Cold Courage

by Pekka Hiltunen

  Henriete smiled at everyone who spoke to her, but she did not reply, seeming to have slipped into a half sleeping state.

  Paddy cleaned the wound on her shoulder using the first aid kit in one of the camper vans. The cut was not deep, and he was able to bind it relatively tightly. They gave Henriete painkillers and water. Within half an hour she had fallen asleep on the bed. Ausma sat next to her grandmother and held the hand of her unhurt arm.

  Lia sampled the wine Berg poured for her, wondering why she felt so strange.

  Berg boiled another batch of pasta so Lia, Elza and Paddy could eat. Soon they heard the sound of another car outside. It was Mari.

  Lia realised she had never known that Mari owned a car. Or perhaps she had rented it. She was too numb to give the matter any more thought.

  Mari and Paddy went to the other camper van to talk through everything that had happened. They considered whether to take Henriete or Lia to a doctor, but neither seemed to be in need of that level of help. The best thing for them now was sleep.

  Elza came to tell them that the women were doing relatively well. After seeing Henriete and Lia’s state, they had put off thinking what would happen to them later, accepting that first they simply had to get through the present moment.

  When Elza left, Paddy asked, ‘What will we do with Henriete?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Mari said.

  None of them wanted to give her up to the police. They were sure to ask Lia about Vanags and would also find Jansons. But Henriete had suffered too much, and Mari could not see any reason she should have to go to jail.

  They rejoined the group in the larger camper van.

  Lia asked Mari to come to her. She was extremely tired, but wanted to talk.

  ‘How are things with Arthur Fried?’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll take care of Arthur Fried. There’s nothing you need to worry about now.’

  ‘Good. Now I’m going to empty my head of thoughts,’ Lia said, showing her wine glass. ‘It feels like I have a lot to get flushed out. Do we still have any wine left?’

  Mari poured her a full glass.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about you,’ Lia said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Do you know what kind of person you are? You’re a työihminen.’ She needed the Finnish word to express how at one with her work Mari was.

  Sometimes people would say that someone was a hyvä työihminen, a good work person, Lia continued. But the adjective was pointless. If someone was a työihminen, that word alone said how responsible and competent she was.

  ‘And you are.’

  Mari nodded and allowed Lia to express everything running around in her head. Lia’s thoughts wandered here and there, but she did not speak at all of the day’s events.

  As Lia began to nod off, Mari moved on to chat with Elza and the other women. She made the acquaintance of everyone in the whole group, except Henriete who was fast asleep.

  Then Mari left for home, and the others also began to move towards their beds. The small camper van became the men’s quarters and the larger the women’s. The women were a little crowded, but everyone preferred things this way.

  Lia fell asleep quickly. Berg had given her a sleeping pill, because, despite her exhaustion, she didn’t think she could quite fall completely asleep.

  Berg was the last one awake and made the rounds of both vehicles before going to bed, checking that all the doors were locked. He did not really fear anyone coming to such an out-of-the-way campsite, but he was used to looking after important people.

  40

  On Wednesday morning, Lia woke up to Berg shaking her awake.

  ‘You’re going to want to see the news,’ Berg said, pushing a coffee mug into her hands.

  Lia sat up on her small bed in the camper van and squinted at the morning news broadcast. Two seconds later she was wide awake.

  The lead story was that Fair Rule was suspected of supporting groups convicted of staging racist attacks using secret money transfers. The police had made a surprise raid on the party headquarters, seizing computers and files. The office would remain open, but party secretary Gallagher had already announced that their work would be slowed down until the issue had been resolved.

  The reporters had interviewed Gallagher because Arthur Fried was incommunicado. The police had asked Fried and Gallagher to appear for questioning regarding the irregular support payments.

  Lia looked in Berg’s face for an explanation.

  ‘Wasn’t this supposed to come out a couple of days from now? What happened?’

  Berg shrugged.

  ‘I moved up the schedule,’ Mari said when Lia reached her on the phone.

  Mari had asked a favour of a private detective she knew a few days earlier and arranged for the information to be given to the police immediately.

  ‘It felt right. The Latvians’ case came up. You, Paddy and Berg are there now. And that’s as it should be. You need to be there.’

  Arthur Fried would be instituting counter-measures to survive the tax evasion revelation. Mari had wanted to give him something new to think about as soon as possible. If Fried was spending all his time responding to enquiries regarding racist groups, he wouldn’t have time to plan a rescue operation for his reputation.

  ‘That will give us at least a couple of days. Then I need you back here. And Paddy and Berg too of course. How are you doing?’

  ‘I don’t know. I feel sort of numb.’

  ‘Take it easy. Call me whenever you want. Even if you just want to talk.’

  The day was unique in every way.

  Lia watched the news, which was filled with analysis of the latest Fair Rule scandal. Many of the commentaries suggested that the party had fallen into a tailspin from which it was unlikely to recover, at least not before the general election.

  As she watched the news, images from the previous day also flashed through her mind. Being forced into the boot of a car. The bloodstains on the concrete pit in the warehouse. Henriete Vītola with a pistol in her hand. Kazis Vanags’ and Olafs Jansons’ limp bodies.

  That the news was not full of those pictures felt strange to her. Suspicions of racism directed at a political party seemed insignificant compared to what had happened to them.

  Over the course of the day, Lia, Berg, Paddy and the six Latvian women formed a strange family. They busied themselves preparing food and playing card games together. They talked a lot, but not a word was said about the previous day.

  The father and mother of the family was Berg, who listened to and bolstered them all up. Elza and the other women from Vassall Road were the sisters, unfailingly loyal to each other.

  Lia learned much about each woman as the day wore on. She soon found it difficult to connect them to prostitution and everything else in their past. She thought she could sense shadows of the past now and then in the melancholy with which they regarded certain things. The way they threw themselves headlong into games and jokes made it seem they wanted to forget all of that.

  Paddy was the family’s mischievous older brother, who turned out to be a master card player and dominated every game. Under his direction they played a long game of poker with Paddy circling the table doling out advice.

  Lia was unsure what was going through Ausma Vītola’s mind. She participated in everything they did together, but she was quiet.

  Two days ago she heard about her mother dying a gruesome death. She’s had to live for months in a locked house, not knowing what would happen to her. She’s just a girl, and the world has already showed her cruelty in all its forms.

  Henriete and Lia were objects of protection and nurturing, and they accepted it all with gratitude.

  Lia surreptitiously watched Henriete’s condition. She sat with the others, but did not participate in the games and only spoke when directly addressed.

  In her eyes there was something very serious and resolute. Lia believed she knew what was in Henriete’s mind: She had decided to survive.
/>   In the afternoon, while most of them were napping, Elza approached Lia.

  ‘How are you doing?’ Elza asked.

  ‘Pretty well.’

  Lia said she was seeing nightmarish images even when she was awake but was starting to feel fine otherwise.

  ‘How long do we have to stay here?’ Elza asked.

  ‘Not long. Until tomorrow. Tomorrow everyone has to decide where they are going.’

  Lia and Mari had thought about housing the women at the campsite for longer if necessary. But there was no sense putting off decisions they would have to make eventually in any case. That wouldn’t help anyone, and the possibility that one of Vanags’ criminal associates would pick up their trail was always there. They had to move forward.

  ‘Right. I’ll talk to the others,’ Elza said.

  At around four o’clock, a woman in her forties pulled up to the caravan pitch. Fiona Gould was the lawyer specialising in immigrant rights with whom Mari had spoken before and whom she had hired to advise the Latvians.

  Lia expected that the question about their future would dampen the mood, but the opposite was true.

  Fiona Gould was quite something. She spoke in a loud voice and laughed even louder, and everyone found her both extremely professional and sharp-witted. She described the women’s options precisely and realistically.

  That they were Latvians, EU citizens, theoretically gave them certain rights in Britain. The problem was that most of them had entered the country secretly and none of them had passports – Vanags had taken them. Four of them had worked as prostitutes, which was legal in Britain in itself, but since they had worked under pimps it was not. Laws had been broken, but who was actually culpable was unclear.

  They were exceptional cases. It was obvious that they had no right to asylum, because Latvia was a stable country. Even the fact that they had been held captive did not make any difference – it could matter in the cases against the men who had kept them prisoner, but it would not bring them a new life in London.

  Fiona Gould did not sugar-coat their prospects.

  ‘Of course I’m duty-bound to advise you to follow the law and present yourselves to the authorities. However, it is possible that you will be deported to Latvia. Latvia may be an EU country now, but that happened recently enough that you still needed a permit to live and work here for so long. Even if the authorities allow you to stay, you won’t qualify for state benefits for twelve months, so living and looking for work will be very difficult. Should you stay illegally, your situation would be even worse.’

  Hundreds of thousands of people came to Britain in search of work each year, many of them illegally, Gould said. Estimates suggested that within less than a year about half of newcomers returned to their homelands or went elsewhere because life in the country had proved too difficult.

  A return to Latvia could be the better choice for most of them. Especially if they had friends or relatives there.

  The women considered their options. None of the quartet from Vassall Road wanted to return to the brothels, which was a big relief for Lia. If one of them had wanted that, their escape from their pimps would have caused them serious difficulties.

  They had a difficult decision to make. Originally they had come to London voluntarily as sex workers. But then to all intents and purposes they had been turned into prisoners and had had to make what they could of their lives, living in constant fear. Their previous lives they had mentally set aside.

  For them London had been a jail, but it was a prison surrounded by potential wealth. The thought that the city could offer something else fascinated them. A return to Latvia meant returning to loved ones, but also to the difficult questions that had led them to London originally: how would they survive, how would they earn their living?

  Lia asked them about their work on Vassall Road and how the customers had treated them. She wanted to understand what they had been through.

  The women replied briefly and seriously. Yes, the work had been punishing, and in their free moments they hadn’t had the energy for anything more than staring at the television. No, the customers had not been violent, but some were certainly clumsy, heavy-handed, a little vile, treating them with the contempt they thought a whore deserved. They were all thirty years old or more. That was old for a prostitute, since most men wanted women in their twenties. Often they had been sold at a discount: before 5 p.m. was happy hour and regulars received their own mark-downs.

  Before long Elza pulled Lia aside and asked her to put an end to her questioning.

  ‘You’re asking this for yourself. It won’t help us. You’re a lovely person who has helped us in an unbelievable way. But now let us be. That’s how you can help,’ Elza said.

  Lia understood. They had made difficult choices. They were ashamed of what had happened to them and that they had been prisoners. Talking about it only underscored the difference between them and everyone else. They had to break loose from their experience and cope with everything new that was ahead of them.

  Fiona Gould overheard Lia and Elza’s conversation.

  ‘Don’t think you’ve done anything wrong,’ Gould said to Lia. ‘This happens when you help people. You can’t go any further into people’s lives than they want. The person doing the helping often thinks that helping is also about becoming friends. It doesn’t work like that. You have to be content to help and also stay a little bit removed. It’s better for everyone.’

  Like Mari said that time. This is about dispensing fairness.

  By the evening the women’s choices were becoming clear. Elza and Ausma wanted to stay in Britain, at least for now. Finding work would be a problem, but both were ready to do the basic manual labour that might be available: cleaning or routine task in hospitals and restaurants.

  Henriete, Alise, Kamilla and Rozalinde wished to return to Latvia.

  The problem was that all six women needed passports. Without those, seeking work in London or travelling to Latvia would be difficult. Even though Latvia and Britain both belonged to the EU, the UK was not part of the Schengen Area which meant you had to show your passport at border control.

  Paddy knew how the issue could be resolved. Before he told them, he asked Fiona Gould to go out for a walk.

  ‘This is one of the things you can’t be involved with,’ Paddy said.

  Through her contacts, Mari could obtain fake passports, Paddy told the women assembled in the camper van. They had done it before, and now they just had to get them more quickly than usual.

  The women received this information with great relief. Without delay Berg began taking passport photos of them with a tiny camera and recording their dates and places of birth, the exact spelling of their names and their physical descriptions.

  ‘Where will the passports come from?’ Lia asked. She remembered her and Mari’s meeting with Big K, the snitch, who had connections to the criminal underground.

  ‘It’s better not to know,’ Paddy said. ‘It isn’t important to know everything. Let Mari handle this.’

  Berg emailed the women’s pictures and particulars to the Studio.

  Berg sighed. ‘This will be expensive,’ he said quietly to Lia so the others couldn’t hear. ‘Six Latvian passports, express delivery. Making them on this schedule will be a small miracle.’

  But Mari did not bat an eyelash at the cost. She was only interested in getting the matter settled.

  Once the question of the women’s future had begun to resolve itself, the mood eased again. The day’s discussions with Fiona Gould and the acquisition of passports had dispelled the women’s uncertainty.

  And, strangely enough, Lia also felt recharged by what Gould had said and the improvement in the women’s situation.

  There is the law – and society. Yesterday we went far outside both. Today we’re crossing those lines again. But soon I’ll be back inside.

  In the evening they had a party in the large camper van. Fiona Gould stayed and sat with them, making herself at home.


  Berg acted as bartender, mixing drinks from what they had to hand. Ausma was DJ, searching the radio waves for songs. The others played cards, smoked, drank and laughed. They talked loudly, English and Latvian mixing fluidly.

  Lia was the only one who occasionally sought out the quiet of the smaller camper van in order to watch the TV news. The downward slide of Fair Rule and Arthur Fried dominated the entire night. On every channel, from one broadcast to the next, one question recurred: why was Fried staying out of the public eye?

  Fried had not given a single interview since the allegations of his party’s support for racists and his company’s tax avoidance had come out.

  ‘Fried has long been considered a skilful politician and media strategist, but now he looks more like a coward or lightweight,’ observed the host of a Channel Four current affairs programme.

  Lia believed Mari would be pleased but didn’t ring her. She wanted to focus on her big new family at the Twineham Green Caravan Site.

  41

  The breakdown came during the night, a little after one o’clock.

  Lia had not been able to sleep at all. She had decided to try to get through without sleeping pills. She had stayed quietly in her bed, listening to the sounds of the other women sleeping in the camper van. Light snoring, breathing, rolling over. The air was stuffy – the ventilation was not nearly sufficient for seven sleepers.

  Lia’s upper body clenched. It was as if an enormous steel beam had fallen on her. Eventually she couldn’t stand the pressure in her chest and throat any more.

  She had to get out, into the fresh air.

  She climbed out of bed, feeling her way to the door and opening it. The night was black.

  The campsite lights had been turned off. The moon was dark. Lia could only just see where she was stepping.

  She took a few paces, but then realised she had left the door open. She turned to close it, but suddenly she could not move.