by Anna Smith
Rosie motioned her towards the car. They got in and Rosie started the engine.
‘Look, I can’t go anywhere,’ Jan said, her voice quivering. ‘I’ve no time. My weans will be in from school. I need to get home and make their dinner.’ She looked over her shoulder. ‘Just drive up here, where it’s a bit quiet and we can talk for a minute, then you can drop me nearer my house.’
Rosie drove up towards a derelict industrial estate and turned in, taking one of the smaller roads where the place was deserted. She stopped the car.
‘Jan,’ Rosie turned to her. ‘Listen to me. Do you have any idea what’s happened to Tam? I mean, is there anything in the last few months that he’s been doing different? Has he been behaving different because of his work?’
Jan said nothing. She shook her head and bit her lip.
‘I’ve told the police everything.’ Jan fell silent, then sniffed.
‘Have you, Jan?’ Rosie touched her arm. ‘Did you really tell the police everything? Or did you keep stuff back.’
Jan looked at her and wiped the tears spilling out of her eyes.
‘Tell me, Jan. What’s happened to Tam? What was he doing?’
Suddenly Jan put her hands to her face, sobbing.
‘I told him. I told him.’ She buried her face.
Rosie waited, listening to Jan’s sobbing and looking out of the windscreen at the steady drizzle.
‘Jan,’ she ventured. ‘I want to ask you something, because I’m working on an investigation. Was Tam mixed up in something to do with refugees? Is that what’s happened here?’
Jan took her hands away from her face and wiped her tears. She took a deep breath, and spoke between sobs.
‘Tam’s dead.’ She swallowed and sniffed.
‘How do you know that?’
‘They told me. He’s dead.’ She wiped her face. ‘Oh God! What am I going to tell my weans?’
‘Who told you?’
‘That polecat Howie’s sidekick Clock Buchanan. He told me. He was sent to sort me out. Keep me quiet.’
‘Keep you quiet? How?’
Jan turned to face Rosie, her eyes bloodshot and her cheeks and neck blotchy from nerves and emotion.
‘Fuck sake! How do you think? They know my weans are more important to me than anything else in the world.’ She paused. ‘They sorted me out with money.’ She put her hand to her mouth and shook her head.
Rosie said nothing.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Jan went on. ‘They bought my silence. They killed my man, then paid me to keep quiet. They gave me money so the weans will be all right.’ She paused. ‘You got any kids?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Well, maybe you’ll not understand then. Maybe you won’t know that when you’ve got a wean you’ll do anything to make sure they’re all right.’
They sat in awkward silence.
‘I do understand.’ Rosie touched her arm. She remembered the men her mother had sex with at their home for money. It had never been mentioned, but even as a kid she always knew. ‘I understand what people do for their kids.’
‘It’s not right though,’ Jan said.
‘What’s not right? You have to look after your kids, Jan. I can see that.’
‘No, that’s not what I mean. What they’re doing isn’t right.’
‘Who?’
‘Howie and that mob.’ She shook her head. ‘Them poor people.’
‘What people?’
‘Them refugees. Asylum seekers.’
Rosie’s pulse quickened.
‘What, Jan? What are they doing?’
Jan looked at Rosie then put her head back and her hands went to her face again. ‘I’m scared. I’m so fucking scared.’
Rosie watched her. She knew it would come.
‘They’re killing them, Rosie,’ Jan said. ‘They’re kidnapping them and killing them.’
Rosie tried hard to say nothing. She was almost scared to breathe in case she’d break the moment.
Jan wiped her nose. She seemed to compose herself, then spoke again. ‘They steal them off the street and take them away somewhere in the countryside and kill them.’
‘What?’ Rosie said. ‘The vigilantes?’
‘No. Not vigilantes. That’s just shite. I mean there’s vigilantes as well, but they’re just hooligans. No. This is different.’
‘But why do they do it?’
Jan paused, then took a deep breath.
‘I think they sell their body parts. Bones, eyes, skin. Every fucking thing. That’s what Tam told me.’ She shook her head. ‘Oh, Christ. I can’t believe my Tam would be mixed up in that.’
Rosie looked at her in disbelief. ‘Christ almighty! You mean Tam was actually part of that, Jan? That just doesn’t sound like him. From what I hear about Tam, he wasn’t that big a player in Howie’s mob.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He was just driving the … the stuff, in the van down to Manchester. That’s where it’s all organised from. Tam was just driving the van, one of them refrigerated vans with the stuff inside it all packed in metal containers and bottles. They took it to some factory.’ She closed her eyes tight. ‘Christ, I don’t even want to think about it.’
Rosie was trying to process the information – body parts, tissue, vans to Manchester. She couldn’t even imagine telling McGuire this one.
‘Did Tam tell you all this?’
‘Aye. He told me. He’s only been doing it for three months. He didn’t know what it was at first, thought it was just gear – drugs or something. Then he got curious. He looked in the van one time and saw stuff.’
‘What stuff?’
‘I don’t know. He said containers and things. Then one time, he saw a torso. He said it was all frozen stiff, like a side of beef. I don’t know what the fuck they were going to do with that. I mean who wants to buy a fucking torso?’
‘So how did they find out he knew? Why did they kill him?’
‘Because he was trying to blackmail them. I told him not to be so stupid, but he said this was bigger than drugs and bigger than anything he’d ever done. He thought he could blackmail them by threatening to expose them. I mean how fucking stupid is that? I told him not to.’
Rosie shook her head slowly.
‘Jesus. What was he thinking about? You can’t blackmail a guy like Al Howie or Jake Cox. Tam would know that.’
‘I know.’
‘So,’ Rosie said quietly, ‘that torso in the Clyde. Is that something to do with Tam?’
‘Aye. He phoned me to say he stole it and was going to hide it, that he’d made a phone call to Big Al Howie. I told him not to be so stupid. His phone went dead in the middle of the conversation, and that’s the last I heard from him.’
They sat in silence.
‘What do you want to do, Jan, with all this information? Don’t you think you should be going to the police?’
‘What? And leave my weans orphans?’
‘Doesn’t have to be like that. They could get you away somewhere. Witness protection.’
Jan shook her head.
‘No way.’ She looked at the clock on the dashboard. ‘I’ve got to go now, Rosie. Can you drop me up the road a bit?’
‘Of course.’ They drove out of the industrial estate in silence. As Rosie got close to where Jan had asked to be dropped off, she turned to her and asked, ‘Jan, do you have any idea where this place is? You know – where they take the refugees?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Jan said. ‘Tam said it was on the outside of Glasgow – out towards Drymen or something. Off the main road in the countryside. He might have it written down somewhere. I’ll look in the house.’
Rosie needed more.
‘Do you know who does all the stuff, you know, the operations on the bodies? I mean, cuts them up. They must have somebody who knows what they’re doing.’
Jan nodded. She looked at Rosie.
‘Some foreigner. He runs the place. They call him Doctor Mengele after that
Nazi. I think he’s from Yugoslavia or Russia or Kosovo – one of them places. Tam said he was a scary bastard.’
‘Any name, Jan? Can you remember anything more about him?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘If I find anything, I’ll let you know. Phone you or something.’
Rosie stopped the car, and Jan moved to get out.
‘Jan,’ Rosie said, touching her arm. ‘You do know that I’m going to investigate what you’ve told me. I won’t go to the cops, I promise. But I will find out what’s going on, and what happened to Tam.’ She paused, giving Jan her business card. ‘And obviously I’ll never tell anyone I spoke to you.’
‘I know what I’ve done by talking to you, Rosie. I’m doing it for Tam, even though it’s too late for him. And I’m doing it for them refugees. Howie and that mob are rotten. They should get what’s coming to them.’ She paused. ‘But give me two days before you do anything, till I leave the country. I’m out of here. The weans don’t even know yet. I’m taking them out of school and I’m going to Spain, out of the way. I was going anyway, even before I met you.’ She shook her head. ‘I just don’t know what I’m going to do. My Tam didn’t deserve this.’
She got out of the car and closed the door.
CHAPTER 10
In the crowded waiting room of the Scottish Refugee Council, Rosie watched the black woman whose eyes stared blankly, seemingly oblivious to the racket of noisy kids playing with toys on the floor. She’d been motionless in the same position for the past twenty minutes, her baby asleep in a garish coloured shawl at her bosom. She was the only black person among the half dozen other refugees, each here with their stories of lives torn apart by war and ethnic cleansing. Each of them with their own separate nightmare, but all of them united by fear and apprehension of what tomorrow could bring. Rosie had heard the woman say she was from Rwanda, which probably explained the catatonic expression in her eyes. No matter where the troubled young mother would go, no matter how far away from her homeland she fled, she would forever be in Rwanda. That much Rosie knew for sure. She watched her, recollecting her own brief stint in the Congo border town of Goma, where Rwandan refugees had flooded in after the genocide. She’d been there at the height of the cholera epidemic as it swept through the sprawling tented camp. The images had stayed with her. The sickly stench of the stiff dead bodies piled up on the pick-up trucks, the refugees crawling in the baking sun to the makeshift hospital tent to die among babies too weak to fight. And always, for Rosie, the memory of a little abandoned toddler, hunkered down, tear-stained and screaming for help that never came. Rosie shuddered.
‘Rosie Gilmour?’
She blinked away the flashbacks and looked up at the tall, gangly young man in the spectacles standing before her.
‘Hi. I’m Christy Larkin. Can you come this way please? Margaret Bradshaw will see you now.’
Rosie got up and exchanged glances with a few of the refugees as she left the room. The Rwandan woman stared straight ahead.
‘You’ve got your hands full here,’ Rosie said, making conversation with the young man as they walked along the corridor.
‘Yeah, not half,’ he said, squeezing past metal filing cabinets stuffed with folders. ‘There’s so much to do – between people fighting deportation, and always more and more refugees arriving. Huge workload, as you can see.’
‘How do you find it – the nature of the work? Must kind of wear you down a bit, all the stories.’
Christy stopped and looked at her.
‘Yeah, it does, Rosie. But you must know that yourself – having seen a lot of it at first hand in the camps and stuff.’ He smiled, his eyes soft behind big tortoiseshell, geeky glasses. ‘I’ve read a lot of your reports – Rwanda, Kosovo, Bosnia. Must have been tough.’
‘Yeah. It was sometimes. But it wasn’t happening to me, Christy.’ Rosie gave her stock answer. ‘I got to go to a hotel at night.’
Christy studied her face.
‘Yeah, suppose so. But you still told the stories. That matters.’
‘Thanks, Christy,’ Rosie felt a little embarrassed, but touched by his youthful honesty. ‘I appreciate you saying that.’ She changed the subject. ‘So are you with the press office?’
‘No. Not really,’ he replied. ‘I’m a kind of investigator. I gather all the information from the refugees. Do a lot of the one-to-one interviews and collate information and background. I help identify with the press office what we should be doing to highlight certain cases.’
‘Sounds like a lot of work.’
‘Yeah. It’s hard sometimes. Trying to get the right story across.’
Rosie scanned his face as they stood in the corridor. She sensed some underlying frustration in his demeanour.
‘What do you mean, the right message? Like the refugee stories that are going to make the papers sit up and take notice?’
Christy hesitated. He shrugged. ‘Hmmm … Sometimes. But other times you find things out that people don’t want to know.’
‘Who doesn’t want to know? The press?’
Christy sighed. ‘No. Not really.’ He looked like he was bursting to talk.
‘We should have a drink sometime, Christy.’ Rosie took a card out of her pocket and handed it to him. ‘Just you and me. Away from here and off the record.’
He put the card in his pocket and looked Rosie in the eye.
‘Yeah.’ He smiled. ‘I’d like that. I’ll give you a call.’ He put his finger to his lips as he was about to open the office door.
*
‘Margaret – Rosie Gilmour,’ Christy said, announcing her as he walked into the office.
As Rosie followed him in, a pale and tired-looking woman, with mousy brown hair that needed a wash, came from behind her desk. She gave Rosie a limp, clammy handshake and introduced herself.
‘I deal with the press enquiries here, Rosie. You know, organising one-on-one interviews with refugees for features. All of that stuff. Facts and figures.’ She motioned her to a small sitting area with a coffee table and four soft chairs.
‘You must be up to your eyes, Margaret,’ Rosie said as they sat down. She declined the offer of a coffee and sat for a second watching the press officer. She looked nervy, Rosie thought. Probably snowed under with work and the strain of trying to get the right spin across to the public at a time when refugees were suddenly unpopular in Glasgow. The city had opened its heart many years ago when the Vietnamese boat people arrived, and after that, the Bosnians. But lately, with the influx of Iraqis, Kurds and now Kosovan Albanians, it was clearly getting refugee fatigue.
‘Yeah. It’s tough some days.’ She sighed.
‘This is a terrible business up the road in Balornock,’ Rosie said. ‘The way locals are turning on refugees, I think it’s disgusting.’
Margaret crossed her legs and leaned forward. ‘It is. But it’s all part of a bigger picture of poverty and social problems, Rosie …’
Rosie didn’t want to listen to a lecture on the effects of the mushrooming underclass. She’d been in that movie many times. So she got to the point.
‘Margaret,’ she interrupted. ‘I’ve a couple of things I wanted to ask you – facts and figures – if that’s ok.’
Margaret looked irritated at the interruption.
‘Of course.’ Her mouth tightened.
From the corner of her eye, Rosie could see Christy was watching her.
‘You see,’ she began, ‘I’m wondering how you keep track of the refugees who are here. You know, once they are housed and you have records of them, so they can get social welfare and the things they need. How do you keep track of them?’
Silence. Rosie tried not to look at Christy. Margaret got up and went to a filing cabinet and opened a drawer. She took out a file and sat down behind her desk. Rosie could sense she was rattled. No more Mr Nice Guy.
‘Well,’ she said, opening the file without looking up, ‘there’s a procedure and a protocol. Once they are receiving benefits, the details are passed on
to social work and then it becomes a multi-agency approach. We pull all the resources together to make sure the people are looked after, whether it’s schools, registering them with doctors – all of the things that we need to do.’
‘Yeah, I can see that.’ Margaret wasn’t answering the question. She had obviously found the standard civil servant doublespeak phrasebook. ‘But how do you keep track?’ Rosie persisted.
‘What do you mean “keep track”?’ Margaret’s fingers clenched her pencil as she gave Rosie an impatient look. ‘We don’t stand guard – obviously.’
‘No, of course not,’ Rosie said, looking her in the eye. ‘What I mean, Margaret, is this: for example, if a refugee comes here and then suddenly drops off the radar screen after say, a couple of months, what happens? How can you keep track of them is what I’m asking. And I suppose I’m asking whether you can actually keep track of them at all. If some guy from Afghanistan, for example, decides to disappear into the black economy and go and work with his mates, illegally, in a restaurant or warehouse down south, what I mean is, can you keep track of that?’
Rosie’s words hung in the air, and she shot a glance at Christy, who kept his head down.
Margaret looked like she was swallowing anger.
‘Well, no, not if that’s what you’re asking, Rosie,’ she bristled. ‘If what you’re saying is do we control people every day, then the answer is no. If someone disappears like that and goes off into the black economy we have no control over that.’ She put the pen down, folded her arms and looked at Rosie. ‘Can I ask you, Rosie, has your paper got an agenda here with the refugees? At the Scottish Refugee Council we’re trying to do our best for these poor people. I don’t think hammering on about them disappearing into the black economy is helpful, to be candid.’
Rosie took a deep breath. ‘No, of course, Margaret. I agree. No, no. We don’t have an agenda, and please don’t think I’m here to put the boot into refugees. Believe me I’m not.’ She glanced at Christy. ‘I’ve reported from enough trouble spots in my life and listened to the stories of enough refugees to be nothing but totally sympathetic to their cause – whether or not they stay here or disappear into the black economy. I’m just asking the question as part of an overall picture of the refugee situation here.’