Die Last

by Tony Parsons

  But the larger man was the one who seemed afraid.

  The man in the balaclava raised his free hand, the hand that did not claim possession of the Boss coat.

  And he clicked his fingers.

  Click-click.

  Just once. It was enough.

  The large man with the beard relinquished the coat.

  The man in the balaclava put it on. It was a few sizes too big for him. He was heading towards the road out of the camp.

  Edie was already following him.

  Hanif was watching her. She turned to glance back at me and he saw the look that passed between us.

  Hanif stiffened in his new Giorgio Armani coat, staring hard at me, as if seeing me for the first time. I jogged after Edie. There was nothing else to do.

  ‘It’s him,’ she said.

  ‘They’re on to us,’ I said.

  ‘I swear to God it’s him, Max.’

  ‘I know but listen to me, will you? They’ve twigged that we’re cops.’

  ‘No,’ she said, but without much conviction.

  By the side of the BMW X5, Hanif was addressing a group of men in their nearly new coats. A boy in an oversized Berghaus was sprinting towards the shack of wooden pallets. Troy appeared in the doorway, his tattooed face grotesque in the sunlight. The boy pointed in our direction. We couldn’t go back.

  ‘Let’s get the bastard,’ I said.

  ‘What’s the plan?’

  ‘ID our man. Apprehend and arrest. Then call Europol.’

  ‘And if they refuse to hold him?’

  ‘Then he’s coming back in the boot of the car.’

  She looked at me for a moment and saw I was not joking.

  ‘It’s not going to come to that,’ I said. ‘The driver of the lorry with twelve dead women in the back is on every Europol watch list.’

  ‘What about the CRS?’

  ‘I don’t trust them.’

  ‘Me neither. He’s clocked us, Max.’

  The figure ahead of us broke into a run.

  We did the same, sprinting by the side of the muddy country lane, the ditch beside us overflowing with garbage. I felt the sweat trickle down my back. A bottle exploded on the road behind us. Something thudded into one of the trees.

  The men from the camp were coming for us.

  Then Edie slowed and stopped.

  ‘You go on,’ she said.

  I stared at her incredulously.

  ‘I’m not leaving you!’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said.

  She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out what looked like a blue handgun with a bright yellow cartridge. A Taser X3. The X3 is compact, light and capable of firing three shots before it needs reloading.

  ‘What happens after you’ve shot three of them?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not going to have to shoot that many,’ she said, and I hesitated for just a moment. She was right. When they saw one of their number twitching on the muddy road with involuntary muscular spasms, the rest of them were likely to find the fight draining out of them.

  So I left Edie Wren and I went on alone.

  I was running faster to keep up with the figure jogging ahead of me. I was hot now and he must have been hot too. Because, without breaking his stride, he removed his balaclava with a flourish, like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, and when he looked back at me I saw the ragged ranks of scarring that ran down one side of his face.

  Mr Click-Click.

  Then he was leaping across the trash in the ditch and sprinting into the winter woods.

  I looked back at Edie. The mob had stopped twenty metres away from her. She held her gun hand in the air, the blue-and-yellow Taser clearly visible, but I knew her voice would be calm and rational and making it clear that she would prefer not to dish out any neuromuscular incapacitation today.

  I felt a surge of fierce pride in her.

  Then I jumped across the ditch and went into the woods, losing sight of my man, but hearing the roar of the traffic ahead and knowing that he must be heading for the road. I caught sight of him again, moving nimbly through woods that he must have known well. He was getting away from me.

  I slowed on the uneven ground of the woods, and I stumbled over the tangled roots and dead leaves and brightly coloured trash that was scattered everywhere, and I found that I could not keep up with him. Ahead, the road was a torrent of traffic, all three lanes booming with giant lorries heading for the port, and when I finally reached it he was already standing on the hard shoulder of the other side.

  We stared at each other like two men on different banks of some mighty river that looked impossible to cross.

  There were other men on either side of the road, all of them looking up speculatively at the lorries, all of them desperate for England, all of them waiting for a chance to cadge a ride. But the lorries moved too fast, the drivers casting wary looks at the packs of men by the side of the last road in France as they rumbled by. On the far side of the road, I saw that scarred face smile at me.

  The lorry that hit him came out of nowhere.

  It was moving at twice the speed of the traffic on the motorway, barrelling down the hard shoulder at a good sixty miles an hour, and it went through Mr Click-Click as if he wasn’t there. The force threw him into the air and into the middle lane of the motorway. The traffic skidded, slowed and finally stopped in a cacophony of angry horns.

  And the men on both sides of the road went wild.

  A cry of disbelieving joy went up at the sight of this miracle – the lorries on the last road out of France, stopping as if to pick up passengers. As they ran into the stationary traffic I stumbled after them, still trying to understand what I had seen.

  Mr Click-Click on the far side of the road.

  The lorry speeding on the hard shoulder.

  Then the sickening impact of tons of steel colliding with flesh, blood and bone, and tossing him into the air as if it all weighed nothing.

  But I could not see any sign of the lorry that had hit him – it had not slowed down, let alone stopped with the rest of the traffic, it had just kept on speeding down the empty hard shoulder – and I could see no sign of Mr Click-Click or whatever was left of him. I walked among the motionless lorries, still spilling their diesel fumes, the drivers with their windows down and voices from a dozen nations, but mostly the accents of London and Liverpool and Glasgow, and I wondered if I had imagined it.

  And then I saw the blood.

  A long streak of it across the tarmac, so much of it that at first I believed it had to be something else, it could not all be from one man, but then I could smell it, that metallic tang of freshly spilled blood. I followed the trail to the back of a massive blue Scania lorry with the picture of some market town idyll on the side. VISIT LINCOLN CATHEDRAL, it advised, spires against a blue sky, and my eyes drifted from that scene of tranquil beauty to the mangled body of the man who had been thrown beneath it by the lorry still speeding away on the hard shoulder.

  I watched it disappearing into the distance without even a blink of brake lights. And I stared up at the appalled face of the driver of the VISIT LINCOLN CATHEDRAL lorry, almost grey with shock.

  And I saw that Mr Click-Click was roadkill now.

  Everywhere men were climbing into the backs of lorries. Drivers were getting out of their cabs, but they were always one against many, and the men in the back of the lorries jeered and laughed openly at the useless baseball bats the drivers carried. Nobody was paying any attention to Mr Click-Click. It was as if I was the only one who knew he was there.

  And then I was shoved roughly aside as two men dropped to their knees and fell upon him. At first I thought they were his grieving friends.

  But then they began to go through his pockets.

  I joined them. They shoved me. I shoved them back. They were rifling through his wallet, examining a wad of what looked like euros, British pounds and Turkish lira.

  One of them pushed me in the chest and shouted something i
n Arabic.

  I pushed him in the chest and cursed him in English.

  The dead man was wearing the Hugo Boss coat we had brought from London but the impact of the lorry had ripped it from shoulder to hem. One of the pockets was torn wide open and I could see two mobile phones. I picked them up and put them both in my jacket. The man who had pushed me shouted something in Arabic, and then grunted and dropped as a CRS cop hit him on the back of the head with his sidearm.

  There were three CRS men. They were mean, scared and angry, cops who knew that the situation was running away from them. In every direction you could hear the lorry horns blasting and the curses of the drivers and the men declaring the greatness of Allah.

  The CRS cops were screaming at us in French and pointing their SIFG Pro revolvers. The man who had been struck on the back of the head was face down on the tarmac, out cold, inches from what was left of Mr Click-Click. The other man was still on his knees, protesting his innocence in pidgin French.

  I held up my hands and got slowly to my feet, my face a mask of docile compliance, nodding obediently at the cop pointing a pistol in my face.

  ‘I am a detective with the Metropolitan Police and I am following your instructions,’ I said. I indicated the dead man between us. ‘I was attempting to apprehend this man for—’

  The CRS man swiped the butt of his gun across my face.

  Not hard. Croissants at ten paces. Not as hard as he could have, but hard enough to shut me up. He wasn’t interested in anything I had to say. He wasn’t open to debate. The polymer frame caught my cheekbone and whipped my face sideways.

  I felt a warm trickle of blood ooze down the broken skin but I resisted the urge to move my hands. The cop screamed in my face.

  ‘Allons-y! Allons-y! Allons-y!’

  The man who was still conscious was dragging his friend away, who was semi-conscious now and groaning and rubbing the back of his skull, euros and Turkish lira spilling all around them. I looked at the CRS men. They did not want to arrest us because they already had their hands full. But they would do so if we gave them no choice.

  ‘Allons-y, connard!’

  I glanced down at the remains of Mr Click-Click.

  And then I went looking for Edie.

  14

  Edie was standing where I had left her, the Taser 3 still in her hand. There was no sign of the men from the camp.

  I felt as though I had been holding my breath since the moment I had left her. I exhaled as she turned to look at me.

  ‘What happened to your face?’ she said.

  ‘I was born this way. What’s your excuse?’

  Her cool fingers traced the mark the CRS man had left on my face.

  ‘Did we get Mr Click-Click?’ she said.

  ‘He’s gone,’ I said. ‘He was on the hard shoulder and a lorry hit him. The lorry was driving on the hard shoulder. It didn’t stop. It didn’t even slow down.’

  She frowned, struggling to understand.

  ‘He’s dead, Edie. And it’s chaos down there. Nothing moving. The boys from the camp think they’ve won the Lottery. The CRS are going to need a lot of extra tear gas before they clear it.’

  ‘Did you tell them who you are?’

  ‘I tried. They weren’t very impressed. They called me connard. Does that mean respected detective?’

  ‘No, Max, connard means shithead.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘Was it definitely him?’

  I nodded.

  ‘What happened here?’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘They bottled it. They came close but in the end nobody wanted to take a hit for the team. I didn’t fire a shot.’

  She slipped the Taser into her pocket and we smiled at each other.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ I said.

  Then I saw her face twist with pain.

  She collapsed into my arms, the pain suddenly replaced by panic, and I held her close, already knowing, my mind whirling ahead, wondering where the nearest hospital was, and how fast I could get there, and if it could possibly be quick enough.

  I scooped her up in my arms and carried her towards the car.

  When she spoke, her face pressed against my chest, the words were muffled by my jacket and choked with what sounded like bereavement.

  ‘My baby,’ she said.

  They were very kind at the Centre Hospitalier de Dunkerque.

  When they finally let me see Edie a few hours later, she was sitting up in bed in her own private room wearing a white smock, pale as a red-haired angel.

  I sat on the bed and took her hand.

  ‘I lost the baby,’ she said, as matter-of-fact as she could make it. ‘Apparently I’ll have cramping for a day or two. Bleeding for a week. Is that too much information?’

  I shook my head. I held her hand tighter. I had no words for her.

  ‘The body heals quick, so they say.’ Tears sprang to her eyes. ‘No news yet on how long the heart takes,’ she laughed, making a joke about something that tore her apart. She pulled her hand away from me, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘I made some calls. Someone’s coming down for me. You can go home to Scout, Max.’

  ‘I’ll stay until he arrives,’ I said, speculating how long it would take Edie’s married man to make up an excuse to come to northern France.

  ‘I feel so bloody sad, Max.’

  ‘You’ll have a beautiful baby,’ I said. ‘I know you will, Edie. And you’ll never forget this baby. You’ll never stop loving her.’

  ‘Maybe I’m not meant to be a mother. I wouldn’t know where to start.’

  ‘You’ll know when you the time comes. And you’ll have these feelings unlocked inside you that you never knew were there. This great store of unconditional love, Edie. That gets unlocked and that’s what gets you through. A child changes everything. It’s simple until they arrive. It’s just men and women dealing with all the usual stuff. But after you have children, everything’s got all these jagged edges. It’s like life is holding you hostage. Because there’s something in the world that you love more than yourself.’

  I looked at the door as if expecting to see Mr Big walk in, removing his wedding ring.

  ‘I know it’s a mess,’ she said, reading my face. ‘And I know it’s not easy. And I’m not so stupid that I think it will ever be easy.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘But he loves me,’ she said. ‘He loves me, Max. He does, I know it.’

  Edie Wren was twenty-five years old. You might not have found her beautiful but I did. She was a small, feisty redhead, and probably the bravest person I have ever met. She made me laugh and she made me care. There wasn’t much of her but it was all good.

  I got up to go.

  ‘Why wouldn’t he?’ I said.

  I stopped for petrol halfway home.

  Beyond the motorway, the chalk hills of the North Downs stretched off into the distance, brown and green in the white winter moonlight and I stared at them as the big BMW filled up with diesel. I listened to the sound of the cars booming by and for a moment I hung my head and I thought about a baby who would never be born.

  Then my phone began to vibrate.

  WHITESTONE CALLING, it said.

  ‘Did we get him?’ she said.

  I told her about the ID at the camp, the pursuit through the woods and what had happened on the hard shoulder of the road. I was still struggling to understand why there was one lorry speeding on the hard shoulder. It made no sense. But Whitestone did not care. She whooped with delight when I told her that I had two mobile phones recovered from Mr Click-Click.

  ‘Good work, the pair of you,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you first thing in the morning.’

  So then I had to tell her the other news and why Edie would be coming back later than me.

  Silence.

  ‘One more thing,’ she said finally. ‘The Champagne Room burned down during the night.’

  ‘It’s got to be an insurance scam,’ I said. ‘Torching buildin
gs for the insurance money is how Steve Warboys started out.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Max. Because Steve Warboys was inside the Champagne Room when it went up in flames. They’re still bringing the bodies out now and it looks like he was tied to a chair in one of the VIP rooms.’

  We hung up and I walked to the service station to pay, suddenly noticing that the car was coated in the mud of northern France. Something about the sight of it sickened me, and I glanced towards the service station’s car wash.

  OUT OF ORDER, said a sign, but there was activity there, men were milling about with buckets and brushes, and when they saw me looking they hurried towards me, perhaps a dozen of them and they could have been from Afghanistan or Syria or Iraq, they were so similar to the men that I had seen at the camp on the other side of that narrow sea.

  I shook my head and waved them away. I had heard too many horror stories about what these hand-wash merchants use to clean your car. There was a big fleshy Englishman at the till who took my money for the diesel without a smile.

  ‘What happened to your car wash?’ I asked him.

  ‘We got shot of it,’ he said, handing me my change. ‘People are cheaper.’

  PART TWO

  Shadow People

  15

  It felt like the world was on the move.

  As Scout and I walked past the men of Smithfield meat market, there were new languages among the old London voices that I had not heard here before – Korean and Russian and Arabic and Chinese, and not the Hong Kong Cantonese of London’s Chinatown but real mainland Mandarin.

  And I could sense the world on the move among the builders on their way to work at the huge developments of luxury apartments that were going up by the Thames. There were Poles and Russians and East Europeans of every nation. And in Smiths of Smithfield when we had our breakfast, Scout slipping scraps of pancake to Stan at her feet, there were the young people of southern Europe, the French and Italians and Spanish, a generation made exiles by the unemployment queues of their own countries, although you would never guess it from their smiles.