Kieran Mitchell knew only one word of Urdu—khamosh, which means “silence.” In the event, though, he had no need of it. The cargo, as usual, looked cowed, fearful and properly respectful. As a self-styled patriot Mitchell had no time for raghead illegals, and would have been much happier sending the whole bloody lot of them home. As a businessman, however—and a businessman in the full-time employ of Melvin Eastman—his hands were tied.
The return journey to shore was the part Mitchell dreaded. The old wooden fishing boats could only just manage a complement of twelve, and sat terrifyingly low in the water. Superior seamanship kept Gunter’s people more or less dry, but Mitchell’s were not so lucky. Waves broke almost continuously over their bows, drenching them. In the end it was a shivering and bedraggled group which helped him drag the boat up the beach and—as every consignment did—fell to its collective knees on the wet shingle to give thanks for its safe arrival. All except one, that is. All except the man with the black rucksack, who just stood there, looking around him.
Once the boats were in place Gunter and Mitchell removed their lifejackets and waterproofs. As Gunter unlocked a small wooden shed at the beach’s edge and hung the gear inside, Mitchell lined the men up and led them in single file away from the sea.
The shingle gave way to a turf path, which in turn led up to an open ironwork gate, which Mitchell closed behind them. They marched upwards, and the shapes of trees appeared against the faint illumination of the false dawn. These gave way to formal hedges and the flat plane of a lawn before the path led them to the left. A high wall appeared in front of them, and a door. Gunter opened this with a key, and Mitchell pulled it shut behind the last man. They were now in a narrow side road bordered by the wall on one side and by trees on the other. Some fifty yards up the road, hard against the trees, was the dim outline of an articulated truck.
Unpadlocking the back entrance of the truck, Mitchell led the migrants inside. When they were all in position at the front of the container, Mitchell pulled an alloy barrier across which, draped as it was with ropes and sacking, effectively formed a false front to the container. Beyond it, the migrants were crammed into an area approximately three feet deep, with a ventilation fan in the ceiling. The arrangement was not foolproof, but to the casual observer—a policeman with a torch, for example, looking in from the back—the artic was empty.
Mitchell drove, and Gunter took the passenger seat next to him. To begin with, for a good five minutes, they crept along an uneven country lane without showing any lights. Once in sight of the main road, however, Mitchell turned on the headlights and accelerated.
“Force nine out there earlier,” he said. “Bet they’ve been spewing their guts all the way.”
“They did look a bit buggered,” admitted Gunter, reaching into his pocket for his lighter and his cigarettes. He usually went home to bed at this stage of the game, but this morning he was taking a ride off Mitchell as far as King’s Lynn, where his sister Kayleigh had a council flat. He’d rather have driven there in his own car, but that silly-bugger Munday woman had ploughed into the back of it with her four-wheel drive. The Toyota was in Brancaster, getting a new tailgate, lights and exhaust system. The old exhaust was just knackered, nothing to do with the shunt, but the garage had been more than happy to quote for a new system and charge it to the insurance. Least said, soonest mended.
Twenty minutes later the artic pulled into the lorry park of a transport café on the A148 outside Fakenham. This was where, according to instructions, the “special” was to be let out.
As the lorry’s hydraulics gassily exhaled, Gunter took a heavy fourteen-inch Maglite torch from the passenger-side locker and jumped down from the cab. Unlocking the rear doors he clambered inside, switched on the torch and opened the forward compartment a crack.
The man with the rucksack presented himself. He was of medium height, lightly built, with unruly black hair and a studious half-smile. The rucksack, expensive-looking but unbranded, hung heavily from his narrow shoulders. Victim written all over him, thought Gunter. No wonder these Pakis get pushed around. And yet somewhere he’d found twenty grand for his transit. His dad’s life savings, that’d be, and probably half a dozen aunties chipping in too. And all so that the poor sod could spend his life shovelling curry or flogging newspapers in some dingy city like Bradford. Unbelievable. As he relocked the false wall, Gunter glanced at the young Asian—at the worn jeans, the cheap windcheater, and the narrow, fatigued features. Not for the first time in his life he gave sincere thanks that he’d been born white, and beneath the flag of St. George.
He watched as the special lowered himself to the ground, searched the unprepossessing nightscape, and hitched the heavy rucksack higher up his back. What did he have in there that had to be so carefully guarded? Gunter wondered. Something valuable, that was for sure. Maybe even gold—he wouldn’t be the first illegal to carry in a slab of the shiny stuff.
Following Mansoor to the ground, Gunter locked up the truck. From the open cab window, up the front, came the drift of Mitchell’s cigarette smoke.
Mansoor held out his hand. “Thank you,” he said.
“Pleasure,” said Gunter brusquely. His large callused hand dwarfed Mansoor’s.
The Afghan nodded, his half-smile still in place. Rucksack on back, he began to walk the fifty-odd yards to the white-painted toilet block.
Gunter came to a snap decision, and when the door of the block had opened and closed, he followed in Mansoor’s footsteps. Extinguishing the Maglite, he reversed it in his hand so that he was holding it by the knurled grip. Stepping into the toilet block he saw that one of the stalls was occupied, but that otherwise the place was empty. Genuflecting, he saw the base of Mansoor’s rucksack through the gap beneath the door. It was shaking slightly, as if its contents were being repacked. I was right, Gunter thought, the sneaky bastard has got something in there. Shaking his head at the perfidy of Asians in general, he crossed to the urinal to wait.
When Mansoor stepped out of the stall a couple of minutes later with the rucksack hoisted over one shoulder, Gunter rushed him, swinging the big Maglite like a steel-jacketed nightstick. The improvised weapon smashed into Mansoor’s upper arm, sending him staggering, and the rucksack sliding to the floor.
Gasping with pain, and furious with himself for having allowed fatigue to override caution, Mansoor made a desperate grab for the rucksack with his good arm, but the fisherman got there first, clubbing at Mansoor’s head with the Maglite so that the Afghan had to throw himself backwards to avoid having his jaw or skull shattered.
Skidding the rucksack out of reach, Gunter kicked Mansoor hard in the guts and crotch. As his victim writhed and clawed for breath, he grabbed for his spoils. The rucksack’s weight, however, slowed him down. The couple of seconds’ hesitation as he swung it over his shoulder was long enough for Mansoor to reach agonisedly inside his windcheater. He would have shouted if he could have—attracted Gunter’s attention to the silenced weapon, made the stupid English lout drop the rucksack before it was too late—but there wasn’t the breath in his body. And he couldn’t lose sight of the rucksack; that would be the end of everything.
Faraj Mansoor’s choices raced to the vanishing point.
The detonation was no louder than the snapping of a stick. It was the impact of the heavy calibre round that made the noise, such as it was.
P runing shears in her gloved hand, Anne Lakeby moved purposefully along the bank of ornamental sedges and grasses at the foot of the front lawn, cutting back the dead stems. It was a fine morning, cold and clear, and her Wellington boots left crisp imprints in the frosted turf. The shoulder-high grasses prevented any sight of the beach below, but the brownish glitter of the sea showed beyond them.
In her youth, Anne had been described as “handsome.” With age, however, her long features had contracted to a benign gauntness. Robust and unfussy—a pillar of local charities and good works—she was a popular figure in the community, and there were few eve
nts in and around Marsh Creake at which her loud neighing laugh was not to be heard. Like the Hall itself, she had become something of a landmark.
In thirty-five years of marriage Anne had never developed much of a fondness for the grey late-Victorian sprawl which her husband had inherited. The house had been built by Perry’s great-grandfather, to replace a much finer building which had burnt down, and she had always found it severe and uninviting. The gardens, however, were her pride and joy. The weathered brickwork, the sweep of the lawn to the shore, the subtle interplay of textures and colours in the mature borders—all of these brought her deep and lasting pleasure. She worked hard to maintain them, and opened the grounds to the public several times a year. In the early spring, people came from far and wide to enjoy the display of snowdrops and aconites.
Perry had brought the house to their marriage, but it was all that he had brought. Born to a local landowning family, Anne had inherited on the grand scale when her parents had died, and had made it her business to keep her personal accounts separate from her husband’s. Many couples would have found such a relationship unsustainable, but Anne and Perry managed to rub along together without too much friction. She was fond of him, she enjoyed his company, and within limits was prepared to indulge him in the little things which made him happy. But she liked to know what was going on in his life, and right now she didn’t. Something was up.
A cold sea breeze rustled the sedges and agitated the feathery heads of the grasses. Pocketing the secateurs, Anne proceeded towards the path which led to the beach. This, like the lawn, was still frosted hard, but Anne noticed that it had recently been considerably churned up. That bloody man Gunter, she supposed. She didn’t see him in person all that often, but she saw signs of his presence all the time—cigarette ends, heavy footprints—and it was beginning to annoy her profoundly. Given an inch, Ray Gunter was the type to take a mile. He knew that she had never liked him, and he didn’t give a damn. Why Perry put up with him tramping backwards and forwards through their property, night and day, she would never know.
She turned back to the house. The bank of grasses and sedges marked the end of the garden proper. The lawn was bordered by frozen beds of closely pruned old roses. The whole was enclosed by a pair of brick walls, above which maples and other deciduous trees stood starkly against the winter sky. The sight gave Anne a moment’s profound satisfaction before reminding her of the second reason for her irritation, which was that Diane Munday had decided to open her own garden to the public on precisely the same day that Anne herself had.
What had possessed the woman, God alone knew. She knew, or she damn well ought to have known, that the Hall always threw its gates open to the public on the last Saturday before Christmas. There wasn’t a great deal to admire in the garden at that time of year, but it was a tradition: people paid a couple of pounds to wander round the gardens—all profits to the St. John Ambulance Brigade—and then, believers or no, went on to the carol service and mince pies at the church.
But there was no telling people like the Mundays. They had a decent house, granted. Several million pounds’ worth of elegant Georgian manor house on the other side of the village, to be precise, all paid for out of the lavish salaries and bonuses that Sir Ralph Munday had seen fit to award himself in his final years in the City. And the gardens at Creake Manor were OK too—or had been before Diane had got her over-manicured hands on them. Now it was all Sheraton-style coachlights and fancy trelliswork and horrid little fast-growing conifers. And that swimming pool, which seemed to think it was part of a Roman villa, and the pink pampas grass … One could go on pretty much indefinitely. When the Mundays opened their garden to the public the event had nothing in the world to do with horticulture, and everything to do with a crass display of wealth.
Which was fine, Anne supposed—not everyone had been born with one’s social advantages. And one didn’t want to appear boringly snotty and stuffy. But the silly woman could have troubled to check the date. Really, she could have bothered to do that, at the very least.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the crackling roar of fighter jets. She looked upwards as three US Air Force fighters drew cursive trails across the hard blue of the sky. Lakenheath, she supposed vaguely. Or Mildenhall. How many miles to the gallon did those things do? Pretty few, she supposed—rather like Diane’s ridiculously oversized four-wheel drive. Which reminded her that police cars had been whizzing backwards and forwards in front of the house since well before breakfast. Extraordinary. The place was like Piccadilly Circus at times.
Anne walked down the path towards the sea. The Hall and its gardens occupied an elevated spit of land flanked to east and west by open mudflats. At high tide these were covered by the sea but at low tide they lay shining and exposed, the domain of cormorants, terns and oystercatchers. At the far point of the spit, beyond the garden, was the seventy-yard bank of shingle known as the Hall Beach. This was the only navigable landfall for a couple of miles in either direction, and as such afforded Anne and Perry Lakeby considerable privacy. Or would have done, mused Anne grumpily, had it not also been the place where Gunter kept his boats and nets.
The shingle crunched underfoot, and the brine was sharp in the air. There had been a bit of a blow the night before, Anne remembered, but the sea had settled. For a moment she gazed out towards the horizon, and surrendered herself to the ebb and wash of the tide. Then something caught her eye on the wet shingle at her feet. Bending, she lifted a tiny silver hand, a charm of some kind. Pretty, she thought absently, and slipped it into the pocket of her puffa jacket. She had taken several paces before she stopped dead in her tracks, wondering where in Heaven’s name it had come from.
L iz arrived at her desk at 8:30 to discover a switchboard message to contact Zander as a matter of urgency. Glancing at the FBI mug, wondering whether there would be a queue for the kettle, she flicked on her computer and pulled down Frankie Ferris’s encrypted file. The number he had left for her was that of a public call box in Chelmsford, and he had asked her to ring on the hour until he answered.
She rang at 9:00. He picked up on the first ring.
“Can you talk?” Liz asked, lining up a pencil and pad.
“For the moment, yeah. I’m in a multistorey. But if I hang up, you’ll … The thing of it is, someone got done on the pick-up.”
“Someone got killed?”
“Yeah. Last night. I don’t know where, and I don’t know the details, but I think it was a shooting. Eastman’s gone completely off his head, ranting on about raghead this and Paki that and all sorts …”
“Just keep to the point, Frankie. Start at the beginning. Is this something you’ve been told, or were you in Eastman’s office, or what?”
“I went into the office first thing. It’s on the Writtle estate, which—”
“Just tell me the story, Frankie.”
“Yeah, well, I ran into Ken Purkiss, that’s Eastman’s storeman. He says not to go up, everything’s come on top, the boss is like totally off his …”
“Because someone’s been killed on a pick-up?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know what sort of pick-up?”
“No.”
“Did he say where it happened?”
“No, but I’d guess that headland place, wherever that was. What he said, according to Ken, was that he’d told the Krauts they were overloading the network. Something about when their problems ended, his begun. And all the stuff about Pakis and that.”
“So did you speak to Eastman yourself?”
“No, I took Ken’s advice and slung it. I’m supposed to see him later.”
“Why are you telling me all this, Frankie?” Liz asked, although she knew the answer. Frankie was covering his back. If Eastman was going down, as well he might if there was a murder hunt, Frankie didn’t want to go down with him. He wanted to be in a position to make a deal while he still had a few cards in his hands, rather than from a police cell. If Eastman wriggled his way out of th
e charge, on the other hand, he still wanted to go on working for him.
“I want to help you,” said Frankie, his tone injured.
“Have you spoken to Morrison?”
“I’m not speaking to that bastard. It’s you and me or the deal’s off.”
“There’s no deal on, Frankie,” said Liz patiently. “If you have information relating to a murder you must inform the police.”
“I don’t know anything that’d stand up,” protested Frankie. “Only what I told you, and that’s all hearsay.”
He paused.
Liz said nothing. Waited.
“I s’pose I could …”
“Go on.”
“I could … see what I can find out. If you like.”
Liz considered her options. She didn’t want to step on Essex Special Branch’s toes, but Frankie did seem adamant about not speaking to Morrison. And she would bounce the information straight back to them. “How do I contact you?” she asked eventually.
“Give me a number. I’ll call you.”
Liz did so, and the phone went dead. She stared at her scribbled notes. Germans. Arabs. Pakistanis. The network overloaded. Was this a drugs story? It certainly sounded like one. Drugs were Melvin Eastman’s game. His stock-in-trade, so to speak. But then a lot of the drugs people had moved into people-smuggling. Economic migrants brought in from China, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East in return for fat wads of hard currency. Hard to resist when you’d got your border guards bribed and a good shipment line up and running.
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