fleet. That’s what the newsreader said that night. Forty individuals. The guy on the phone said you were out in the nick of time and if you didn’t believe him you should watch the news.’

  ‘Tashie,’ Garry said and again he sounded amused, ‘you’re talking about people smuggling. Lorries full of people getting smuggled into Britain? Is that what you thought?’

  I nodded. I couldn’t have spoken. My face was numb.

  ‘BG has never, ever, ever been mixed up in anything like that,’ he said. ‘BG is as clean as a whistle.’

  I felt my breath go in a long wheezing sigh. If I could have stood up without falling over I would have gone round his desk and hugged him. He was still talking.

  ‘Dockets, she says! Cleaning out vans!’

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know how I got it so wrong. I don’t understand.’

  ‘Me neither.’ He was shaking his head at me. And I was thinking how quickly I could get down to Dumfries and explain to Ken that I’d left stuff in his files that I needed back. Ply him with doughnuts until he helped me. Then away to Ayr to tell the new driver I’d lost my engagement ring and checked everywhere else, so could I have a wee keek in the luggage hold of the bus. Then finally to Fraserburgh to clean out my locker at Icarus and hand back the key.

  But then he went on. ‘Tash,’ he said, his voice heavy with scorn, ‘these girls don’t come in by the dozen lying in a chilled container.’

  ‘What girls?’ I said, tuning back in gradually.

  He blinked slowly. ‘I thought you said you listened to the report. Those girls. Those women and girls.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Yeah, that’s right. Women and girls. Because their dads pay for them to leave Aleppo or whatever. Right? To get away from the war. And the men stay and fight. I hated thinking of them paying you to take their wives and children to safety.’

  ‘What about the little boys?’ he said. ‘Why would it be … what did the newsreader say?’

  ‘Women and girls, some as young as twelve,’ I said. That was what the newsreader had said. I remembered it. It just wasn’t the bit that played in my head over and over again. ‘Seventeen of the forty individuals’ was the bit that hit me so hard. Only, now I couldn’t believe how dumb I had been not to see that ‘women and girls’ was the point. Women and girls changed everything.

  ‘Why wouldn’t there be babies and toddlers?’ he said. ‘Little girls and boys of four and five?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I whispered.

  ‘Because, Tash,’ – he was enjoying it. He always enjoyed it when he got the chance to lecture me about something – ‘these girls should never have been smuggled. That’s not how it works. These girls come on holiday, or for a bit of cosmetic dental work, or engaged to a citizen – so they think. They come on planes, one at a time. Sending bloody forty of them over in the back of a wagon was ridiculous. People smugglers get caught all the time and that’s why.’

  ‘People smugglers,’ I said. ‘Which you’re not mixed up in and never have been. As opposed to …’

  ‘Trafficking,’ said my dad. ‘Smuggling is transit. Trafficking is logistics. They’re both supply and demand but otherwise – totally different game.’

  ‘Trafficking,’ I said. My vision clouded, a haze coming in from the edges until only his grinning face was still clear. ‘You’re a trafficker.’

  ‘Was,’ he corrected. ‘I’m out.’ He shook his fingers as if he’d burned them and laughed. ‘Those girls that day were all from towns where we’d been doing business for years. If that lorry load had been coming to us and got caught at Calais … Aiyeeee! But they weren’t because we’d got out.’

  I tried to blink away the haze in my eyes, but it only thickened and it was spreading. Even his face was hazy now. ‘Out,’ I said, ‘of trafficking. So it’s …’ I said, before my breath ran out. I was literally gasping for air. ‘It’s just a coincidence? That BG is transport?’

  ‘No,’ he said, lifting his chin. ‘It’s a big FU to the do-gooders. Transit gets a bad name for being dodgy so we’re whiter than whiter than white, see? Hiding in plain sight, Bazz calls it.’

  ‘Bazz calls it? Bazz knows? Bazz?’ I was dizzy.

  ‘Bazz knows more than you ever gave him credit for,’ my dad said sternly. ‘He’s designed an app and there’s more than us uses it now. “Click and collect”.’

  ‘Collect …’ I said and that one word used up my whole breath. I heaved in another one. ‘A girl? From … a street corner?’

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sp; ‘Come on, Tash!’ he said. ‘Don’t be stupid. Bazz is better than that. Pop-up shops. You’re in and out before the neighbours start mumping. Airbnb mostly.’

  ‘Pop-up shops to buy …’ Another breath. ‘Girls?’

  ‘The thing is a lot of them think they’re coming to work in factories and they’re happier—’

  ‘No!’ The anger was instant, like a petrol spill and a tossed match. It cleared my vision. ‘No way, Dad. Tell yourself that crap if you like but don’t smear it on me.’ I stopped and breathed my way back to calmness again. ‘So Bazz is a pimp, is he?’

  ‘Don’t be a bitch,’ Big Garry said. ‘Bazz is a tech innovator.’ He paused then. ‘His customers are pimps. Were pimps. I told you: it’s over. We’re out.’

  ‘But how do you get “out” of something like that?’ I said. ‘What happened to all the girls?’

  ‘We sold it. You know we sold it, Tash. BG Europe – the front business – and the rest of it too. Got a good price as well. Russians. They were the ones who had to write off a loss because some twat used a single lorry instead of forty commercial planes. Not us. Somebody up there likes me!’

  ‘So what happened to all the girls?’ I said again.

  ‘They’ve still got their jobs. New bosses, but the same old game. Unless that shitshow with the lorry did for them. Clueless buggers. They don’t deserve my good business if they’ve got no more sense than that.’

  ‘Your good business,’ I said. Suddenly he seemed to be a long way away. Maybe I was going to faint. But at least the distance helped me see him clearly. ‘Why are you telling me all this? After keeping it secret so long?’

  ‘You were halfway there anyway. Up a hell of a cul-de-sac – people smuggling! – but getting there.’

  ‘And what do you think I’ll do now?’

  ‘Eh?’ he said. ‘Do? Come home. We thought you’d found out and “taken the vapours”.’ It was one of my mum’s expressions. ‘But here you are back again. Overreacting, I might say. But at least you’re home.’

  ‘It’s all documented,’ I said. ‘And I’ve written a statement. The cops won’t care that I said “smuggling” instead of “trafficking”.’

  ‘You’ve not written anything.’ He spoke in a drawl.

  ‘I have. And I’ve planted it. Along with everything I could find. Anything I could lay my hands on.’

  ‘No, you haven’t,’ he said. His smile was broad enough to show the gaps from his missing molars. He said he kept the holes in his mouth to remind Bazz and me how cushy we had it compared with when he was a boy. The truth is he was scared of the dentist. He was a coward like most bullies. ‘Don’t lie to me, Tash. You haven’t planted anything. Not at Icarus, not at RoundnRound in Dumfries, not anywhere in the system of the South Ayrshire Health Trust.’

  ‘You knew where I was?’

  ‘Of course we bloody knew.’ He banged the sides of his fists on his desk, irritated, as if I was an insect he couldn’t quite manage to swipe away. ‘Bazz found you every time and he’ll find you next time too, wherever you go. Shetland, Cornwall, London. The reason I know you’ve planted nothing is that Bazz found every log-in and every email.’

  I shouldn’t have smiled, but I couldn’t help it. He grew very still, watching me.

  ‘I didn’t know about Bazz,’ I said. ‘You’re right. I underestimated him. But that’s not why there’s no log-ins and no emails to be found. There’s nothing online, because I’m your daughter, Dad. And I wanted to present you with something you’d understand. Paper and ink.’

  He did understand. He wasn’t laughing or drawling now. He wasn’t affronted or annoyed. He was breathing like a bull and the look in his eye turned my blood to jelly.

  ‘I’ll find your paper and ink,’ he said. ‘Wherever it is you’ve stashed it.’

  ‘Where do you think I’ve stashed it, Dad?’ I said. ‘Which one of three places would I have picked?’ He hadn’t cottoned on, so I drove it home. ‘Eh? Which one? Out of three?’

  ‘You stupid—’

  ‘Me?’ I said. ‘For doing what you always told me? Belt, braces and glue? Belt, braces and three big tubes of super-glue? You might talk your way in once, Dad. Two’s less likely. But three? How long would it take you to get in and out of three different places when you don’t know where to look?’ I said. ‘Longer than the time it takes me to dial nine-nine-nine?’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ he said.

  ‘Try me,’ I said. ‘I dare you. Or, if your brain’s firing on all cylinders, give it up now. And I’ll retrieve everything and destroy it.’

  ‘You’re breaking my heart, Tashie,’ he said. And every one of my hairs lifted and bristled. Because I believed him. It was breaking his heart to do what he was going to do. Leaving his company and moving to Mallorca would have pissed him off and embarrassed him. Letting me go to the police and drag his name through the mud would have enraged him. What he was planning to do – I was almost sure of it – was heartbreaking.

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ I whispered.

  ‘Try me.’

  FIFTEEN

  It was neat and it was simple. They both came to the outside door. One of them opened it. Kate came into the anteroom, said ‘Won’t be long, Gail’, and got locked in. She opened the inner door, entered, delivered the food and left again. She locked the inner door and shouted ‘Let me out, Gail!’ Which Gail did. Every day. Five minutes every day to clamour and beg. Five minutes to bargain and wheedle and argue. And all of the other minutes of all the other hours to ache.

  And to question.

  ‘What do they want?’ That was what Martine kept coming back to, like Laura came back to ‘When will someone come?’ and Ivy herself came back to ‘Why didn’t she kill us, with her little knife?’

  Only none of them said it out loud now. The pain of arguing, of being at one another’s throats, had been unbearable when it happened out of the blue one day.

  ‘Shut up!’ Laura had screamed suddenly, when Martine was talking about her hotel room, comforting herself, not doing any harm to anyone. ‘Shut up shut up shut up!’

  ‘Don’t pick on her!’ Ivy had said.

  ‘Your little clique,’ Laura screamed. ‘Your cosy little twosome. You make me sick, both of you.’

  ‘No wonder you needed a dating site,’ Martine said calmly. ‘You’re a stone-cold bitch.’

  ‘No wonder your father ran for the hills,’ Laura said. ‘Who’d want an anvil like you round his neck.’

  ‘Don’t be such brats,’ Ivy said. ‘Don’t be such poisonous little brats.’ She thought it would make her feel better to give in and say it, but it only put a lump of cold misery in her chest, as if she’d swallowed a stone, and she started sobbing. She and Laura cried for what felt like hours, while Martine banged her head over and over, against the wall behind her, then she cried too. They cried until they were sick and shaking, until their sweat had turned bitter, until their voices cracked and their eyes dried.

  Then came hours of silence.

  At the end of it, Ivy leaned sideways and picked up a water bottle. She took a swig and passed it to Laura. ‘Taste that,’ she said. She waited. ‘I think they’ve run out.’

  ‘Let me taste,’ Martine said. She swilled a mouthful of water round her mouth. ‘You could be right.’

  ‘But why would Igor stop slipping us the Valium, or whatever it is?’ Laura said.

  ‘Igor?’ said Martine.

  Ivy saw the flash of irritation cross Laura’s face. Any time she was reminded how young Martine was, that look swept over her. As if age mattered now. ‘Frankenstein’s lab assistant,’ she said. ‘Good one, Laura. It suits her better than “Kate”.’

  The next day, Ivy took the first sip from the water bottle after it was brought in and when she tasted the bitterness there she felt a warm surge of relief and then of rage at herself.

  She passed the bottle to Laura who took a deep swig. ‘Thank God for that,’ she said. ‘And how pathetic is it that I mean it with all my he
art?’ She passed the bottle to Martine, saying ‘Little something for your nerves, madam?’ Martine drank thirstily too.

  So maybe they wouldn’t have ended up at each other’s throats again. But still they were wary. They passed the baton carefully. One could be low at a time, no more. Round and round they passed it – tears, and rage and hope and despair – but always keeping those three questions quiet, like a prayer.

  They took turns for everything. It was Ivy’s turn to choose what to ask for today. Kate didn’t always comply, but often enough to make it worth trying. They’d got a toothbrush, and a plaster for Martine’s cut hand when she had scraped it on the frame of the fanlight, scrabbling for a way to find the edge of the thick cloudy glass and knock it out.

  ‘One toothbrush,’ Laura had said. ‘I could weep. Or I could file it to a point and stab her.’

  ‘You can have it,’ said Martine. ‘I don’t mind using my finger with a baby wipe wrapped round.’

  They’d got the baby wipes, Ivy thought. That helped. They washed with them, wiping their own fronts and having each other scrub their backs, eking out every last bit of clean smell and moisture. Then they hung them over a pipe that crossed the cellar at head height and when they’d dried out, they went over to the drain, folded in a pile.

  That was another thing they’d fallen out over. Ivy saw Martine wipe after a pee and before she knew what she was doing she had burst out scolding like a monkey. She couldn’t help herself. And Martine lashed back. Now they had the drain she wanted to be clean. It was different before.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ivy. ‘It was quieter.’ The drain was high above the sewer it fell to and it was right in the middle of the floor. It was upsetting to squat there while two strangers listened to the stream that splashed into the pipe so far below and the farts that rattled out of them all whenever they squatted, from the terrible food they ate and the lack of exercise. Whenever it was more than pees and farts the other two would go as far as they could get and talk as loud as they could, only returning to the cardboard and the bit of light when they heard the scraper and the rumble of the metal sheet being pulled back over the hole.