Die Last

by Tony Parsons

  And there were homeless bundled up in the doorways, men with the same haunted faces that I had seen in the camp at Dunkirk – Syrians and Iraqis and Afghans. You saw those faces mirrored in the men who stood in the corner of Holborn Circus, one of the great junctions of the capital, five minutes from our home, where six roads lead to different parts of the city In the shadow of the great shining buildings of glass and steel men shivered inside their cheap sportswear and lifted their faces in hope every time a white van or a lorry slowed down.

  ‘What are those men doing?’ Scout said.

  ‘They’re waiting, angel.’

  ‘What are they waiting for?’

  ‘They’re waiting for work, Scout,’ I said. ‘You’ve seen all the new places being built and all the old buildings been done up?’

  Scout nodded, her gaze not leaving the waiting men. ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Well, those are the kinds of places they want to work,’ I said.

  ‘Do they get work every day?’

  ‘Probably not every day.’

  And I looked into those faces, too, but I never saw Hana Novak’s kid brother, Nenad ‘Nesha’ Novak.

  I never saw the boy.

  Up in MIR-1 Billy Greene tapped his keyboard and a blown-up passport photograph appeared on the big HDTV, every ragged scar a livid, larger-than-life furrow in that hard, empty face.

  ‘Mr Click-Click,’ I said. ‘This is the driver of the lorry that we found in Chinatown containing twelve women – eleven dead and one dying. The French police have identified him from his passport as Zlatko Draganov.’

  MIR-1 was silent as DCI Whitestone stared thoughtfully at the face on the screen.

  ‘Nationality?’ she said.

  ‘Bulgarian,’ I said.

  ‘Can we trust the French ID?’

  ‘Not really,’ Billy said. ‘According to the Bulgarian embassy in London, a Zlatko Draganov with the same date of birth died of lung cancer four years ago. Zlatko Draganov was Bulgarian Roma. From Vidin, on the banks of the Danube in north-western Bulgaria. It’s where Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia all meet.’

  ‘Mr Click-Click looked like he was from the same neck of the woods,’ I said. ‘But my guess is that the passport found on him originally belonged to a brother or an uncle or some kind of relation. This town Vidin is a major hub for the people smugglers and the Bulgarian Roma in those parts are the poorest people in all Europe. And they’re off the books. They’re not big on registering with the authorities.’

  ‘But this guy would be on our books if he has ever been arrested here,’ Whitestone said. ‘Can we run him through IDENT1? Have we got prints?’

  IDENT1 is the UK’s central database for storing the palm and fingerprints of anyone who is arrested or detained by the police. If he had ever been lifted, even if he had never been formally charged with a crime, then Zlatko Draganov – or whatever his real name was – would be on there.

  ‘Our CSIs are trying with the fresh prints they took from these.’ I held up two phones in evidence bags. ‘But IDENT1 is a long shot as none of the prints lifted from the steering wheel of the lorry in Chinatown has been identified. Suggesting that we have no record of Mr Click-Click on any database.’

  ‘Talk to me about the phones,’ Whitestone said.

  ‘This one is a burner.’ I indicated the cheaper piece of black plastic in my left hand. ‘Use it and lose it. The IMEI numbers are only six digits from the phone that Lee Hill was using.’

  ‘So they were using disposable phones from the same batch,’ Whitestone said. ‘Anything on the burner?’

  ‘Never been used,’ I said. ‘Presumably Draganov – I’ll call him Draganov, shall I? – would have received GPS coordinates for the drop-off point after arriving in the UK.’

  I held up the other phone, the latest model of some Korean smartphone.

  ‘This is his personal phone. Everything has been wiped – calls made, calls received, calls missed – apart from the photographs. And they’re worth seeing. Billy?’

  Billy had pulled on some blue latex gloves. As he took the evidence bag containing the smartphone from me, my own phone began to vibrate. I read the message and looked up at Whitestone.

  ‘Edie will be back in the country tomorrow,’ I told her. ‘She’s talking about coming into work.’

  I expected Whitestone to say something about taking the rest of the week off after the miscarriage.

  But our SIO merely nodded.

  ‘We could use her,’ she said.

  And that was it. I waited for something more but it never came. And I saw that something had changed in DCI Whitestone after her son had been attacked in a bar last summer. The assault had left her teenage boy blind and Whitestone had understandably been a mess of rage and grief. But now that anger had cooled into something hard and unforgiving that I had never seen in her before. Something had calcified in the heart of Pat Whitestone.

  Because of what happened to her son, because of the boy’s bad luck in being in the wrong place with the wrong people, because of the random madness of some little pound-store gangster putting a glass bottle across his eyes in some dismal little club on the Liverpool Road.

  ‘I think Edie needs to take it easy,’ I said.

  Whitestone looked at me sharply.

  ‘I think we need to find whoever put those women in that refrigerated lorry,’ she said. ‘And we need to do it now. Before they do it again. What’s the story with this bunch of anarchists, Imagine?’

  ‘Imagine are meant to be some kind of no-borders, imagine-no-possessions radicals. Troy – the leader – the one with the tattooed face – has about as much human compassion as a merchant banker, as far as I can see. We had to pay for the privilege of handing out coats.’

  ‘So these hippies – radicals – whatever they are – are they for real or not?’

  ‘Imagine run the camp in Dunkirk. And Troy runs Imagine. He rules that camp like a feudal chief. It may be a dungheap, but it’s Troy’s dungheap. And they certainly do a little freelance trafficking when they’re not saving the world.’

  ‘These are the photos on Draganov’s personal phone,’ Billy said.

  He had rigged the smartphone to his workstation. A photograph appeared on the big screen. A man and a woman standing side by side, the man’s scarred face smiling, the woman – thin, maybe early twenties, pretty in an exhausted sort of way – totally impassive. The man was Zlatko Draganov.

  ‘We’ve seen her before,’ Whitestone said. ‘Her face was in the stack of passports we found in the cab. One of the Turkish passports.’

  ‘There were two Turkish passports,’ Billy said. ‘One in maroon – the standard Turkish passport – and one in green – which allows the bearer to travel visa-free to some countries. In the opinion of Ken, our Questioned Documents guy from Heathrow, both of those passports were false. But the young woman pictured here had the higher-status green passport, travelling in the name of Rabia Demir. But who knows what her real name might be?’

  There was some kind of modest castle in the background, carefully maintained, its pale walls topped with red-brick parapets.

  ‘That’s Fort Baba Vida,’ Billy said. ‘Main tourist attraction of Vidin, Bulgaria. There are six more photographs, but I can’t identify the other locations. And the one in Vidin is the only picture that’s not a selfie.’

  Billy began scrolling through the photographs. They told the story of a man and a woman, travelling across Europe, strangers who became intimates. It was only the first photograph that featured any attempt to capture a picturesque background. The rest of them seemed to be taken at a collection of petrol stations. But as the seven photographs progressed, the couple became more familiar.

  ‘Besser denn je!’ said a sign behind them in the last image, with the woman calling herself Rabia Demir snuggling in the arms of the man travelling as Zlatko Draganov. Now they were both smiling.

  ‘Better than ever!’ I translated. ‘So that’s Germany or Austria.’


  ‘And what happened to her, Max?’ Whitestone said.

  ‘He might have killed her,’ I said. ‘When he got to London and found he had a cargo of dead and dying in the back of his lorry because he was too stupid to think about controlling the temperature in a refrigerated lorry. Because he didn’t know how the thermostat worked. Or because – my guess – it never even crossed his mind that those women were in danger of freezing to death until he parked in Chinatown and it was far too late. Rabia Demir – the girl who got to ride in the cab – was a witness. If she talked to the law she could put him away for a long time.’

  ‘But only if she knew,’ Whitestone said. ‘And only if she saw. She was a passenger. A favoured passenger, no doubt about it, the passenger who got to sleep with the driver, but my guess is that she didn’t know what was in the back of that lorry. Because why the hell would he tell her?’

  We were all silent, weighing the possibilities.

  ‘Whatever happened when he got to Chinatown, he was in a state of panic,’ I said. ‘If he killed Rabia and ran because she had seen too much, then her body would have been there.’

  ‘It’s possible he could have killed her and taken the body elsewhere,’ Whitestone said.

  ‘Yes, but my gut feeling is – they both ran,’ I said. ‘They got to Chinatown, he clocked what had happened in the back of the lorry, and all the plans went out the window. Draganov may have killed those women accidentally – he had probably never seen a refrigerated lorry before – but he killed them. He wanted to put as much distance as possible between himself and all those dead girls. So they ran. And they ran together.’

  ‘Then she’s here,’ Whitestone said. ‘She’s the only woman who was in that lorry left alive.’

  I nodded.

  ‘She’s out there now – the girl in the cab, the thirteenth woman, the only one who didn’t freeze to death,’ I said. ‘Rabia Demir. The only one who survived the journey. Find her and we find the chain that leads all the way to the bastards at the top.’ I looked at Billy. ‘Can you scroll through the photographs again?’

  The images began to appear.

  The young pretty woman and older scar-faced man looking almost formal in front of Fort Vida. And as they made their way across Europe, the woman becoming more relaxed, smiling more, something like her true self.

  ‘What do you notice?’ I said.

  ‘He looks keen,’ Whitestone said. ‘And she looks less keen.’

  ‘Understandable,’ I said. ‘He’s the one with all the power. He’s in the driver’s seat in every way possible. Until they reach their destination. Until they get to this country. Until they reach London. And then he feels all his power suddenly slipping away.’

  We stared at the screen.

  ‘They tell a story, don’t they?’ I said. ‘These seven photographs. You wouldn’t call it a love story exactly. But they tell a tale. It has a beginning, middle and an end. She was the prettiest girl in her village. He picked her up. He drove her here. At some point – quite early on, I reckon – he fell hard for her. Love, sex, obsession – label it how you like. But she rode up front in that lorry all the way across Europe because he wanted her and because she needed him. And when all those other women died because he forgot to press a button or turn a dial, she lived because she got to sit in the cab. And then they reached Chinatown.’

  ‘And then she dumped him,’ Whitestone said.

  16

  I stood outside a duck restaurant halfway down Chinatown’s Gerrard Street and looked up at the small office on the first floor. The lights were on so I excused myself as I edged through the long line waiting for a table and went up a short flight of stairs to the white door with its small sign.

  SAMPAGUITA

  Social Introduction Agency

  I knocked and went inside.

  Ginger Gonzalez looked up from her copy of the Financial Times and stared at me coldly, still resenting me for coming to see her with Whitestone.

  ‘Come to bust me, Max?’ she said.

  She mockingly held out her wrists to be handcuffed, displaying the tattoos that ran down her lower arms.

  Never for money, said one side.

  Always for love, said the other.

  ‘Maybe later,’ I said. ‘Fancy some Chinese?’

  She stared at me for a moment and then got her coat.

  We went across Gerrard Street to a cavernous Sichuan restaurant. It was crowded but there was no line outside and an indifferent waiter grudgingly found us a table for two. At the back of the restaurant there was some kind of celebration. An endless procession of waiters and waitresses brought massive plates that steamed and sizzled.

  In the middle of it all, an old Chinese man stared at his phone, checking his messages.

  I felt I knew him from somewhere.

  Ginger and I ordered spicy dandan noodles and Tsingtao beer and then I pushed a manila envelope across the table. Hard 8 x 10 inch copies of the seven photographs we had looked at in MIR-1. The oldest photograph was on top.

  ‘The man is Zlatko Draganov and the woman is Rabia Demir,’ I said. ‘The names might be false but we know that first photograph was taken at Fort Baba Vida in Vidin, Bulgaria. And that Draganov was the driver of the lorry we found in Chinatown and Rabia was the only woman to survive.’

  Ginger began to thumb through the photographs.

  ‘And how did she manage that?’

  ‘Because she wasn’t in the back of the lorry. She was sitting in the cab with Draganov.’

  The waitress brought our order. The dandan noodles were a beautiful mess of pork, vegetables and scallions on a bed of noodles and drenched in a sauce of chilli oil and Sichuan pepper so spicy that it brought tears to my eyes. I took a gulp of ice-cold Tsingtao and watched Ginger go through the photographs and then do it all again, slower this time.

  ‘Even in strictly commercial transactions, affection can creep in,’ she said, more to herself than to me. ‘But sometimes – usually – that affection is only one way. It tends to be the one with all the power who starts getting that loving feeling.’

  ‘Draganov is dead,’ I said.

  ‘Good,’ she said.

  ‘But Rabia made it to London. Our theory is that she dropped him once she got here.’

  ‘Smart girl. Trading up from a people smuggler.’ She stared at the final photograph with the cool calculation of a professional. ‘Not a bad-looking woman,’ she said thoughtfully.

  ‘She would have been the prettiest girl in her village,’ I said.

  ‘Then they get to London,’ Ginger said. ‘And she finds there are a million others who were all the prettiest girl in their village. And suddenly the village feels long ago and far away.’

  ‘We have to assume that she’s working,’ I said.

  ‘And not as a nuclear physicist, right?’ Ginger bared her white teeth as she sucked some dandan noodles from her chopsticks. The heat did not seem to bother her as much. ‘You mean a working girl in London.’

  I felt a stab of pain.

  ‘I think that’s what she’ll end up doing. I don’t know what her original plans were. Hana Novak – the one who was still alive – wanted to be a nurse.’

  ‘That’s a new one. It’s usually models, actresses and dancers.’

  ‘We don’t think Rabia Demir is working as a nurse.’

  ‘We don’t actually need any more working girls here, Max. The competition is fierce enough already.’

  ‘And yet still they keep coming,’ I said. ‘And some of them come to you, Ginger. Don’t they?’

  ‘What do you want to do, Max? Save her or arrest her?’

  ‘I want to know how she found her way into that lorry. I want to find out who put those other twelve young women in the back and then let them freeze to death at the other end of this street.’

  I pushed the dandan noodles away. I wasn’t hungry any more.

  ‘I want to find the men who put those women in that lorry, Ginger, and then I want to lock them up so t
hey can never do it again. But I need your help. Where should I start looking?’

  Ginger put down her chopsticks and picked up her beer.

  ‘You should check the language schools,’ she said. ‘If she’s here, she’ll be trying to improve her English.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘A lot of these girls are into self-improvement. The smarter ones know that nobody gets very far in this country if they don’t speak good English. If she dropped the driver after getting here, then she sounds like the aspirational sort.’ Ginger smiled at me. ‘You know, I was hurt that you came to me with that hard little woman.’

  ‘No choice, Ginger. Twelve dead women at the end of your street. We have to pursue every lead we can find.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I’m still allowed to be hurt.’

  The waitress took away our bowls and Ginger fanned out the seven photographs.

  ‘Just to be clear. My girls – they’re not trafficked, Max.’

  ‘I know.’

  She stared at the images without speaking.

  ‘Some of them like this life. They like the money. They like the freedom. They kid themselves they’re in some branch of show business. Or they are at that point in their life when they’re lost. And then they give it up and go back to studying or working in an office or they get married and nobody ever knows.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘The point is – they don’t all have knives held to their throat, Max,’ she said. ‘Though some of them do.’

  There was a sudden flurry of activity at the back of the restaurant. The manager was fussing over the departure of the Chinese man I had almost recognised. His entourage had fallen into step behind him. And now I knew where I had seen him before.

  Keith Li, the man who had found the lorry parked in Chinatown.

  ‘Please don’t stare,’ Ginger said.

  ‘Why not?’

  She lowered her voice to somewhere below a whisper.

  ‘Because that’s Keith Li and he is the head of the Wo Shing Wo.’

  The Wo Shing Wo are by far the largest Triad gang operating in the country, although traditionally their power base is in Manchester, while London’s Chinatown has been run for fifty years by the 14K Triads.