by Tony Parsons
‘Those girls in Chinatown,’ she said, and the shake of her head became a shudder. ‘A terrible thing.’ I followed her to the kitchen. ‘Everybody’s been washed, walked and fed,’ she said, looking at Stan. By everybody she meant Stan and Scout, my six-year-old daughter. Mrs Murphy collected the airmail envelope that contained her money for the day. For some reason, both of us preferred me to not actually hand over money directly. Perhaps because Mrs Murphy felt like the closest thing that Scout and I had to family.
‘Scout thought you might be here to tuck her in.’
‘That was the plan.’
I knew I had let all the good things of the day slip away. Meeting Scout from school. Eating dinner with my daughter. Walking Stan in the streets and squares of Smithfield. I would have to try harder to make them happen tomorrow. We walked to the door. Mrs Murphy pulled on her coat and patted my arm.
‘You’ll make up for it, I’m sure. Scout mentioned pancakes at Smiths of Smithfield.’
I smiled. ‘OK.’
‘We should be nice to our children,’ Mrs Murphy advised. ‘They choose our care home.’ At the door she jabbed a finger at the laptop. ‘And don’t turn that thing on or you will never get your sleep.’
When Mrs Murphy had gone I crossed the loft, Stan padding behind me, the lavish plume of his tail wagging, and I slipped quietly into Scout’s room. It felt that until quite recently she had slept like a baby, on her back with her raised fists in the air, like a victorious boxer. But tonight she was curled up on her side, her hair falling across her perfect face. Now she slept like a little girl.
I gently pulled up her duvet and let myself out, ushering Stan before me. The pair of us sat by the giant floor-to-ceiling windows, watching the lights burning at the meat market.
Despite my weariness, I knew that sleep would not come soon or easily tonight.
So I slipped Stan a dental chew and, as he crunched it contentedly in the middle of that massive open space we called home, I powered up the iMac and found the home page for Europol, the European police intelligence agency responsible for the war on people smuggling.
And I learned it was a war they were losing.
The figures were staggering: 90 per cent of migrants into Europe used smuggling and trafficking networks. The smugglers came from more than a hundred countries. Hana Novak and the eleven other young women who died in the back of that refrigerated truck were part of a criminal industry that was worth almost £5 billion a year.
This was far more than big business.
This was the fastest-growing industry on the planet.
Europol charted the varied routes of the smuggling, a tide of trafficked humanity heading west and north.
Across the Mediterranean from Morocco and Algeria into Portugal and Spain. From Tunisia and Libya into Sicily and the islands of southern Italy. And from all points east – Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan – into Turkey and Greece then across the Balkans and the dream of life in northern Europe.
I checked my notes on the thirteen passports we had found in the cab. Three Syrian. Two Turkish. And one each from Nigeria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, China, Somalia and Serbia – Hana Novak.
There was no doubt in my mind that the lorry had taken the Balkans route.
We knew that the truck had entered the country at Dover on a ferry from Dunkirk. I worked my way backwards through what Europol called the major smuggling hubs.
Dover. Dunkirk. Paris. Stuttgart. Munich. Zagreb.
And Belgrade.
Had Hana been the last passenger to join the lorry? It seemed likely. My finger traced the likely route before they picked up Hana. Skopje in Macedonia. Athens in Greece. And then one of the Greek islands in the Aegean Sea – Kos or Lesbos or Symi, a short hop from the Swiss cheese coastline of Turkey. And before that, all they were fleeing from – a world of war, suffering and poverty.
And I read about the casualties.
The unknown thousands who drowned unnoticed, uncounted and unmourned in the seas of Europe. The fifty-eight Chinese who were found dead in a Dutch lorry at Dover in 2000, the largest mass killing in British criminal history. And the twelve young women who had died in London this morning.
I remembered Hana Novak, and the few hours of her life that she had spent at the end of the rainbow, and how she had looked in her hospital bed at the Royal Free.
And I thought about the thirteenth passport.
And as my eyes fell shut and my head nodded forward, and I folded my hands to rest just for a moment, I tried to imagine where the woman who got away was sleeping tonight.
I jolted awake in the crystal light of another freezing dawn. My daughter and my dog were by my side, both watching me with disapproval. Scout was still in her pyjamas and holding a purple toothbrush, clearly realising that I had not made it to bed when she was cleaning her teeth.
‘Scout,’ I said, still blurry. ‘Can I get you some breakfast?’
She nodded briskly.
‘Don’t stay up all night,’ she said. ‘It’s bad for you. OK?’
‘OK.’
She turned away. Stan trotting beside her, gazing up with adoration.
‘And I’m having pancakes,’ she called over her shoulder, as if our breakfast menu had been decided a long time ago.
5
Scout and I sat at a window seat at Smiths of Smithfield, eating our breakfast – a stack of pancakes for her and porridge with honey and berries for me. We were watching the cars go by.
‘Mazda MX5,’ she said through a mouthful of pancakes. ‘Porsche 911.’ Her brown eyes widened. ‘BMW X5 – like us!’
I looked out at the morning traffic on Charterhouse Street.
‘That’s a BMW X6.’
Scout craned her neck, looking doubtful. ‘Is it?’
‘You’re slipping, kiddo. The X6 has a smaller back window than the X5.’
Scout was not convinced.
‘What – you don’t believe me?’ I said. ‘You used to think I was infallible.’
I thought she might ask me what infallible means – she couldn’t possibly know at six years old, could she? – but instead her face split into a happy smile, revealing a gap where she had lost a couple of her lower centre milk teeth.
‘Edie,’ she said.
Through the steamed-up windows, we watched Edie Wren coming our way. It was another freezing day, the sky steely grey and too cold for snow. Edie was dressed to climb mountains. Puffa jacket, boots, her red hair tucked up inside a beanie. She pushed through the big glass doors of SOS, grinning when she saw Scout. Stan stirred between our feet.
‘You should get the pancakes, Edie,’ Scout said. ‘They’re very good in here.’
‘Pancakes are good everywhere,’ Edie said, scratching Stan behind the ears. ‘I bet even the worst pancake you ever had was still pretty good, right?’
They smiled at each other. But Edie’s face was lined with exhaustion. I could see she was still shaken up from what we had discovered in Chinatown yesterday morning. I pulled out a chair for her, wondering what she wanted, but she lifted her chin, indicating that it could wait until we were alone.
‘You two enjoy your breakfast,’ she told me.
When the pancakes and porridge were gone, we all walked to school, Edie holding hands with Scout, Stan trotting by my daughter’s side, the dog expertly slipping between the meat porters and their empty trolleys as they wound up business for the night. As we got closer to the school, the sound of the children rose like birdsong in the bitterly cold air. Someone called Scout’s name and she was immediately off, never looking back. She was with her friends now. Edie and I were forgotten.
We stood in silence at the school gates, listening to the sound of the children. Then a bell rang from somewhere inside the school and we turned away.
‘Anything in Chinatown?’ Edie said.
‘Ginger Gonzalez gave us a name,’ I said. ‘Asuman Jenkins. Formerly Asuman Ata. Turkish. Asuman is of interest because she was t
rafficked into the country and worked at some kind of lap-dancing joint where they only used illegals.’
‘So they can keep the girls on a tight leash, right?’ Edie shook her head. ‘Bastards.’
‘The place this Asuman worked was out on the M25. Then she did a bunk and found Ginger in London. She’s still here. You and I will pay her a visit. But it’s huge now, Edie. Human trafficking. It’s bigger than drugs. It’s the biggest criminal racket in the world.’
Edie nodded, pausing to take a deep breath. A wave of nausea seemed to pass. I touched her lightly on the sleeve.
‘You all right?’
‘Bad night.’ She exhaled hard, in control again. ‘Do you know what we do with the bodies that nobody knows and nobody wants?’
‘The official policy with the unclaimed dead? I didn’t know there was one.’
‘There’s not,’ Edie said. ‘There’s no policy with the unclaimed. In this country we get around one hundred and fifty unidentified bodies every year, everything from dead newborn babies to bodies with their heads chopped off. Once the law has had a think, and scratched our heads, and come up blank, then it’s the coroner’s call if the unclaimed are stored at the morgue or buried in unmarked graves.’
‘And you think those dead women in Chinatown are going to remain unclaimed? We only found them yesterday morning, Edie.’
‘But how can anyone claim them if we don’t know who they were? We’re investigating multiple unlawful deaths where eleven of the twelve victims are unidentified – and likely to stay that way because they had fake travel documents. I’ve been talking to the embassies, Max. They don’t want to know. None of them. They don’t want to hear about a bunch of fake passports. It’s not their problem because they don’t even know if it’s really one of their nationals. The only luck I’ve had is with the genuine passport.’
‘Hana Novak,’ I said.
‘The Serbs have found a next of kin in Belgrade. They’re flying him in from Belgrade tomorrow to formally identify Hana.’
‘Parent?’
‘No, both the mother and father are long gone,’ she said. ‘But Hana Novak had a kid brother.’
‘This is how you freeze to death,’ said Elsa Olsen, forensic pathologist, deep inside the Iain West Forensic Suite at the Westminster Public Mortuary. ‘Breathing slows then stops. Blood slows then stops. The heart rate slows then stops. The metabolism shuts down. And that’s what happened here.’
The twelve bodies of the young women lay on stainless steel tables, two rows of six, pushed close together. I shivered in the near-freezing temperature, those carefully maintained single digits of centigrade that make it possible to examine and inspect the dead.
My eyes drifted to Hana Novak, at the far end of one of the lines.
She did not look at peace.
I could not believe the comforting clichés we tell ourselves about death. She looked like someone else, someone other than the young woman who had spoken to me to tell me her name in the ambulance, someone other than the young woman who I saw fight for her life in the Royal Free. Whatever spark had made Hana Novak the person who climbed into the back of that lorry in search of some better life, it had gone forever. This was not Hana Novak any more, although perhaps it was the shadow of who she had once been. I thought for a moment about her brother, wondering how old he could be, knowing that whatever age he was, he was far too young to come to this place to look upon the shell of his sister.
‘It’s a hell of a thing,’ Elsa said to herself in the clipped English of a Norwegian who had spent most of her adult life in London.
She walked between steel tables, a tall dark woman in a white coat and latex gloves, as each of our team stood at the end of one of the lines, wearing blue scrubs and hairnets. Whitestone and Edie and Billy and me. DCI Whitestone, our Senior Investigating Officer, wanted all our team to witness what had been done to the women we found in Chinatown.
So we stared at the bodies on the steel tables, and it seemed as if the victims came from every race on earth and from every corner of the planet.
‘Despite some abrasions, there are no defensive wounds or signs of violence on the victims,’ Elsa said. ‘Therefore I looked at three possible causes of death.’ She counted them off with a nod of her head. ‘Asphyxiation due to lack of oxygen. Carbon monoxide poisoning due to inhaling toxic fumes. And multiple organ failure due to fall of body temperature.’ She looked at Whitestone. ‘And I am satisfied that the cause of death was multiple organ failure due to stage four hypothermia – profound hypothermia.’
‘So it’s as we thought – they froze to death,’ Whitestone said.
Elsa nodded.
‘We call it freezing to death although there’s no precise core temperature at which the human body can no longer survive. It’s what the exposure to sub-zero conditions does to the internal organs that causes death. And it was cold enough in the back of that lorry to kill anyone.’ She glanced at Hana Novak with something like fondness. ‘It is a miracle that they didn’t all die before you found them.’
‘Some of them had their clothes torn off,’ Edie said. ‘Indicating some kind of assault before death.’
‘The clothes torn and removed are attributable to what is known as paradoxical undressing,’ Elsa said. ‘When someone has profound hypothermia they remove their clothes as a response to what feels like extreme heat. When I was growing up in Norway, mountain climbers who died of cold would often be found in a state of undress.’
I remembered what the paramedics had told me in Chinatown.
‘You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead,’ I said.
Elsa nodded.
‘The cold makes the brain enzymes less efficient,’ she said. ‘Their cerebral metabolic rate drops rapidly with every degree of core temperature. At first you can’t think straight. And then you can’t think at all. You would struggle to recognise your mother’s face. Time would have no meaning. Blood thickens. Blood pressure drops. It’s a cruel delusion. At the moment the cold is about to kill you, you’re not hot – but you think you are. And then perhaps – right at the end – there would be a moment of terrible clarity.’
I took a step closer to Hana Novak. The skin on her hands seemed torn away. I noticed that a few of the victims had the same injury, as if they had been fighting off an attacker.
‘You say there are no defensive wounds, Elsa,’ I said.
‘That’s right.’
‘And you’re certain nobody attacked them? Nobody assaulted them? They didn’t fight anyone off?’
‘Correct, Max.’
‘Then what are those marks on their hands?’
Elsa picked up Hana Novak’s right hand and stared at the torn skin on her fingertips. I saw that there was also skin missing from the palms of her hand.
‘The abrasions on their hands are where they beat the door,’ Elsa Olsen said. ‘Those marks are from where they tried to get help.’ She struggled to control her breathing and I saw that the tall Norwegian pathologist had tears in her eyes.
‘Those marks are where they tried to stay alive,’ she said.
6
The locals were gone.
The pub at one end of the street was now a mosque. The church at the other end of the street was boarded up and used as a car park. The working-class families who had built their lives here had long ago moved out of this far-flung corner of east London to Essex and Kent and East Anglia. The only sign that they had ever been here were the net curtains that still hung in every single window.
‘My nan still has net curtains like that,’ Edie said as we sat in the BMW X5 outside the address we had been given for Asuman Jenkins, formerly Asuman Ata.
The newcomers had not removed the net curtains. Not the Bangladeshis who had first moved in, and not the East Europeans who came later, and not the most recent arrivals, who had brought their food and their faith to the street but left the net curtains in place, even as they turned yellow and frayed with age.
‘M
y nan’s net curtains are cleaner, of course,’ Edie said.
I remembered a book from school, and the fifty-year-old wedding dress of a woman who had been left alone at the altar on her wedding day. That’s what all those rotting net curtains looked like. Miss Havisham’s wedding dress in Great Expectations.
It was a street of modest terraced houses built after the war, the places that went up when the slums were bombed out or torn down, with probably two bedrooms and what they used to call a box room and not one place in the house where you could not hear everybody else going about their business.
There would be a garden out back and there had once been smaller patches of grass out front but these token gardens had long been concreted over, converted into parking spaces for the cars and vans that crowded the road as if they were the true owners.
It was late afternoon and the hazy winter sun was already calling it quits for the day. My stomach rumbled and I was suddenly aware that I had not eaten since I had breakfast with Scout that morning.
Towards the former pub end of the street there was a sad-looking strip of shops, some of them with graffiti-stained shutters down for the day or possibly forever, some with TO LET in the dusty windows and hills of junk mail piled under the letter box. But some were still open for business. Halal butchers. Polish supermarket. A chicken joint where a little crew of apprentice bad boys idled on their bikes, giving us the evil eye. There was a betting shop and I couldn’t tell if it was open or closed. And there was a Chinese takeaway, Double Fortune.
‘We could get some noodles from the Chinese,’ I said. ‘Double Fortune. Sounds good.’
Edie took a breath and shook her head. She placed the palm of her hand on her midriff and slowly exhaled.
And suddenly I got it.
I stared out at the street, letting it sink in.
‘Edie,’ I said. ‘How far gone are you?’
Silence.
I looked at her. The pale face, the untidy red hair tucked inside a beanie, the bluest eyes I had ever seen. How old was she now? Her mid-twenties? Still young.