Die Last

by Tony Parsons

  ‘You tell her,’ I said. ‘It’s OK to be honest, Scout.’

  ‘Well,’ Scout said, not wanting to be rude. ‘Your flat, Edie – it’s very nice and all, but it’s, well, it’s a bit … little.’

  Edie looked around her single-girl flat.

  ‘For Dasher,’ Scout said. ‘For a young Labrador-Retriever.’ Dasher was roaming about the flat, his nose twitching at all the new scents. Stan was curled up on the bed with Lil. ‘These dogs love human company,’ Scout said. She closed her eyes and remembered the words. ‘Labrador-Retrievers are a healthy, happy breed but they need regular human contact and a responsible amount of exercise.’

  Edie was staring at Scout.

  ‘She sounds like …’

  ‘She sounds like the Internet,’ I sighed. ‘I know. But Scout’s right, Edie. It’s not going to work.’

  ‘It’s a good place, Edie,’ Scout said, with the heart-tugging diplomacy that comes naturally to the children of divorced parents. ‘But it’s too small for a two-year-old Labrador-Retriever mix.’

  ‘Dasher would tear this place apart if you left him home alone,’ I said. ‘I know you want to help, but he will have trashed the place before you get to the office.’

  ‘Clos …’ said Scout, struggling to summon the word. ‘Clos … clos …’

  ‘Claustrophobic,’ I said.

  So Dasher came home with us.

  Scout was in raptures.

  Stan was less keen.

  Scout raced across the great empty expanse of the big loft – a space large enough for even a big boy like Dasher to wear himself out – as our Stan settled in the classic Cavalier King Charles Spaniel pose, his head resting on his front paws, casting anxious looks towards Scout and the newcomer.

  I scratched the tuft of white fur on Stan’s ruby-coloured chest.

  ‘You’ll get her back, old Stan.’

  Whitestone called. I was expecting to be told to bring Dasher over immediately, but it was nothing to do with the dog.

  ‘I’ve sent you a link,’ she said. ‘Watch it and call me back.’

  The link took me to YouTube footage that was filmed by the side of a busy road. Above the noise of a constant stream of heavy lorries, I could hear the voices of excited men in French and English and sub-Saharan languages that I didn’t know.

  The camera panned briefly to a sign above the road.

  GRAND PORT MARITIME DE DUNKERQUE

  There was a date stamp in the corner of the screen. It took me a moment to realise that it was the same day that Edie and I went to the camp in Dunkirk and this was the road to the port from the direction of Grand-Synthe. The camera bounced between the faces of the men – mostly African faces, all young and male, all wrapped up for a bitter north European winter – as they merrily threw large branches of trees into the busy road. They were laughing and I could tell that it was not the first time they had attempted to slow down a lorry for long enough to clamber into the back.

  They were not having much luck. The giant lorries barrelled over the scraps of trees they tossed into their paths. Sometimes I heard a lorry driver cursing the men as he tore past, and the men by the side of the road cursing the mothers of the lorry drivers.

  And then, as the men paused in their efforts, the camera’s eye settled with mild curiosity on a man standing alone further down the road, just above the hard shoulder, on the slope of the dead grass that led up from the motorway.

  The man’s face was stained with multiple tattoos, and he pressed a phone to his ear as he looked towards the oncoming traffic.

  Troy.

  And fifty metres beyond Troy, there was another dark figure, also alone, but standing much closer to the roaring traffic.

  And I saw that it was Zlatko Draganov standing on the hard shoulder, staring across the road at something.

  Staring across the road at me.

  Then Troy abruptly stepped back.

  And the men who had thrown their branches into the road were screaming, and scrambling away from the road, running for their lives, and the camera swung wildly, veering to the sky and the ground and swerving somewhere between, and when it finally regained control of itself it followed the path of a lorry that had roared past on the hard shoulder and narrowly missed the men throwing branches into the road.

  The vehicle seemed to accelerate as it closed the short distance to Zlatko Draganov. It was on him in a broken fragment of a second, smashing into him with a force that hurled him into the air and into the thick of the traffic.

  The lorry did not stop. The driver – whoever he was – did not even touch his brakes.

  And then the traffic stopped and the riot began.

  At first the camera dangled forgotten in the hand of the anonymous cameraman, until his colleagues began climbing into the back of a stopped lorry and he recorded this historic moment, the happy grins of men who looked as though they had just won the lottery.

  When the cameraman was safely tucked up in the back of a lorry, his friends chuckling contentedly all around him, the view switched to three CRS men giving a beating to a man on the ground between the back of one massive truck and the front of another. The man holding the camera screamed at them in his schoolboy French.

  The screen went black.

  I watched it all again, feeling sick.

  The men happily throwing branches in the road.

  Troy standing alone with a phone in his hand.

  The sudden appearance of the rogue lorry on the hard shoulder.

  I paused the YouTube film here, and saw that the lorry’s registration plates were smeared with the mud of northern France, a simple but effective way to hide a vehicle’s identity.

  And finally the brutal death of Zlatko Draganov.

  It no longer looked like a road accident.

  It looked like an execution.

  Then I called Whitestone. The cold Sunday afternoon seemed far away, the cheese-and-onion crisps in a back garden in Islington, the sandwiches and teacakes, the dogs running after the tennis ball. Now there was only the work.

  ‘They took him out,’ I told Whitestone. ‘Troy and whoever he works for. They used a lorry instead of a gun, but someone knew that Zlatko Draganov was about to be lifted by the law. They knew that we had identified Draganov as the driver of the Chinatown lorry and they knew that, sooner or later, he was going to be in a cell and telling us what he knew.’

  ‘What happened to the driver of that lorry?’

  ‘The driver’s in the wind,’ I said. ‘Maybe he got on board a ferry. More likely he kept going. He would have been in Belgium or Holland by the time the French cops got the alert out. Did you see what they did to the registration plates?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘So just to be clear – the death of Zlatko Draganov was no road accident, was it?’

  I could hear DCI Whitestone breathing at the other end of the line. She was waiting for me to confirm what she already knew.

  ‘His death was a hit,’ I said.

  20

  Early next morning Lee Hill sat in MIR-1, surrounded by our team. He was happy and relaxed, sipping the mug of builder’s tea Billy Greene had made for him. If there had been any chocolate digestive biscuits, we would have offered him one. We made sure he was sitting comfortably. Then we began.

  ‘We need you to make another run to Dunkirk,’ DCI Whitestone said.

  The lorry driver exploded.

  ‘That wasn’t the deal! The deal was I fingered the driver with the messed-up face! That was the deal we had!’

  ‘What you do is you drive to Dunkirk and make contact with Troy of Imagine,’ Whitestone said calmly, completely ignoring his protests. ‘Your old radical comrade with the tattooed mug. Then you bring another load into the country. And then you tell us where the drop zone is and then you’re done.’

  ‘But last time I was down there I told them I was too scared to try another run,’ he said, sloshing tea on to his jeans. ‘Oh bugger.’

  ‘Tell them you changed y
our mind,’ I said. ‘Tell them you need the money.’

  ‘Tell them whatever works,’ Whitestone said. ‘Tell them whatever you like. But – look at me, Lee – you are doing another run.’

  ‘In your dreams, copper. That was never the deal.’

  Whitestone looked at me. I knew she was thinking that we should have had this conversation in an interview room or a holding cell instead of MIR-1. Somewhere with locks and a metal grille on the door. Somewhere with not even the possibility of a chocolate digestive biscuit.

  Doing it in a room that wasn’t locked had lulled our bent lorry driver into a false sense of security.

  ‘There was never any deal, Lee,’ I said. ‘You agreed to help with our enquiries instead of facing charges for facilitating the entry of illegal immigrants. Remember?’

  ‘What do I get out of it?’

  ‘Freedom,’ Edie said.

  He snorted with derision.

  ‘You call this freedom?’

  Whitestone nodded at Billy. He hit his keyboard and the YouTube footage from the road by the Dunkirk camp began to play on the big screen.

  We all watched it in silence.

  The men throwing their branches on to the busy motorway. The brief glimpse of the man with the tattooed face standing by the side of the road, the dark phone pressed to his ear almost invisible against his inked features, staring towards the oncoming traffic.

  Troy.

  And Zlatko Draganov in the last seconds of his life before the oncoming truck annihilated him.

  ‘They killed him,’ Whitestone said. ‘Troy and those caring revolutionaries from Imagine. All those humanitarians with rings in the noses and bells on their toes. They knew we had ID’d the driver of the lorry in Chinatown. So they took him out. He was going to be given a tug, so they murdered him. Or they did it on the bidding of their masters.’

  ‘Nothing to do with me,’ Lee Hill said.

  ‘Everything to do with you,’ Whitestone insisted. ‘Those dead women in Chinatown could have been in your ride.’

  He shook his head furiously.

  ‘I never wanted anyone to die. Look – I only brought those people in because I couldn’t stop them. Nobody can. You have no idea what it’s like for the drivers down there. Look at those jungle bunnies chucking trees into the road! They’re going to be in the back of my lorry if I get paid for it or not. So why not get paid for it?’

  Edie scrunched up her eyes.

  ‘Because when you get nicked you do hard time – the kind of hard time that lasts long enough for your parents to die, your children to grow up and your friends to forget you. How about that for a good reason?’

  The lorry driver grimaced with frustration.

  ‘And what do I get if Troy thinks I’m ratting him out?’

  ‘Troy’s not going to think that,’ I said. ‘You were never arrested. Most of those Afghans you were bringing into the country were never collared. The ones that were haven’t been anywhere near West End Central. Nobody knows you’re here with us.’

  He covered his face with his hands, not buying it. I felt for the poor bastard. But this is how it works with CIs. We suck the juice out of them in return for not locking them up.

  ‘When would I go?’ he said.

  ‘Now,’ Whitestone said. ‘We would like you to go immediately. Make contact today. Make the run back in the next day or so.’

  ‘I don’t have a rig.’

  ‘We’ve got your lorry out of the pound,’ Billy said.

  He held up a set of keys.

  Lee Hill reluctantly took them.

  ‘And when does it end?’

  ‘When I say it ends,’ Whitestone said.

  Lee’s lorry was waiting outside the great subterranean car park of West End Central, which is round the back on Old Burlington Street.

  Billy walked him down.

  ‘But he already failed to make one delivery,’ I said when they were gone. ‘Even if most of them got away. You don’t think it looks like he’s been turned?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Whitestone said. ‘But he’s all we’ve got.’

  Edie was staring at her phone. All of her attention was suddenly somewhere else.

  I recognised that look.

  It is only our family who can make us feel that way.

  We searched for Lil all day. In the markets and the shops and the parks of Holloway and Islington and Highbury, from the old Arsenal stadium all the way to the Angel. But as the sun faded on another bitterly cold day, we realised we were looking in the wrong part of town.

  ‘I know where she will be,’ Edie said.

  Her grandmother had gone looking for her old neighbourhood deep in the East End.

  But that neighbourhood was long gone.

  The streets Lil knew, the terraced house where she grew up, the shops and the school and the people – it was as if none of it had ever existed. It took us two hours to find her.

  ‘There she is,’ Edie said.

  Lil was standing outside a brand-new block of apartments, talking to a porter in a dark suit with the tribal markings of West Africa on his face.

  ‘I’m looking for Harry,’ Lil explained.

  ‘Harry’s not here,’ he said. ‘Is no Harry. Please go.’

  Edie took her grandmother’s arm, laughing.

  ‘Come on, Nan, let’s go home. Went for another wander, didn’t you?’

  Lil looked confused.

  ‘Molly?’

  ‘It’s Edie. Your granddaughter. Remember?’

  ‘Edie. Yes. Of course. That’s quite right. Edie. I knew that.’

  A dog walker emerged with half a dozen dogs. She looked askance at Lil.

  ‘Excuse me,’ the old lady said to the dog walker. ‘Have you seen Harry? He’s – what? – must be sixteen by now.’

  The dog walker moved quickly away.

  The porter had his arms spread wide, ushering us out. Edie put her small body between the porter and her nan.

  ‘We’re going, pal,’ she said very quietly. ‘But don’t rush us.’

  She gently led Lil to the street, holding her close, softly whispering to her.

  ‘Harry’s gone, Nan. Remember now? Harry went a long time ago. Harry was your brother, wasn’t he?’

  Lil became suddenly tearful.

  I stared at the street. Building work was happening everywhere. The cranes loomed over the city as if they were the masters now. On the far side of the street a queue of men were being given hard hats and hi-vis jackets.

  And that was when I saw Nesha Novak.

  He was carrying bricks in a wheelbarrow. Almost running with them, as if it was some kind of grim new sport. I gave Edie the keys to the BMW and told her I would meet her at the car.

  Hana Novak’s kid brother looked at me as I brushed past the queue of men. But he carried on working, racing his load to the massive hole that was the centre of the site. Now that London was close to capacity, most of the building work was going underground.

  Russian voices were everywhere. Men with shaven heads, cigarettes jammed between their lips and, among all the ragged sportswear, there were hoodies that looked as though they had been bought from a tourist shop on Oxford Street. There were more Union Jacks than the Last Night of the Proms.

  I found the foreman.

  ‘See that kid with the wheelbarrow?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He’s sixteen.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘He’s in this country illegally.’

  The foreman smiled. He said something in Russian to his mates. Everybody had a good old chuckle.

  ‘So what?’ he repeated.

  I took out my warrant card and showed it to him.

  ‘So I can have you all deported so fast that your human rights won’t touch the ground,’ I said. ‘Want me to make a call to my colleagues at Border Control, the tax office, immigration?’

  His smile faded. He called Nesha over. The boy reluctantly set down his wheelbarrow, now empty, and approa
ched us.

  ‘Go,’ the foreman told Nesha.

  He hesitated for a moment and then handed in his hard hat and his hi-vis jacket and followed me silently.

  There were two middle-aged women coming down the road, pulling suitcases on wheels, and once upon a time they would have been friends off on holiday but now I knew they were more likely to be foreign housekeepers or cleaning ladies returning home after working in one of the East End’s new luxury apartment blocks.

  The women saw me coming with Nesha trailing reluctantly by my side, every inch the policeman with his suspect, and quickly crossed the street and hurried by on the far side of the road, as if I was bad trouble just waiting to begin, and as if they were a long way from home.

  When we reached the car, Lil smiled at Nesha brightly.

  ‘Hello, sweetheart!’ she said. ‘Hello, Harry!’

  ‘Hello,’ said Nesha.

  ‘Where’s all your kit?’ I asked him.

  He directed me to a nearby industrial estate where a dozen dead cars were lined up in the shadow of a giant carpet warehouse. The dead cars were inhabited by perhaps twice as many men. Nesha was staying on the back seat of a Vauxhall Corvette that had lost its wheels many years ago.

  The men – and they were all men – stood around a fire in an old oil barrel, trying to get the chill out of their bones, and they watched us without fear or interest as Nesha collected his things. There wasn’t much. He filled half a black bin bag and he was ready to go.

  Lil leaned into Edie. ‘Is that our Harry?’ she said.

  ‘Harry’s dead,’ Edie said.

  We dropped Edie and her grandmother back at her flat and then I drove back to Smithfield and parked on Charterhouse Street.

  I needed to talk to Nesha Novak.

  ‘We got him,’ I said. ‘The driver of that lorry. The one who drove your sister and those other women to London. As far as we can tell, his name was Zlatko Draganov. He was Bulgarian Roma. He made a living out of people like Hana and now he’s dead. Because we got him.’ I thought about it. ‘Well – we didn’t get him. Someone else did. But they got him because we were closing in on him.’

  The boy traced a finger over his face to indicate scarring.

  ‘That man?’ He clicked his fingers twice. ‘That man is dead?’