by Tony Parsons
He was impressed. ‘You know China, Detective.’
‘Not really. But I worked Chinatown. When I was very young. When I was so young that I wore a police uniform. I don’t know China. I only know Chinatown, Keith.’
‘And yet you will not drink with me.’
I relented. He poured another cup of boiling water on to the leaves.
‘We Chinese invented other things,’ he said. ‘We Chinese invented the snakehead. We invented the smuggling of people from a poor part of the world to a rich part of the world. The worst of our people have been doing this business for many years. So we are very familiar with the kind of people you are hunting. It is new to you. It is new to the West. But it is not new to us.’
‘And is she all right?’
‘My niece was fortunate. If nobody knows you’re here, then nobody knows you’re missing.’
‘And how did you know she was up there?’
‘One of my friends. She is out there now, in fact,’ he said, indicating the great game that is played under the streets of Chinatown. ‘She is one of the ladies you saw at my table playing Mahjong with me. She goes to that big glass tower – the Hopewell Centre – every day.’
‘Why?’
‘So she can clean it for them. All those rich, well-educated people – they can’t clean it for themselves, can they?’
‘She must be in her eighties. Bit old to be a cleaner, isn’t she?’
‘Chinese people don’t retire,’ he said proudly. ‘Only Europeans retire. And then they immediately drop dead. So much for retirement!’
‘Keith,’ I said. ‘There were other women up there who needed your help. There was a woman called Rabia Demir. She was in the cab of the lorry we found at the end of this street.’
‘And you think my men and I could have saved her?’
After a moment, I shook my head. ‘But I think we could have tried.’
There was a hard light in his eyes.
‘We came for my niece. I told you, Detective. We take care of our own. I’m sorry for that woman. I am sorry for all the women in that place. And I am happy that coming for my niece also meant that we saved your hide.’ He liked that one. Saved your hide. ‘But I told you before – this is why you tolerate us. Where were your colleagues?’
‘They got there in the end. Later than I would have liked.’
‘And did you catch the snakeheads you were seeking?’
I thought of Paul Warboys bleeding out on the floor of a holding cell in West End Central. I knew that Madam Theresa would be in a cell for the rest of her life. And I saw Troy of the camp finished at the hands of the small man drinking his tea on the other side of the desk.
I nodded.
‘They’re all done,’ I said.
It was time to go.
Keith Li stood up and held out his hand.
I shook it.
But there was one last thing.
‘What was your niece studying in Hong Kong?’ I said, although I felt that I already knew the answer.
‘How to help people,’ he said. ‘She wants to be a nurse.’
36
When her grandmother had slipped into her afternoon sleep, Edie gently took the box of Milk Tray from the bed and settled herself in the small room’s only chair. I made a drinking gesture and Edie gave me the thumbs up. We smiled at each other. I went off to the canteen to get coffee.
White-suited nurses were eating their lunch, their conversation like birdsong. They all wore the same identical white suit but they looked as if they were from every corner of the world. They did not look exhausted or depressed by their work. They seemed energised and happy.
As I paid for the coffee, I felt my spirits sink.
What’s wrong with this picture?
I stared at their happy faces. One of them, Maria from the Philippines who always took such good care of Lil, saw me staring, and smiled back.
They came from Africa. South America. East Asia. They came from where one continent ended and another began. They were Nigerian or Ghanaian, Filipina and Chinese, Albanian and Turkish, Brazilian and Colombian. They spoke in English, even when addressing someone from their own country, but I knew their languages would have been the Ashanti Twi of West Africa, the Mandarin of mainland China, the Portuguese of South America and languages that I had never heard of and would never recognise.
But the white-suited nurses of Golden Years all spoke to each other in English that was getting better every day.
I returned to Lil’s room as if in a dream.
‘What’s wrong, Max?’ Edie said.
‘The staff,’ I said. ‘These nurses.’
‘They’re great, aren’t they?’
‘Yes,’ I said, suddenly aware of my breathing. ‘But they’re all illegal.’
I stared out of the window. In the car park a Bentley had pulled up next to my BMW X5. Doherty, the driver, leaned against the door, smoking a cigarette in his gloved hands.
‘No,’ Edie said. ‘You can’t know that. You can’t be sure.’
She looked anxiously at her grandmother. The old lady moaned in her sleep.
‘I hope I’m wrong,’ I said. ‘But I can feel it in my blood, Edie. Every one of them is illegal. That’s why the women we found were all nurses. Hana Novak and the others in the lorry in Chinatown. Rabia Demir. Keith Li’s niece. They were all nurses. They were coming here to do what they had been trained for. And do it well. And do it better than the locals. I’m sorry, Edie.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘If you’re right, then why did some of them end up working for Madam Theresa? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘It’s the only thing that makes sense,’ I said. ‘Some of them never made it here alive and some of them were put to work in the Hopewell Centre. But they all came to do the same job.’ Edie’s grandmother had woken at the sound of our voices. ‘I’m sorry, Lil,’ I told her. ‘I truly am.’
‘That’s all right, love,’ Lil said, grinning happily, not a care in the world.
Edie was shaking her head.
‘Max – please. Stop for a minute and think this through. You could be wrong.’
‘But I’m not,’ I said. ‘Call it in, Edie.’
She made no attempt to reach for her phone. We stared at each other for a long hard moment and then I turned away. And as I left the room, I saw her reach for her grandmother’s hand.
I walked out to the car park. Doherty saw me coming and dropped his cigarette. I held out my hand. The chauffeur stared at it as if uncertain what to do. I kept my hand there. He slowly took it. We shook.
And then I squeezed his hand as hard as I could.
I saw the look of disbelief on his face turn to shock and finally, as I increased the pressure, excruciating pain, the kind of pain that doubles you up.
Cursing, Doherty abruptly pulled his hand away, and bounced off the side of his master’s car. His leather-soled shoes skidded and slipped on the icy ground as he broke into a run, his eyes streaming with tears.
It had been just shy of two months since the Champagne Room was torched.
And burns take a long time to heal.
Barry Warboys was smoking a cigar at his desk when I walked into his office.
‘What’s the life expectancy in this country these days?’ I said.
His PA appeared in the doorway behind me.
‘Mr Warboys? This gentleman just barged—’
‘It’s all right,’ he said, dismissing her. He considered my question. ‘Eighty years for men,’ he said. ‘Eighty-two for women. And rising all the time, of course.’
‘Then this is the best business to be in,’ I said. ‘Reasonably priced residential care for the elderly. All these people who need looking after.’
‘It’s an expanding market.’
‘But it must be hard to get nurses from affluent countries to look after old people. I imagine it’s a hard, messy, thankless job for not much money. To wash them, to clean up after them, to care about them.’
/> He was watching me carefully.
‘Frankly, it’s hard to get their own children to care about them,’ he said.
‘But your nurses care.’
‘Yes, they do care.’
‘Is that why they’re all illegals?’
He laughed like a man whose conscience was clear.
‘Technically speaking, Detective, these nurses are not employed by me. These women are not my staff. They come from an employment agency. They are employed by that agency. So if there are issues with work permits, residency visas and so on, then you will need to take it up with the employment agency. It’s the agency’s job to vet them. Not mine.’
He looked at me like a man who knows his hands are clean.
‘That ruse would work if it was just some migrant worker scam,’ I said. ‘It would work – and work well – if it were some cleaning jobs in London or a bit of potato picking in East Anglia. But the bodies are piling up. It’s gone too far for anyone to just get a slap on the wrist for lacking the right stamp in their passport. Too many women have died, Warboys. And you’re the man who shipped them in.’
We stared at each other.
And he still wasn’t afraid. He exhaled a cloud of cigar smoke.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Believe me, I can see the attraction. Your nurses work harder, cheaper and better than the locals. They do their job with good grace. It can’t be easy, looking after people who are in their final years. And I can see that they are all highly qualified and motivated. But I bet that when we round up the staff here – and at all your other retirement communities – they will all have entered this country in the back of a lorry. Every single one of them.’
He looked out of his window. The Bentley was without its driver.
‘Doherty’s not coming,’ I said. ‘Your man did a runner. Why did you have him burn down the Champagne Room?’
His jaw tightened, the blood slowly draining from his face.
‘I was nowhere near that fire.’
‘Oh, I don’t doubt your alibi is first class. My guess? It was all getting a bit too hardcore for your son, Steve. I met him a couple of times – but Steve wasn’t quite as hard as he wanted to be, was he? Were you trying to shut him up? Was he going to go to the law about the lorries that were being unloaded out the back? Or did he just want you to stop using his car park for your filthy little business?’
He sucked on his cigar as if it was the cure for something.
He took his time exhaling and the smoke drifted from his half-open mouth as if he was releasing something that had been locked up deep inside for a long time. I believed that there would be no more empty denials. Barry Warboys was ready to talk.
And I realised that I had seen this kind of confession before in dozens of interview rooms and holding cells. They deny everything until it can no longer possibly be denied. But when the truth is finally so close that you can smell it, taste it, feel it in the back of your throat – then you can’t shut them up.
‘Stephen was – how can I put it? – a trifle squeamish,’ he began. ‘He liked to play the hard man out there in the Essex nightlife, but the lorry with those girls in Chinatown – well, it put the wind up him.’
Put the wind up him. Meaning to cause extreme fear. It was an expression that his own father might have used.
‘My son wanted to see you and confess,’ Warboys said. ‘Which would have been good for his conscience but bad for my long-term plans.’ He was suddenly exasperated. ‘But I’m a businessman. You have to understand. I never wanted to hurt anyone.’
‘Then why are so many young women dying?’
‘Supply and demand,’ he sighed. ‘Market forces. We just had all these women coming in that we didn’t need. We didn’t have any use for them. They were no good to us. They were surplus to requirements. I had all the staff I could possibly use. But once the pipeline was open and flowing, it was impossible to turn it off. You can’t imagine the logistics, Detective – talent scouts at nursing colleges, reliable drivers for the journey across Europe, the odd anarchist to ease our way across borders. There were deliveries that were never even collected.’
‘Is that what happened to Hana Novak? A delivery that nobody collected?’
The name was unknown to him.
‘Who’s Hana Novak?’ he said.
I felt myself shaking with rage.
‘Hana Novak died in that lorry we found in Chinatown. She wanted to be a nurse.’
He laughed shortly.
‘Do you know how many qualified nurses there are in the world who want to come to this country? It’s rather a lot. And even when I attempted to shut off the pipeline, and told that tattooed freak in Grande-Synthe that we didn’t need any more, there were still all these women arriving. And then that old bag contacted me. My father’s favourite whore.’
‘Madam Theresa.’
‘Madam Theresa! She was long retired. She contacted me about my brother.’ His face twisted with disgust at the implied intimacy, and the last of the cigar smoke seeped from his mouth. ‘Would I like to visit my brother? The old girl has done it quite a bit over the years – inviting me to hold hands with her retarded offspring. Make believe we are family. No, thank you! I told her that I didn’t have a brother. But I did have a job for her. Oh, I knew what she was. And I knew what she sold. You see, we just were just bringing in too many nurses. It seemed a shame not to put them to work.’
‘So it was never your father who was Theresa’s sponsor up in the penthouse of the Hopewell Centre. It was you.’
He took a long drag on his cigar and the tip glowed red in the dying light of the late afternoon.
‘Look, I was never interested in whoring. That’s my father’s area of expertise. Getting someone to have sex with you is absolutely nothing,’ he said. ‘But try finding someone to look after your old, dying parent! Try getting someone to clean the mess off dear old mum or dad when they’ve soiled their bed again! Now that’s bloody difficult, Detective.’
A squad car pulled up in the car park.
And then another.
No lights, no sirens, no fuss.
Nobody wanted to scare the residents. So Edie must have called it in after all. I felt a huge wave of sorrow for her. And for the lovely old lady with the censored box of Milk Tray on her lap.
Warboys stepped out from behind his desk.
‘I think you’ve earned this,’ he said, and tried to stub out his cigar in my right eye.
I must have slipped because I felt the cigar burn and crumble against my shoulder and then his hands were in my face, the fingernails clawing at my forehead as he sunk his thumbs into my eyes, planning to push them into the back of my head as a howl of furious rage strangled in his throat.
Slip and rip, Fred had said. Slip and rip, Fred had drilled into me until it was second nature, no need for my brain to tell my body what to do, all of it done from muscle memory after repeating it a thousand times, and as I took half a step away from Warboys I dug a left hook into the bottom of his ribcage, and as he let me go with a squeal of pain I brought a right upper cut on to the tip of his chin, snapping his head back. There was a right cross ready to drive into his heart, but it was not needed. He was already going down. And as I caught him by his lapels and I held him up, I thought of the photograph that I had seen in the Black Museum of a small boy in a gym long ago, surrounded by all those leering, laughing hard men, the look of dread on his face, a son sick with fear in the presence of his father.
But I didn’t feel sorry for him any more.
‘You should have stuck with the boxing,’ I said.
On Valentine’s Day there was a party at the Finchley branch of Golden Years. Staff from all the other branches of the chain of retirement communities were invited. Mini-buses were provided to bring them from all over the country to North London.
The canteen was decked out in heart-shaped balloons in pink and red, and tables and chairs were pushed to the walls
to create a dance floor.
A beat box was provided for music – pop favourites from the last twenty years – and a small selection of food and drink was on offer. It was not our show at West End Central, but I saw the budget drawn up by the UK Border Agency and they certainly made it stretch to a lot of cheese sandwiches, crisps and cheap wine.
Even as the dancing got started, large coaches were pulling up in the car park. Two vans of uniformed officers were already parked in the corner but they were relaxed and chatty, coppers who were not anticipating any trouble on this shift.
The nursing staff of Golden Years were all expected to go quietly.
But still, there was no harm at all in letting them work off a little steam on the dance floor before they were collared.
I saw Maria, the Filipina nurse who had changed Lil’s bedding, dancing to ABC’s ‘The Look of Love’ with a group of other Filipinas.
But I didn’t see her stopped by one of the two uniformed officers who waited in the doorway of the canteen for when the nurses left, and I didn’t see her being processed by the immigration officers who set up their desks in the lobby, and I didn’t see her loaded on to one of the coaches that were waiting to transport them all directly to one of the UK’s dozen Immigration Detention Centres, which are built to Class B – medium-security – prison standards and invariably close to an airport.
We don’t call the facility a prison or even a detention centre. We call it pre-departure accommodation. They did not know it yet, but the staff of Golden Years were all going home.
As ABC made way for Abba, I went upstairs to Lil’s small corner room on the first floor.
There was a half-eaten box of Milk Tray in the wastepaper bin.
But the bed was stripped down to its bare mattress, the room was dark and cold and Edie Wren’s beloved grandmother was staying in some other care home tonight.
37
They came to the Old Bailey and they waited for justice.
It was not quite ten in the morning but many of the crowd gathered in Newgate Street had already done a full day’s work.
They were the night cleaners who scrubbed the towers of glass and steel. They were the drivers of tube trains, buses and mini cabs who pulled the graveyard shift. They were hospital porters, security guards and nurses, and some wore the white-and-blue uniforms of professional carers. They came up from the underground and they came down from the skyscrapers where they scrubbed before the working day began.