Dead on Arrival

by Patricia Hall

  “I know, I know,” Longley said heavily. “It won’t do a right lot of good for race relations either. We’re working on it flat out, don’t you fret.”

  “You don’t think it’s a race attack, do you?” Fisher asked, horrified.

  “We don’t know what it was,” Longley said. “Michael Thackeray’s not got a lot to go on just yet.”

  “Up to the job, is he?” Wright asked sharply. “I saw him coming out of your HQ the other day looking like he’d been dragged through a hedge arse over tip. It’s a sensitive case, this, whichever way you look at it, after all that publicity about the palace of culture, or whatever you call it.”

  “He’s fine,” said Longley with more conviction than he felt. “We’re expecting developments.”

  “Got quite pally with Imran over the culture centre discussions, didn’t you, Jack?” Wright asked. “You should be a step ahead on what made him tick. Must be a bloody millionaire, by now, mustn’t he? You have to admit those beggars know how to coin it when they’ve a mind.”

  “Trevor Dale fell on his feet, an’all,when he got hitched in with that lot, didn’t he?” Womersley asked no-one in particular. “He’d have gone bust by now if the Hussain’s hadn’t bailed him out.”

  “They don’t take prisoners neither,” Wright said. “I had a friend in the haulage business. Not any more. Dale and Hussain’ve pretty well wiped him out. Cut throat, it is.”

  “That’s just what I was going to say,” Womersley said, half hearing what Wright had said. “They should never have got rid of the death penalty. Stands to reason. The Muslims don’t bloody hesitate, do they? Off wi’their heads in Saudi, chop chop. That’d soon bring the little beggars back into line.”

  “Aye, well, I just enforce the law, I don’t make it,” Longley said evasively.

  “Mind you, it could be some Paki feud, this, couldn’t it?” Wright offered brightly. “Nowt to do with race at all. He was shot, wasn’t he? That’s what it says in tonight’s Gazette. Guns, drugs, you don’t know what the beggars are into these days, do you?” Longley shook his head and got to his feet.

  “You know I can’t discuss the details, lads,” he said. “Come on. It’s time we got upstairs to this meeting. Though where we can get to now with Imran Hussain dead I don’t know. I dare say the cultural centre’s died with him. I can’t think of anyone else who’s likely to take it on, can you?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Laura cruised north slowly on the M20, refusing to be intimidated by the heavy lorries tail-gating behind her before they swung out lethally close to her off-side to overtake with a blast of disturbed air which swung the little red Peugeot towards the hard shoulder. Ahmed Barre was in the passenger seat beside her gazing intently at a heavy watch with accessories on his left wrist and referring every now and again to a piece of crumpled paper on his lap.

  “Can you really be so sure?” Laura asked doubtfully, not for the first time. The boy glanced at her with contempt in his dark eyes.

  “I know about navigation,” he said. “I studied it. And I never fell asleep once after we came out of the tunnel. I did sleep during the hot times but I woke up again. I was OK because I could breathe. I told you. The only thing I can’t be sure of is how fast we were travelling. But if you do the same speed as these lorries are doing we should get close.”

  Laura gave a tiny shrug and put her foot down on the accelerator as an expanse of relatively empty motorway opened up in front of her. Ahmed had told her a great deal, and one part of her mind still refused to believe the horrors he had described.

  Ahmed Barre was a thin boy, not as tall as his brother, but with the same narrow face she had instantly recognised when she saw him again at his mother’s flat. But the dark intelligent eyes were more deeply set than she remembered from her brief glimpse of him on the Docklands railway. He barely looked his nineteen years, and he had been as carefree as a young boy the night she had first seen him. Now the taut, unsmiling face could have been that of a much older man and the paper he held shook slightly in his long slim fingers.

  “If you don’t give evidence they’ll never convict the men who murdered your brother,” Laura had said, when they had taken refuge earlier that afternoon in a steamy cafe in Stoke Newington not far from the hotel where she was staying.

  “And if I do, they will arrest me and lock me up in that place they have for asylum seekers,” Ahmed Barre said, his English fluent, but slow and precise like his mother’s. “They lock you up for months, years sometimes. My brother told me about that place before…” He hesitated, swallowed hard and then went on. “Before he was killed.”

  Until then their conversation over cups of dark tea which were now stone cold had been circular and unproductive. Ahmed had refused point blank to contemplate going to the police.

  “They keep you there,” he said, a note of desperation in his voice. “I can’t do that. My mother and Djamilla need me more than ever now.”

  “But you’re not safe with them,” Laura said. “It’s not only the police who are looking for you, is it? That gang of yobs could come back at any time.”

  “I’m good at hiding,” Ahmed said sombrely. “I was hiding for months at home before I got to my uncle’s house and he gave me the money to get away. There you didn’t just get arrested if you made a mistake, you got shot - or worse. Like my father.”

  “But you need to claim asylum. You’ve obviously got a strong case. If you keep on running the chances are they’ll find you in the end and then they’ll most likely deport you. You’ll never get permission to stay in England.”

  “I don’t want to stay in England,” Ahmed had said fiercely, his eyes suddenly alight. “I never wanted to stay in England. I want to go to Canada. I have an uncle and cousins there. And that’s what they said would be possible, the people who arranged my passport and tickets. I was just to stop off here to see my mother and then fly to Montreal. I don’t want to live in your dreadful, unwelcoming little country at all. Look.” He reached in a pocket of his jacket and pulled out a crumpled airline ticket, and showed her the smudged details, now days out of date.

  “You see? I was to go, and work, and then send for my mother and the others. But I missed the flight. If it hadn’t been for what happened, I would be there now with my uncle in Canada.”

  He hesitated again and glanced away, overcome by a sudden trembling. Laura reached out and touched his arm, feeling its wiry thinness through his shirt-sleeve.

  “What happened?” she asked. “What do you mean?”

  “You won’t believe me,” he said in little more than a whisper. “No-one would believe me.”

  Laura had suddenly felt cold although the cafe was crowded and overheated, the windows onto the street misted over with an acrid combination of steam and smoke from cigarettes and vigorously frying hamburgers.

  “Tell me,” she said. She pulled her tape-recorder out of her bag and switched it on. “Do you mind?” she asked. Ahmed shook his head.

  “Record it,” he said in a voice choked with emotion. “Someone should. Though I don’t know where to begin.”

  “Begin at the beginning,” Laura said. “When you left Somalia.”

  The boy turned his teaspoon over and over between his fingers and his eyes took on a distant look, as if he could see straight back to the dusty war-torn streets of his homeland on Africa’s eastern horn.

  “My uncle stayed on the right side in the civil war,” he said. “Not like my father. I can remember the Americans coming and then they went away again, and things got worse. I was at school when my father first disappeared. My school was closed, and the university. There was nothing there for me. My mother told me it was wise to disappear myself, because I was regarded as a supporter of my father, at least until things calmed down. But they never calmed down.

  “At first I hid close to home. But when my father’s body was returned, I eventually got to another uncle’s house, a little way out of Mogadishu and he arranged for me to le
ave the country. I travelled overland in a lorry to Kenya and then by air from Nairobi to Rome. My uncle took care of all the tickets, the false passport, the papers, everything. And my family in Montreal was expecting me. There were no problems. From Rome I flew to Brussels and from there I was told it was not wise to fly into England. I had to take a secret route to London. They would be suspicious of me when I came in at the airport, they said, but would not worry too much about my papers when I was flying out. Then when I had seen my family, I could fly on to Canada.”

  “Your uncle arranged all this?” Laura asked, half fascinated and half horrified by the ease with which the boy seemed to have travelled illegally half way round the world.

  “He is a powerful man,” Ahmed said simply. But not powerful enough to protect the boy in his own country, Laura thought to herself. Or maybe just not willing.

  “So how were you to get into England?” she asked.

  “I went to a man in Brussels and he took me by car to a big park for international lorries. I am not sure what you call them: the kind with big boxes they can put on ships. You know what I mean?”

  “A container lorry?” Laura asked, quickly sketching what looked roughly the right shape on a page of her diary.

  “Yes, yes,” Ahmed said. “Like that. Made of metal. With big locks on the back. All closed up tight.”

  “You were to travel inside a container?” It was such a claustrophobic proposition that Laura shuddered.

  “Inside, yes. There were about twenty of us. Some from Pakistan, some from Turkey. And me. It was hard to talk to the others because they did not speak much English. A little Arabic, some of them.”

  “All men?” Laura asked.

  “All men and two boys, about thirteen or fourteen. They told us it would take about twelve hours to get to London, some of it on the train in the Channel Tunnel. We were not to worry about that. It was quite safe.”

  “This container, it was empty?”

  “No, not empty. It was full of boxes, big boxes with washing machines inside. They made a narrow passage for us to the back of the container and there was a space. Just room for us all to sit, not enough to lie down, but they said it would be a quick journey. Not long. So we got in and settled down. Most people had a little to drink. No food. And they gave us a bucket for, you know, personal needs. When we were all in they closed up the gap with boxes and closed the doors. It was quite dark then, and very soon we felt the lorry start up and we began to move. We went for three, four hours. It was very hot inside, and soon everyone drank the coke and water they had brought. Then we stopped.”

  Ahmed stopped too and Laura felt a sick sensation develop in the pit of her stomach. She could tell by now that this dangerous journey must have ended in disaster.

  “Take your time,” she said, slaking her own dry mouth with a sip of strong, cold tea.

  “I had found a space to lie where some of the boxes had not been packed straight. There was a sort of shelf and I could stretch out there above the others. Just above my head I could see a tiny point of light and I scrambled up higher so that I could see my watch and find out the time. My father gave me this when I was younger and I said I wanted to be a pilot.”

  He showed her the elaborate chronometer and compass he wore on his wrist with something of a small boy’s pride in the dark eyes and a faint smile which transformed his face.

  “There was a tiny crack in the metal of the container,” he said. “It was four in the morning when we stopped. The light was yellow, from electric lights outside, not the sun. As we stayed there the light changed colour as the daylight came outside. First it was grey and then it was gold as the sun rose. Just a tiny beam came through the crack. Light and enough space to suck in a little fresh air. It saved my life.”

  Laura tried to imagine what it must have been like for twenty men and boys crammed into that tiny space in pitch darkness and how long it was before they began to suffer, first from thirst and then from panic.

  “How long?” she asked, her own mouth dry again.

  “Three days,” Ahmed said. “When the lorry stopped we heard the engine turned off and the door slam and the driver got out. We never heard anything more for a long time. It was quite silent outside.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Two weeks,” Ahmed said.

  “There was a strike in France around that time. They stopped the ferries and the tunnel traffic for several days. You must have been caught by that,” Laura said. “There were huge queues of lorries waiting to cross the Channel. I remember seeing it on television.”

  “It seemed to go on for ever,” Ahmed said. “At first the men down below me kept their spirits up, talking and joking. But gradually they stopped. The inside of the container got hotter and hotter and people began moaning for water. Because of the crack in the metal I could suck in some air, but I couldn’t keep cool. I lay there, with sweat running off me for what seemed like hours, the metal of the side of the container too hot to touch. When night came again it became a little cooler and then I think I slept or became unconscious. I don’t know.

  “When I woke it was daylight outside again but by then, below me, there was nothing but a moan or a groan and I think most people were unconscious by then, or already dead. I watched the hands of my watch go round and round and round and still no-one came, and nothing moved outside. When they were less hot I tried to bang on the walls to get attention, but I was lying awkwardly and anyway I was becoming very weak in the heat and evidently no-one heard me.”

  “Three days?” Laura said appalled.

  “Three nights and three days of the sun and heat. Then someone came and the lorry engine started again and almost immediately we started to move. I had finished all my water. I had licked the sweat off my arms. I had even pissed in my water bottle and drunk that. And when the lorry began to move again and that forced a little more air though my holy crack, that revived me slightly. There was a lot of movement outside and eventually I realised we were on the train and going through the Channel Tunnel, which is what they had told us would happen. I could feel the pressure on my ears - like flying - and the noise of the train.”

  “And the others?”

  “There was nothing. Just silence. And a terrible smell. I knew I was alone then.”

  “And that’s when you began to track the course of the lorry?”

  “When we came off the train and began to travel on the road again, I timed it and kept a note of the direction it took for almost two hours,” he said.

  “Until you stopped?”

  “Until we stopped and I heard someone open up the doors and voices….I was going to shout out in relief that I had survived and then I heard someone scream about the smell - the stink - and how could they be expected to clear this garbage out without masks or something and I realised that it was not a good thing to be alive in that situation. So I kept very very quiet as they began to move the boxes and drag out the bodies…”

  Laura swallowed hard and stared at her empty tea-cup. She could no longer trust herself to meet Ahmed’s hurt and accusing eyes.

  “You got out?” she said.

  “I waited until they had gone off with some of the others and then I wriggled down and out of the container. They had parked close to a sort of shed and I ran to hide behind it. They took the bodies out one by one and dumped them.”

  “Dumped them?” Laura said, horrified by the casual brutality the word conjured up.

  “We were in some sort of rubbish tip. There are tips like that outside Mogadishu - mountains of rubbish where people hunt for anything they can reclaim. But here it was all tipped down a great slope. They threw the bodies down and then a man started up a big machine - a sort of scoop, and lifted rubbish on the top of the bodies. When the lorry finally went away I looked for my friends, but there was nothing to be seen. Just rubbish, and flies and big white sea birds circling overhead. I could do nothing. I just hoped that they were all dead.”

  Laura had looked a
t Ahmed in appalled silence for a long time before she could bring herself to speak.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice husky. “That is the most awful thing I think I have ever heard.” She had got up abruptly and fetched them both another cup of the strong sweet cafe tea and drained hers before she could gather her scattered thought into any sort of coherence. But to her surprise, Ahmed had not finished.

  “I think I can find the place,” he had said quietly.

  “Show me,” she had said.

  Driven by a fierce determination, she had taken him through East London to the Dartford Tunnel and then south to the entrance to the Chunnel in Folkestone, before turning north again so that he could follow the directions he had scribbled on part of a washing machine label in the near darkness of the container as it had ground its way up the A20 towards London a fortnight before. She had barely been able to believe that his navigation system could have worked but as they went north he became more cheerful as he noted the congruence between his notes and the route of the motorway.

  “I knew it would work,” he said as they slowed slightly as the traffic built up around Maidstone. “Now soon we should turn left, and then right and then left.” They were approaching the junction which led north east to the M2, the old Dover road, and as his instruction began to coincide with junctions she finally began to believe that he had got it right.

  “Sea birds?” she said. “You mean sea-gulls. Like this?” She made what she thought approximated to the insistent shriek of a sea-gull and for the first time on the entire journey the boy at her side laughed and looked young again.

  “Yes, yes, sea-gulls,” he said. “Lots of sea-gulls.”

  “They come inland when there’s a storm,” she said.

  “No storm. It was hot and sunny.”

  “So near the sea then?”

  “I could see water, flat water, like a big river or a lake. A right turn next,” he directed her quickly. “Then three minutes and a left.” To their right she could see the old port of Rochester and ahead the land fell away towards what she knew were the mud-flats and marshes of the Thames estuary. Sea-birds and rubbish dumps did not seem out of place here.