Die Last

by Tony Parsons

  I put my foot down. Our side of the road was almost empty but on the other side, where the accident had happened, the traffic was slowing down. As we went faster, it was coming to a total stop. Motorists were getting out of their vehicles.

  And then I saw the lorry.

  It was stopped in the fast lane, the traffic stagnant both ahead and behind, perhaps five hundred metres from the accident.

  The driver had not joined the other motorists who were stretching their legs and checking their phones. He stayed in the cab, but as we passed the lorry the back door of his vehicle came open.

  And two men jumped out.

  ‘Max!’ said Billy Greene, looking back.

  ‘I see them,’ I said.

  And I watched in my rear-view mirror as the men did the one thing that the guilty can always be guaranteed to do.

  They ran like hell.

  I pulled down hard on the steering wheel and did a U-turn up on to the central reservation, and suddenly we were heading in the other direction. The stalled traffic was too thick to allow us on the road and so I bumped along the frost-hardened grass at a teeth-jolting twenty miles an hour.

  Half a mile ahead of me was the stopped lorry, getting closer every second. The back door was wide open now.

  A head stuck out.

  A young man emerged, sniffed the air and jumped to the ground. He stood for a moment in the fast lane of the motorway with nothing moving, looking warily at all the blue lights of all the authorities waiting ahead.

  Then he made a dash for the hard shoulder and beyond.

  And then another man emerged, older this time. He too looked at the blue lights of the law, didn’t fancy them much, and took off exactly in the opposite direction. They were all heading for the blackness that surrounded this final stretch of road.

  And then the doors of the lorry were flung wide open and more were pouring out, perhaps a dozen of them, mostly men but also a couple of women in headscarves.

  They all looked at the blue lights and legged it.

  I approached the lorry just as the traffic began to move. The emergency services must have opened up a lane. Vehicles began to crawl away, then quickly picked up speed. Including the lorry. I bounced along the central reservation, level with the rear doors of the lorry, flapping wildly as it picked up speed. Men continued leaping out of the back and taking off into the black fields. One of them narrowly avoided a Nissan Micra doing thirty.

  ‘I’ve got them,’ Billy said, the passenger door already open, and I touched the brakes as he jumped out, furious horns of accelerating cars blaring all around him as he fell into the oncoming traffic.

  I could see the stowaways legging it into the fields. Billy body-swerved a couple of accelerating cars and went after them. I saw him launch a rugby tackle at the nearest man and bring him down.

  Then I put my foot down, swerving back on to the motorway, the lorry directly ahead.

  It was pulling away from me. The emergency services had all three lanes open now and as I sped past their blue and red lights for the second time, this time in the opposite direction, I again caught a glimpse of the two heaps of smashed metal, glass and rubber, and the strained faces of the emergency service teams.

  The lorry was getting further away from me.

  So I put on my blues and twos. The lights pulsated under the BMW grille and the two-tone siren split the night.

  The lorry immediately began to slow. It takes a lot of nerve to make a dash from the blues and twos. And the driver of the lorry didn’t have that kind of nerve.

  He indicated, slowed down and pulled over to the hard shoulder. I parked just ahead of him, the X5’s rear bumper right up against his grille just in case he had a change of mind.

  I walked back to the lorry, the motorway traffic hurtling past. I could not see Billy but figures were loping desperately across the fields, lit by moonlight.

  By the time I reached the driver’s cab he had the window down and an ingratiating smile plastered on his round, rosy face. He looked like a man who had spent a lifetime sitting down.

  ‘Good evening, brother,’ he said in a West Country accent that was a perfect fit with his stout, yeoman’s mug. ‘Nasty accident back there. These boy racers, eh? How can I help you?’

  ‘Get out of the cab before I drag you out.’

  I waited for him to lower his considerable bulk on to the ground. He walked round the cab and faced me, still smiling. He had his driving licence and insurance documents all ready for me. I glanced at his licence. His enormous cropped head stared out at me. Lee Hill.

  ‘Where have you come from?’

  ‘I come from Augsburg, bruv. Over there in Germany.’

  ‘I know where Augsburg is. Where did you enter the UK?’

  ‘Dover, bruv, off the ferry from Dunkirk. Nice journey, if a bit choppy near the white cliffs.’ He was the picture of benign innocence. ‘What’s all this about then?’ he said.

  ‘What’s your load?’

  He pursed his lips like the class dunce trying to remember an answer he really ought to know.

  ‘I’m carrying car batteries, bruv, bound for a warehouse in Birmingham.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Bruv?’

  ‘Let’s have a look in the back.’

  The lorry doors had swung shut.

  I indicated to Lee Hill and he pulled them open.

  Beyond the crates of car batteries, a young woman in a hijab held her newborn baby to her breast. She looked at me without fear or expectation, as if I was just the latest in a long line of unfortunate events.

  ‘You and your baby are safe now,’ I told her. ‘Do not attempt to leave this vehicle.’

  I looked at Lee Hill and I waited.

  ‘They must have sneaked on board at Calais,’ he said. ‘You have got no idea what it’s like, bruv! Every run! Every time! They light fires now to slow us down. Every Paki, blackie and Iraqi on the planet wants to hide in the back of your lorry!’

  I stared at him and wondered if there was any possibility that he was telling the truth.

  I knew it happened.

  I knew that there were plenty of innocent lorry drivers who entered the country every day with human cargo they knew nothing about, and had absolutely no desire to be transporting.

  ‘Let’s have a look in your cab,’ I said.

  A used condom sat in the footwell like a burst party balloon. There was a coat on the passenger seat, a worn coat that looked as though it had done service in far too many winters.

  I looked at the driver, snug in his leather jacket.

  ‘Who does this belong to?’

  ‘Me, bruv.’

  One of the worst things about my job are the lies that you hear every single day of your working life. It would not be so bad if they were good lies – credible lies, half-believable lies. But usually they are rubbish lies.

  ‘Then put it on,’ I said.

  He looked appalled.

  ‘The … condom?’

  ‘The coat. Let me see you put this coat on. Come on. Do it.’

  He slipped out of his XL leather jacket and struggled to fit into the size-8 winter coat. He managed the arms, sort of, just about, but the worn-out material groaned and split with the strain as it tried to stretch across his broad back.

  I looked down the hard shoulder. Billy was emerging from the darkness with a bedraggled gang of dark-skinned men. The two women in their hijabs followed behind at a demure distance. He had rounded up perhaps half of them. I nodded to the back of the lorry and Billy started loading them back in.

  I turned to Lee Hill.

  ‘Do you know what the sentence is for trafficking people for labour and other exploitation under the Asylum and Immigration Act?’

  ‘Bruv, I had no idea they were in the back of the lorry!’

  ‘Twelve months to fourteen years. You could do twelve months, no sweat, but I don’t fancy your chances with fourteen years. The good news is, that’s only if you are found guil
ty. Only if the jury thinks you are lying through your back teeth about knowing nothing about what was in the back of your lorry.’

  ‘I want a lawyer.’

  ‘Get a good one. Who paid you to bring those people in?’

  ‘Anarchists,’ he said. ‘You know – they don’t believe in borders. They think all men are brothers. They don’t believe in the nation state, as such. They think that if we invite the Third World to come and live here, then mankind will all live happily ever after in a fairer world.’ Billy and I stared at each other. It might even be true.

  ‘What’s the name of the anarchist group?’ I said.

  ‘Imagine.’

  ‘Imagine?’

  ‘Like the John Lennon song.’

  He began singing the chorus.

  ‘Stop singing or I swear to God I will arrest you now,’ I said.

  I took out my phone and called up the photograph of Hana and Nesha Novak. Their smiling faces huddled together in the Belgrade night, the unsmiling profile hovering behind them like a bad moon.

  I showed it to the lorry driver.

  ‘Not a bad-looking woman,’ he said.

  ‘I want you to look at the man in the background.’

  ‘OK, bruv.’

  ‘He’s a lorry driver. Like you. Exactly your kind of lorry driver. The scumbag kind.’

  ‘Bit harsh, bruv, bit harsh.’

  ‘Ever seen him on your travels? Dunkirk? Calais? Dover?’

  ‘He’s an ugly bastard, I’ll give him that.’

  ‘And who are you? George Clooney?’

  He gave me back my phone.

  ‘Don’t recognise him.’

  I slipped my phone into my pocket.

  ‘So is that who you work for?’ I said. ‘This anarchist group? Imagine?’

  He snorted at the very thought.

  ‘Those mad hippies? I’m self-employed, bruv. A small businessman.’

  I nodded.

  ‘You work for me now,’ I said.

  We stared at each other.

  The traffic zoomed by. It was very cold and I was very tired. I wanted to be under the same roof as my daughter and my dog. I wanted to be away from the liars and the desperate. I wanted to be home.

  ‘OK, bruv,’ the driver said.

  ‘And one more thing,’ I said.

  His fat face waited patiently for my instructions.

  ‘Stop calling me your brother,’ I said.

  11

  When I got to West End Central the next morning, Dejan Jovanović of the Serbian embassy was waiting for me alone.

  ‘Where’s the boy?’

  He looked at me apologetically.

  ‘What’s the expression? Our young Mr Novak has done a runner.’

  I could not believe it. It’s a ten-minute walk from the Embassy of the Republic of Serbia at 28 Belgrave Square to 27 Savile Row. It should have been simple.

  ‘How can he have done a runner, Dejan? Your embassy is only a mile away.’

  ‘We were having breakfast in a coffee shop on Piccadilly. He went to the bathroom. Or at least I thought he went to the bathroom.’

  I looked at the cheap telephone in my hand. Nenad Novak’s phone. And I was angry. I didn’t have any great expectation that the boy would be able to tell me anything more about the night his sister climbed into the back of that lorry in Belgrade. But it felt like the kid had condemned himself to a life on the streets of London. The dumb little bastard.

  ‘Did he say anything else about his sister? Anything about the driver of the lorry?’

  ‘He again made the point that his sister was coming to London to be a nurse. And then he went to the bathroom. And then he was gone.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘What does he think is going to happen to him here?’ I said. ‘In London – in the middle of winter – no money, no friends, no family. Nowhere to go. What exactly does he think is going to happen to him here?’

  Jovanović sighed as though he had seen all this before.

  ‘Something better than if he stayed home,’ he said.

  ‘I find that hard to believe,’ I said.

  ‘But it’s why they all come. You have had peace and prosperity here for so long that you think it is the normal state of affairs. And it’s not. You know, I was a soldier once,’ he said, smiling gently at how unlikely that seemed, his dark eyes twinkling behind his spectacles. ‘No – I was a soldier twice. In two of the wars that were fought after the old Yugoslavia came apart. In Bosnia and later in Kosovo. I didn’t have to shoot anyone. I was supposed to save them.’

  ‘You were a medic?’

  He nodded.

  ‘And we picked up everyone. There was no difference between them when they were lying broken on the ground. Whatever their god, whatever their flag, whatever their uniform, they all looked the same when they were broken. And then one day in Kosovo we picked up a solider of the Serb Volunteer Guard. They were also known as Arkan’s Tigers. Did you ever hear of Arkan?’

  ‘A paramilitary leader.’

  ‘His real name was Željko Ražnatović. And we took this wounded Tiger to a house where there were wounded men from every flag, from every god. And of course we did our best to save him. And then Arkan came and we hid the Muslims in the basement because we did not know what might happen to them. And Arkan thanked us and said, “Do your best to save my Tiger.” And Arkan said, “Do you need anything?” And we said, “We need everything. We need everything.” And Arkan came back with three lorries of medical supplies. And that helped us to save many lives.’

  ‘And did the Tiger die?’

  He seemed surprised by the question.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ he said. ‘But this boy reminds me of that time. What does he need? He needs everything. Because he is a boy who has nothing.’

  There is a corner of the Black Museum in New Scotland Yard that is dedicated to the family firms that ran London half a century ago.

  Reggie and Ronnie Kray.

  Charlie and Eddie Richardson.

  Paul and Danny Warboys.

  The exhibit features the electrical generator that the Richardsons relied on for extracting confessions, the bolt cutter the Warboys enlisted for removing a talkative lawyer’s tongue and a crossbow that the Krays were planning to use in an assassination. But your eyes drift past these dusty items to the black-and-white photographs behind them.

  Reggie and Ronnie sharing a cup of tea in an East End parlour with flowered wallpaper. Charlie and Eddie posing outside the main gates of their South London scrapyard. And Paul and Danny grinning and raising flutes of champagne in one of their Soho nightspots.

  It feels like a lost world, that criminal aristocracy of Sixties London – all smart suits and skinny ties and noses that had been broken in the boxing ring, tight bands of brothers with their hair cut short and neat, a leftover from the last generation to do National Service. And the last of the celebrity criminals, pictured in all their swaggering pomp shortly before getting sent down for some of the longest sentences ever handed out at the Old Bailey.

  ‘You’ll not find him up there,’ said a voice behind me. ‘Steve Warboys never made it to this place.’

  I turned and gratefully took a mug of steaming tea from Sergeant John Caine, the keeper of the Black Museum – or, to give it the official title, the Crime Museum of the Metropolitan Police.

  ‘Hit a brick wall, have you, Max?’

  I smiled at him.

  When my colleagues found an investigation leading down a dead end, they turned to the full resources of the Metropolitan Police – Police National Computer, CCTV, recognition systems for everything from faces to fingerprints to number plates. But not me. When I was at a loss for my next move, I went up to Room 101 of New Scotland Yard and had a cup of tea with John Caine in the Black Museum.

  I watched him carefully straighten a framed photograph of the teenage Krays posing in their boxing kit.

  ‘You never crossed paths with Steve Warboys?’ I asked.

>   John shook his head.

  ‘I heard a few rumours when I was still in uniform,’ he said. ‘You always keep your ears open for up-and-coming villains. Especially when they have a name you know. I heard he was some kind of fire starter.’

  ‘His first club burned down,’ I said. ‘The law liked him for it but he walked.’

  ‘Studs,’ he said. ‘I had a lager there once. Rough old gaff. No, I understood it was more than just his own bar that burned down. I heard it’s how he started out – torching places for the insurance money. It’s what he was and what he still is, as far as I can make out – a small-time hood trading on his granddaddy’s name.’

  I looked at a portrait of Paul Warboys fifty years ago. He grinned back at me.

  ‘Why is Steve Warboys of interest?’ John said.

  ‘Chinatown,’ I said. ‘We had a lead that he was employing illegals in the place he has now, the Champagne Room. We thought they might be coming in by the same route as those twelve dead women.’

  ‘But these days they all fly into Luton airport.’

  ‘Looks like it. You had any dealings with people smugglers, John?’

  ‘After my time. But it’s going to be bigger than drugs. I know the smugglers all think of themselves as travel agents and that the service offered varies wildly. Some of them get you where you paid to go, some of them go out of business and leave you stranded. Just like travel agents. The experts will tell you that people get trafficked for all different reasons. Sexual exploitation. Forced marriage. Forced labour. Organ harvesting. And sometimes they just want a better life. It’s always difficult to fight human nature. What’s your instinct tell you about Steve Warboys?’

  I looked at the hard, shrewd faces of all those pairs of brothers from long ago.

  ‘I don’t think he’s smart enough for people smuggling,’ I said.

  John shrugged.

  ‘You stick a bunch of desperate people in the back of a lorry – or in some rubber boat – or in the boot of a motor – and then you let them take their chances. And sometimes they make it across the border and sometimes they get turned back, and sometimes they drown and sometimes freeze to death in a lorry dumped in Chinatown.’ John sipped his tea. ‘How smart would you have to be?’ he said.