The Dead Line

by Holly Watt

  ‘It’s OK,’ Layla called across. ‘She’ll talk.’

  Casey kneeled down beside Romida, smiling. Romida grinned back with a quick, confident charm. Already she looked quite different to the haunted girl on the ship. There was a toughness in her eyes, and in the tilt of her jaw. Looking at her, Casey could see the girl who had fought the soldiers in Rakhine with all her strength. She could see the echo of Shamshun, too, the woman who had walked for miles through the forests, fighting for her daughter, fighting to survive.

  You never know how you can run, until you run for your daughter.

  ‘You said you had met my mother,’ said Romida, as Layla translated smoothly.

  ‘Shamshun,’ said Casey. ‘She will be so excited to see you, Romida.’

  Romida’s eyes lit up. ‘I cannot wait to see her.’ Her eyes clouded slightly. ‘But she will be so angry with me . . . I should never have gone . . .’

  ‘Of course she is not angry,’ Hessa interrupted. ‘And Jamalida will be so pleased to see you, too.’

  ‘Jamalida.’ The memories filled Romida’s eyes. ‘I told them to wait for her, back in the camp. I told them she wouldn’t be long . . . I was so stupid.’

  ‘Do you know the name of the men who snatched you from the camp?’ Casey asked.

  Romida’s head sagged. ‘Jeetu,’ she said. ‘He said his name was Jeetu, but that might be a lie. I thought he was so nice. And then he hit me. He hit me hard. It hurt. It hurts.’

  The bruises still showed on her face.

  ‘Do you remember anyone else?’

  ‘There was another man, but I never knew his name. He told me he had a gun, That he would shoot me if I made a sound. But I didn’t care. I shouted, I tried to throw myself out of the car. I screamed. I said I didn’t care what they did to me, that they could kill me if they wanted, but I would not go. I would not go.’

  The will to live gleamed in Romida’s eyes: the ruthless, absolute determination to survive. But then her shoulders slumped. ‘Jeetu told me they would go to my mother’s tent. They said they would go to her, and rape her . . . And kill her . . . And there was nothing I could . . . I knew they would . . . I stopped fighting then. I didn’t know what to do.’

  Romida paused, gazing at the whirl of the ceiling fan.

  ‘They dragged me out of the car.’ Romida’s voice was empty when she spoke again. ‘We were in some street, I don’t know where. People were staring. And then they looked away. They knew not to get involved. They knew, and they looked away . . .’ Her eyes filled with tears, but she rubbed them back, almost angry. ‘They dragged me into a house. It smelled. It was disgusting. I didn’t know what would happen, or where they were taking me, or where I was. I thought they were taking me to work in a brothel . . . And then Jeetu forced something over my mouth, and everything just . . . faded. When I woke up, I was on that ship. With two other girls.’

  ‘I am so sorry,’ Casey murmured. ‘So sorry.’

  Tasmina interrupted, gesturing angrily. Romida flinched as she listened.

  ‘Tasmina is saying’ – Layla spoke carefully – ‘that they never saw the babies, that they didn’t know what happened to them. And then Zohra . . . Zohra . . .’

  Tasmina was crying, pushing away one of the other girls as she tried to hug her.

  ‘How can people do this?’ Layla translated impassively, as Romida blazed with a blistering rage. ‘How dare they? How dare they do this to us? We are people.’

  And Casey thought of the shrug from the world. Hundreds of thousands of people in a bleak refugee camp, and a casual ‘that will do’. And soon, so soon, they would be trying to send the refugees back to Bangladesh, where the murders and the gang rapes could start all over again. Casey felt that burn of anger, for Romida, for all the girls with no future. It’s not fair: a childish whine for such an injustice.

  ‘But I am free now,’ Layla translated as Romida straightened up. ‘I have survived. And now I will go back to the camp’ – a wry smile spread across her face – ‘and I will see my mother, and Jamalida, and everyone. And one day, Jamalida and I will be tailors together, as we always said.’

  Khadija leaned forward and handed Romida two pieces of fabric. Her eyes met Casey’s defiantly. ‘I am not afraid,’ she said.

  Casey spoke to all the women, one by one, taking careful notes. Some of them described being taken off the ship, to a clinic with basic medical facilities. Driven in the back of what might have been an old truck, they thought. Khadija – the brightest, the angriest – swore about the men, using words that Layla refused to translate.

  ‘They could have been taken to anywhere in Chittagong,’ Casey said in an aside to Hessa. ‘And the surrounding area.’

  ‘The thing is,’ Hessa stumbled, ‘many of these women might not even know what IVF is. You know what Savannah said about that footballer. It’s hard to get information in those camps, with those rates of illiteracy.’

  Casey dug out a photograph of Dr Greystone without much hope, but the women shook their heads.

  ‘Rich Bangladeshis typically travel to Singapore or Bangkok for IVF,’ murmured Hessa. ‘In fact, the wealthiest would travel abroad for most medical issues. They don’t have much faith in Dhaka’s hospitals.’

  ‘All you needed here were the basic requirements for the frozen embryo transfers,’ said Casey. ‘Presumably Greystone could coordinate the egg extraction and fertilisation anywhere in the world. They just had to ensure the carrier woman was at the right point in her cycle.’

  They said goodbye to the women, Romida giving Casey a sudden bright grin.

  On the way back to the hotel, Casey leaned back in the tuk-tuk. ‘We still don’t know the scale of it,’ she said. ‘Were those women the only ones that Greystone’s lot has seized? Or are there other sites, scattered around the country? How much is he pulling in from this scheme?’

  ‘Emily would be able to tell us exact prices,’ said Hessa. ‘Surrogacy varies from country to country. In the US, it’s about $150,000 all in. It’s less in Kenya. In the Ukraine, it’s more like $40,000. Some countries have more delays. The clinics vary too. Some clinics offer several rounds; others offer certain guarantees. Your money back if you don’t get a baby. Then there are the legal costs for getting a baby back to the UK – or wherever. They vary dramatically too. Given that Greystone seems to be able to get the kids back to England fairly straightforwardly without any waiting lists, he’s probably able to charge quite a premium even though he’s operating under the radar. Let’s say $25,000 per child.’

  ‘God.’ Casey put her head in her hands. ‘The mathematics are barbaric.’

  ‘And how many a year?’ Hessa persisted. ‘If there were fifteen women at the shipyard when we got there . . . There could be, say, twenty babies a year.’

  ‘That’s half a million dollars a year from the shipyard women alone,’ calculated Casey. ‘And Greystone has access to an endless stream of desperate women on Harley Street. There could be other sites in Bangladesh, or anywhere else, too.’

  ‘There may even be word of mouth back in London,’ said Hessa. ‘Although, as the Burton-Smiths show, if you don’t want to know, they certainly won’t spell it out to you.’

  ‘He would be making millions every year,’ said Casey. ‘How old was Vivienne Hargreaves’s son? Three? It could have been running for years.’

  ‘I wonder what happened to the Rohingya women after they gave birth,’ said Hessa.

  ‘I suppose they would just have another baby,’ said Casey. ‘Or . . .’

  Hessa turned her face away.

  ‘I wonder if one of the women from the shipyard ended up in the garment factory?’ Casey speculated. ‘And that’s how she managed to get the message into the skirt Cressida found.’

  ‘Maybe,’ muttered Hessa. ‘Maybe she wasn’t able to get pregnant, so they shunted her out to the factories. I suppose we’ll never be able to find out.’

  ‘Probably not,’ said Casey. ‘Any attempt to find her would put her i
n such danger.’

  ‘But she was so brave,’ Hessa clenched her fists. ‘She was so very brave.’

  They were both silent with exhaustion by the time they got back to the hotel. Miranda was waiting, bags packed, with Bantham and Ed and the baby.

  ‘Hurry,’ she said.

  Bantham had come in a diplomatic car. ‘I told the High Commissioner I needed to meet up with a few old contacts,’ he said. ‘He’s already suspicious.’

  He gave them a lift to the airport all the same.

  ‘This is the bit that they will really get me on,’ Bantham almost laughed. ‘Inappropriate use of a government car.’

  ‘Get out of the country as soon as possible,’ Miranda said to him briefly. ‘The Commission may not be safe either.’

  Miranda jiggled the baby in the sling almost instinctively, leaning away from the tiny weight. Casey watched the pair of them, a couple of places back in the queue. Casually bored, Miranda handed over the passport for a small Miss Pippa Lancaster, and the border guards shrugged them through.

  53

  They bounced through Dhaka, Qatar, and landed home. The English spring waited for them: the tulips red and gold in the parks, and the blossom blowing down the streets, confetti for a thousand brides.

  As their car drew up at the Post, Dash and Ross hovered at the entrance. A stern young woman stood beside them.

  ‘Got her from that nanny place.’ Ross jerked his thumb. ‘The one the Royals use.’

  The woman’s mouth tightened. ‘I’m Nina Reynolds,’ she said to Miranda.

  ‘It would be very useful if you could take over with Poppy for a short while,’ Dash said hastily. ‘We need Miranda’s help on a project . . . Urgently.’

  ‘Of course.’ Nina Reynolds spoke with precision, neat in her uniform. ‘I understand that a room has been booked in the hotel across the road.’

  ‘I booked it.’ Janet, the Editor’s personal assistant, appeared. ‘It’s all done.’

  ‘Marvellous.’ Miranda deposited Poppy into Nina’s arms like a parcel. ‘I’ll – um – pop round in a bit, Nina.’

  ‘I’ll show you to the hotel,’ said Janet. ‘This way.’

  Hessa watched as the little group disappeared across the street. Poppy was crying. ‘She’ll be OK, won’t she?’

  ‘She’ll be fine,’ promised Casey. ‘Much better than she would be with us, anyway. Come on.’

  They all crowded into the investigations room, Dash dragging in chairs from the main room. Ross stood by the door, one eye on his newsroom.

  ‘Where have you got to?’ Dash asked briskly.

  ‘Savannah is organising everything for the safe house back in Bangladesh,’ said Casey. ‘But whoever is in charge of operations in London will know that someone got to the Beauvallet, and brought the women out. So they’ll either be seeking revenge, or panicking.’

  ‘I’d assume these people were dangerous,’ said Miranda. ‘Not panicking.’

  ‘We’re sending funds out to Savannah’s organisation.’ Dash was tapping his pen on his notepad. ‘The owners okayed that.’

  Just as the Editor gets his definite article, so too in a newspaper do the owners.

  ‘But we still don’t know’ – Casey was fiddling with some treasury tags – ‘who is behind it all.’

  ‘Greystone, surely?’ Dash looked up, surprised.

  ‘Raz had never heard his name,’ said Casey. ‘Dylan didn’t behave as if Greystone was his boss. There is somebody else.’

  ‘And did you find out who that might be while you were in Chittagong?’ Dash asked briskly.

  ‘No.’ Casey was staring at the wall behind his head. ‘We never got anywhere near him.’

  ‘And can you think of any way of getting to that person?’

  ‘No,’ Casey admitted. ‘Not immediately.’

  ‘Well. There we go.’ Dash turned to Miranda, trying to move the conversation forward.

  ‘I wonder,’ Miranda pondered, ‘when Greystone’s people will start telling the prospective parents that the women have gone missing in Bangladesh? Presumably, the parents whose surrogates were pregnant will all go into meltdown.’

  ‘Honestly.’ Hessa dropped her head into her hands. ‘What a mess.’

  ‘If this gang hold their nerve,’ Casey persisted, ‘they can get things back to normal in a few months’ time. It’s a setback, sure, but if we don’t nail the key people now, they could just start up again. I imagine the parents don’t know each other. So they could tell each set of parents, “Terribly sorry, tragic miscarriage. It can happen, we did warn you.” And the parents won’t know the difference.’

  Casey imagined the pockets of grief all over the world. For all those lost children, who weren’t lost at all, not really.

  ‘And those kids just grow up in Bangladesh?’ Dash asked. ‘Abandoned children growing up in that little safe house? They’ll never fit in.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Casey stared blankly at him. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake.’ Dash was angry, quite suddenly. ‘How can we ever fix this, Casey? These are children. Children.’

  The room fell into silence, startled by his anger. A glance flickered between Casey and Miranda.

  ‘We could never just go in and fix it . . .’ Casey’s words fell away. ‘It’s not how it works. We know that . . .’

  ‘We will think of a solution,’ said Miranda. ‘For the time being, those women need medical care and a decent place to live. They’ve got that. As things progress, we can see what the women want – for themselves and their children – and we can work that out.’

  ‘It’ll be a nightmare.’

  ‘But for now’ – Miranda spoke smoothly into the hush – ‘the mastermind may think they can just get away with it. Carry on. Maybe even start up again, quite soon . . .’

  ‘So they won’t necessarily panic,’ Hessa chimed in evenly.

  ‘We need to work as fast as possible.’ Dash concentrated on the new problem. ‘If they do work out that you’re journalists, and who you are, you could be in serious danger, even in England.’

  In the squash of the room, Hessa had her feet up on her suitcase. ‘Why don’t we start by getting Poppy to the Burton-Smiths? Then at least that is done.’

  ‘I’ve already tried ringing,’ said Casey. ‘They didn’t answer.’

  Hessa gave her a quick glance. ‘Isn’t that a bit odd?’

  ‘They’ll call,’ said Casey. ‘We told them to get out of the house in Surrey, just in case.’

  ‘Leaving everything else aside, we have to get on with publishing, Casey,’ said Dash. ‘Miranda’s got the film of Greystone in his office. You’ve got info on the team out in Bangladesh. It’s more than enough to be going on with.’

  ‘No,’ said Casey. ‘You’re going too fast. There’s someone tying it all together.’

  ‘This Dylan character.’ Miranda spoke to Casey. ‘He seemed to be in charge of operations in Bangladesh?’

  ‘But what links Dylan and Greystone?’ said Casey. ‘How would they ever have come across each other? A Harley Street doctor and an Asia-based drug dealer. It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Maybe Greystone decided that he needed a contact in Bangladesh.’ Dash thought it out. ‘When his arrangements in Nepal – and wherever else he was operating before that – fell through. He put out feelers and came up with Dylan. We know that Vivienne Hargreaves had let it slip that her father was a diplomat out there, so Bangladesh became the obvious choice.’

  ‘There’s someone else.’ Casey felt the certainty grow.

  ‘You haven’t even met Greystone,’ said Dash. ‘You don’t know him.’

  ‘Miranda?’ said Casey. ‘What did you make of him? From your memo, he didn’t strike me as the sort of person who would be going out to these countries, to make these deals. He’s far too urbane.’

  Miranda shrugged. ‘You can’t tell from a few minutes.’

  ‘You can tell a lot,’ said Casey flatly. ‘Especially yo
u.’

  ‘OK.’ Miranda bit her lip. ‘Probably not then. But Greystone could have any number of contacts who put him in touch with Dylan.’

  ‘We have to start publishing as soon as possible,’ Dash repeated. ‘You know that, Casey. Especially with this story.’

  Casey glowered at him. Stay ahead of the story. It was always crucial. Tell the story, own the story. Journalists got blindsided all the time. They climbed on the roller coaster, not knowing where it would end. Pandora’s Box, wide open.

  ‘We don’t have it all yet,’ Casey said again.

  ‘You’ve got enough. Maybe it’s not the whole story, but it’s enough to publish. Get up to north London to see Greystone, and then we can get started.’

  ‘I’ll get the other reporters stuck in,’ Ross joined in. ‘Robert can pull together some of the articles we’ll need. I’ll tell Xav we need a column. Video can get going on the footage. All that stuff from Greystone’s office and the Bangladesh filming needs to be edited too, with subtitles and the rest of it. Foreign can put together stuff on Bangladesh while Heather does a backgrounder on overseas surrogacy.’

  Robert was the chief reporter, brilliant at pulling together dozens of complicated facts into a readable piece.

  ‘All right.’ Casey kicked at her suitcase. Fine.’

  She stood up abruptly, her chin jutting out, and turned to Dash one more time.

  ‘I need to check one thing. It’s important. I need one day.’

  Dash stared at Casey for a long time, tapping the desk with a biro.

  ‘Please,’ she managed. ‘We’ve got to do this right. Otherwise, what was the point in it all?’

  ‘All right,’ Dash said slowly. ‘You can have one more day, Casey. Then we publish what we know.’

  He could see he had lost her already. Casey was checking her phone, thinking, before she looked up, eyes sharp.

  ‘We’ve been looking at this the wrong way.’

  54

  It was almost midnight when Casey’s flight landed at Nice airport, the darkness blotting out the rows of private jets lined up on the tarmac.