by Tony Parsons
He shook his head and sighed.
‘The Champagne Room is on one of the busiest motorways in the country,’ he said. ‘I’m only responsible for what goes on this side of that little red rope.’
‘So you don’t know anything about this lorry?’ I said. ‘You weren’t expecting a delivery from this Lee Hill? It’s got nothing to do with you?’
Steve Warboys looked at me levelly.
‘I should give you a good hiding, Detective,’ he said. He jabbed a finger at me. ‘Because you – I believe – are trying to stitch me up.’
‘You’re really not that stupid, are you, Steve? Give me a good hiding and the next policeman you see will be pointing a Glock in your fat ugly mug.’
‘Where the fuck have you been?’
Mahmud X was at his side. Steve Warboys was a large man but the giant doorman loomed above him even as he cringed with embarrassment.
‘We’ve got a problem,’ Mahmud said. ‘A big problem.’
And then we saw him.
The Middle Eastern man with the neat beard was standing at the bar, sipping a fruit juice through a straw, each of his arms in a sling.
Steve Warboys stared at him with disbelief.
‘Him?’ Warboys said.
‘No,’ Mahmud X said. ‘Them.’
And then we saw the rest of them.
The friends of the man with the neat beard, filing slowly into the Champagne Room, dressed far too casual for this place, all baggy jeans and sagging basketball tops, staring at the near-naked girls as if they could not quite believe their hungry eyes.
A carload of them at first, and then more, another carload, most of them young and bearded like the man sipping fruit juice through a straw, but a few older men among them, until there were more than a dozen of them lined up with their backs to the bar.
‘Do you know what I dislike about them?’ Steve Warboys said, and I couldn’t work out if he was speaking to me or himself. ‘The Pakis and the Iraqis, the Somalians and the Eritreans and the Syrians? It’s nothing personal. They were all wiping their arse with their hands last year but that’s not their fault, is it? But these are people from brutalised societies, Detective.’
Mahmud X handed him a cricket bat.
Steve tested his swing.
‘They have experienced war, poverty, mass rape, slave markets – things that the average person in this country thinks will never touch them,’ he said. ‘They have been changed by these things. And then we invite them in. Or – like your Afghans – they come in hidden in the back of a lorry and we can never send them home because it violates their human rights. Or because it’s dangerous where they come from. Or because some senile old judge thinks it would violate their right to a family life. Or some such old bollocks. So now we have all those people with a direct experience of horror in Lagos and Baghdad and Eritrea and Kabul knocking around Ilford and Southend and Brentwood and Croydon, and even if they’re picking their dinner out of dustbins, it’s still like a lottery win compared to what they left behind. And then we wonder why our country is changing.’ His bat swished through the air. ‘Know what I mean, Detective?’
I watched the men with their backs to the bar and I thought it was very likely that someone would die in the Champagne Room tonight. The man with each arm in a sling had finished his fruit juice. Another man who could have been his younger brother took his empty glass and casually hurled it at the rows of bottles behind the bar.
Women screamed in the sudden shower of broken glass.
The men at the bar fanned out in a wave of destruction.
Steve Warboys waded into them, his cricket bat connecting with neatly bearded faces. Mahmud X grabbed two men by the scruff of the neck and brought their skulls together. A half-full bottle of sparkling wine flew through the air and hit a half-cut City boy in the centre of his face. His companions howled with rage and threw themselves into the fray. Soon the Champagne Room was full of flying fists and broken glass. The music never stopped. Something about taking me to the sky above. One of the good old songs.
I slipped outside.
Billy Greene was standing by the X5, his phone in his hand. He was calling it in. I held up my hand and he stopped. Because the secret truth is that we are never in a mad rush to stop two groups of villains from doing serious harm to each other. Vehicles were streaming out of the car park, suddenly anxious to be elsewhere.
‘You had a message from the boss,’ Billy said.
I waited.
‘DCI Whitestone heard from your CI. Lee Hill? He’s in Dunkirk with his lorry.’
I expected the usual diet of jam tomorrow that these Criminal Informants feed you, the promise of a major breakthrough that’s going to be happening the day after tomorrow.
The usual baloney.
But Billy surprised me.
‘The scar-faced man who brought the girls in,’ Edie said. ‘Mr Click-Click? Lee Hill has found him.’
13
Late next morning I stood under the big blue lamp outside 27 Savile Row, watching Edie Wren’s breath make steam in the freezing air. She was wearing a red Rab winter jacket that was too padded to reveal she was pregnant. She saw me looking at her.
‘It’s too early to show yet,’ she said, and I turned away, my face burning.
‘Here he comes,’ I said.
An unmarked squad car with Billy Greene at the wheel was coming down Savile Row and as he pulled up outside West End Central you could see that every possible corner of the vehicle was stuffed with winter coats that we were planning to take to the camp in Dunkirk.
‘You sure you’re up for this?’ I asked Edie. ‘I can always take Billy.’
She shook her head and tucked a stray strand of red hair under her beanie.
‘This op works better with a man and a woman,’ she said. ‘And besides – you must be tired of babysitting Billy.’
I smiled. She was right, of course. I didn’t have to worry about Edie in the same way I worried about Billy.
He began pulling coats out of the car.
‘I went to Oxfam, Cancer Research and British Red Cross,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t get any more in the car.’
‘This is great, Billy,’ I said, and the three of us took the coats out of Billy’s squad car and loaded them into my BMW X5. There were coats for men, women and children. They were in good nick. Londoners in Mayfair, Marylebone and Soho don’t wear a winter coat until it falls to bits. They wear it until they get tired of it.
I paused, looking at Edie over the high bonnet of the big BMW, giving her one last chance to change her mind. I was torn. There was nobody I would rather have by my side than Edie Wren but her pregnancy changed everything. I wanted her to be OK. I wanted the baby to be OK.
‘I don’t know, Edie.’
‘Trust me,’ she said. ‘It will work better with us.’
So we drove to France.
We saw the riot cops before we saw the camp.
The CRS, the general reserve of the French National Police, swaggered across the A16 in their helmets and boots, their semi-automatics held at a 45-degree angle.
One of them raised a hand from his weapon. I stopped and he stuck his head inside the car. I could see the scratches and scuff marks on his visor. He held out a leather-gloved hand and I gave him my driving licence.
There was no point in showing him my warrant card. We had no authority down here.
I watched him stare at the image on the driving licence and then back at me.
The CRS are often called riot police but in fact they exist to maintain crowd control. They don’t smile much. This one glanced at the dozens of winter coats stuffed into the back of the car then gave me my licence back and stepped away without a word.
The drive had taken us just over three hours. Through the grey of south London, then the bleak winter fields of southern England, through the Eurotunnel and then on to the A16 motorway that runs along the north coast of France. Just over 160 miles. Dunkirk felt very close. But as we
got closer, the camp at Grand-Synthe felt like it was on another planet still reeling from a war that nobody had won.
The motorway became a road, and then the road became a country lane that led to the camp at Grande-Synthe and we saw the trash piled in ditches, and then the bright colours of the tents showing through the sparse winter trees. As we drove closer we saw that the tents were all wrong for this place in this season. They were thin tents for camping out under summer skies, not for living in, not in freezing mid-winter. They were the kind of tents that are abandoned after a music festival.
Then we saw the men.
They watched us drive slowly by, all these ragged figures with impassive eyes that stared through me and settled on Edie.
They stared at Edie and I was suddenly aware of my breathing.
And then we saw the mud. The mud went on forever. The mud was what the camp was built on. It was a sea of mud, a world of mud, and I had never seen anything like it outside of black-and-white photographs of the First World War.
In places the mud was full of frozen water, and in others some scrap of tarpaulin was stomped into the mud, and thin strips of corrugated metal traversed the mud in a parody of streets, pavements and civilisation.
It was like a camping site in hell.
Beyond the tents there were prefabricated cabins being built, wooden structures that looked like a village of portable toilets. Slogans were written on the side.
NO BORDERS – NO NATIONS and AIN’T NO BORDER HIGH ENOUGH and KILL THE BANKERS NOT THE POOR and WE ARE ALL EARTHLINGS and THE KING OF NOWHERE.
But what you noticed most was the mud and the men.
There were children playing outside tents and women with their heads covered by scarves. Smoke rose from their fires, leaving a low bank of fog drifting across the camp, as the women cooked and huddled for warmth.
But mostly this was a place of men.
And I knew with total certainty that, no matter what looked best for a cover story, I had been dead wrong to bring Edie Wren down here with me. I cursed my selfishness. I knew that she was the best person for the job. But I now knew that it had been a rotten call. This place reeked of danger.
I turned to look at her.
‘It’s going to be all right, Max,’ she said.
I shook my head. It was too late to stop now.
As I bumped across the mud towards a dozen parked vehicles near the treeline, a man stepped into my path and flagged me down with a gesture of authority that could have been learned from the CRS.
A rat the size of a neutered tom scampered across the boggy wasteland with some nameless prize in its mouth.
The man stuck his head in the car. Young, bearded, English, hair hanging down in matted blond dreadlocks.
‘What you got?’ he demanded.
‘Coats,’ I said.
‘Just coats?’ He grinned and nodded, showing a mouth full of tobacco-stained teeth. ‘Coats are good,’ he said, and I smelled the skunk on his breath. ‘You wouldn’t believe the crap that people bring with them. Books and shit. You need to check in first. See that building?’
Beyond the miserable huddle of brightly coloured tents and just before the wooden cabins began, there was a ramshackle shack built from wooden pallets.
‘You go in there and you ask to see Troy,’ the blond dread said, indicating the shack. ‘And if Troy approves your load, then you can start to distribute it.’ He indicated the cars near the trees. ‘Park over there.’
‘Troy?’ I said. ‘What’s that? First name, family name or nickname?’
A blank stare.
‘He’s just Troy.’
‘And how will we know Troy?’ I said.
A secret little smile split his face. His small teeth were the colour of weak tea.
‘Oh, you’ll know Troy,’ he said.
Edie leaned across me and gave him a friendly smile.
‘And are you and Troy working for some NGO?’ she said.
His face twisted with distaste, as if it was unseemly for us to be asking all these questions.
‘We’re here until they take down the borders,’ he said, stepping away and slapping the roof.
I bumped across the mud towards the parked cars, thinking that it was still not too late to turn the car around and go home. But in my rear-view mirror I saw the men gathering in the road, cutting off any possibility of retreat, staring at our car, and so I drove on and parked where the blond dread with the skunk breath had told me.
I locked up and we walked towards the shack built of wooden pallets. There was a stencilled sign above the door:
NO BORDERS
NO NATIONS
NO FLAGS
NO PATRIOTS
‘Who are these people?’ Edie murmured.
The shack looked like a house found in the shadows of a forest in a fairy tale. But instead of gingerbread, it was built of all these wooden pallets hammered together with six-inch nails. A house of scraps. The doorway was a barrier of multicoloured PVC strips. A small, sharp-faced woman with matted dreadlocks stood before it. She briefly lifted her chin, her eyes narrowing as they flicked from me to Edie.
‘Yeah?’
‘We have coats,’ Edie said, and I saw suspicion in the woman’s eyes.
Coats were perfect. Perhaps coats were too perfect.
But the woman lifted her chin again and pulled back the rainbow-coloured PVC strips.
‘See Troy.’
We went inside the shack of wooden pallets. A thick-set black man with short, dirty red dreadlocks was conferring with a man, maybe Afghan or Pakistani, who wore a Union Jack hoodie. They turned to look at us and as he took a step from the shadows I saw that the man with the dreadlocks was not black. His white face was stained black with swirls of tribal tattoos, curved shapes and spiral patterns piled on top of each other until only thin worm-like stretches of white skin were visible.
He stared at me hard, as if daring me to be repulsed by his face.
It looked like the end product of a tattooist who had gone insane.
‘Troy?’ I said.
‘What do you have?’ he said softly.
The accent was rough south-east English grafted on to one of those schools that cost Daddy five grand a term. Every pound-store radical I ever met was downwardly mobile.
‘Coats,’ I said. ‘We thought—’
‘Hanif will help you distribute them,’ Troy said, cutting me off and indicating the man in the Union Jack hoodie. Troy showed none of the suspicion of the woman on the door. But as we turned to go he held out his hand.
‘We ask for a donation to the camp,’ he said.
‘Who’s we?’ Edie said.
I lightly touched her arm.
‘How much?’ I said.
He was staring at Edie.
‘A grand,’ he told me, still not turning his illustrated face from her. You could tell that he was used to his features inspiring horror and fear. And that he liked it. But it didn’t work on Edie Wren. She was still waiting for an answer. I took a breath. I knew the gang in the house of scraps had to be Imagine, although they were not quite the collective of well-meaning hippies and pious anarchists that I had been expecting.
‘I don’t have a grand,’ I said. ‘We’ve just brought some clothes that we thought—’
He finally turned to look at me.
‘You can’t ease your Western conscience with a few handouts,’ he said. ‘These people are desperate. These people want to go to England. These people are not human garbage for you to leave out for capitalism’s bin men.’
I took out my cash and held it out. He took it and stuffed it into his pocket without counting. Then he gestured at the man in the Union Jack hoodie, who indicated that we should follow him.
Troy’s voice stopped me at the rainbow-coloured strips that covered the doorway.
‘You should unload the gear and go home,’ he said. ‘Don’t hang about for a bit of sightseeing.’ His hideous face grinned in the half-light of the wooden shac
k. ‘Because – no offence – you smell a bit too much like pig.’ His grin grew wider. ‘And they’re not big on pig around here.’
We followed Hanif to the BMW.
A group of men had edged towards the car but they seemed to know not to get any closer. They stood there, waiting for time to pass. In the distance I could see the children playing and the women in their headscarves, preparing their meals. But only men gathered around the car.
Everywhere you looked there was something that had been used up and tossed aside, resting in the mud. An abandoned car, an abandoned shopping trolley, abandoned people. Near the thin summer tents, a female photographer was taking a picture of a tiny girl who was clutching a doll.
I opened up the BMW and Hanif rummaged through the pile of coats until he found what he was looking for – a Giorgio Armani overcoat with a dark stain on one arm, possibly from a full-bodied Burgundy. Hanif slipped it on over his Union Jack hoodie.
‘Looks good on you,’ Edie said.
Hanif whistled and the rest of them came running.
Men and boys. A pack of them, more than twenty, and more were arriving every moment from the muddy track that led to the camp, from the coloured tents and the wooden cabin, their boots pounding across the metal walkways. The ones at the front reaching out with muddy hands to grab as many of the coats as they could carry, then spinning away as more hands reached out to rob them of their prize, the voices raised in furious Arabic.
We stood to one side of the car as Hanif smoothed the front of his new coat. Within minutes the coats had been torn from the car. Fists were thrown, curses were hissed and men yelled in each other’s faces.
‘Take it easy!’ I shouted.
A man on the edge of the pack bared his yellow teeth at me. He raised his hand from his jacket just enough for me to see the weak sunlight gleam on his knife.
‘They’re all carrying blades, Edie,’ I said.
‘They’re all front,’ she said.
I didn’t think so. What stops most people from committing crime is what they have to lose. And this crowd had nothing to lose.
On the far side of the crowd two men each held an arm of a light-grey Hugo Boss coat that I had been half-tempted to keep for myself. One of them was a large overweight man with a bushy beard. He towered over his rival, a smaller, leaner figure with his face almost totally covered by a balaclava.