by Helen Fields
‘He might have, if he’d thought the alternative was having his sister taken away,’ Jean-Paul said, tossing the gauze into a skip and setting his free hands on his hips.
‘I wasn’t prepared to do that.’
‘Yeah, well lucky for you, you’re not the person who’s going to have to explain to Malcolm Reilly’s parents how he died. Did you go soft in Scotland?’
‘Maybe I just grew up a bit,’ Callanach said quietly, wondering where Ava was at that moment, part of him wishing he could have been with her to give the news to Malcolm Reilly’s family, and the other part equally glad he wasn’t.
Chapter Seven
Bart woke up feeling sick, rolling dramatically to his left and smashing his face against the wall. Metal screeched and the world shifted around him, tilting forwards then back, until he lurched for the ring in the centre of the floor and held tight. The feeling of movement wasn’t new. His world had been unstable since he’d first awoken, but this was something different. Almost – although he told himself it was the lack of fresh water and decent food making him delusional – like flying.
The box he was trapped in shifted again, and this time there was a different noise. Whistling, a gust, then a spinning turn. He gripped his stomach, wishing it would stop. It was a desperate thing to have become resigned to dying alone in what amounted to little more than a cell. The air stank from the bucket he’d had no choice but to fill, avoiding the overflow where it had tipped twice during the journey. Despite turning off the electric lamp for increasingly lengthy periods whenever his sanity could stand it, the battery was fading now. Alone in the dark, cold and starving, at least fear had deserted him too. There was nothing with him in the dark that could hurt him more than his own imagination, and he had conquered that. For the briefest of periods he had managed to meditate, sitting upright, blanket wrapped around his stiff body, breathing in a rhythm with his heartbeat, imagining sitting on a beach at sunset, listening to the waves. Just the waves. Letting nothing else in. It was a neat trick when you learned to do it well. Having an ex-girlfriend who’d been training to become a yoga instructor had helped. The effects just didn’t last very long.
His ribcage protested as a huge crash beneath his prone body reverberated through him. Bart realised the sensation of flying hadn’t been a product of his nutritionally starved mind. Whatever container he was in had been moving through the air. No more, though. All movement, the sense of rocking, had ceased. New noises invaded his space, muffled and distant, but there were definitely voices blended in with the mechanical din beyond his walls.
Bart stood up, listened, strode towards a wall and took a deep breath. Hammering on the wall he began to shout. He bolstered the noise of his fists with one foot. When that was bloody and raw, he used a knee instead. Nothing. No response. Letting his fists rest – by now his hands resembled a cage fighter’s – he took the strain with his forehead. Unfamiliar with the art of giving a Glaswegian kiss, Bart didn’t let himself be deterred. He headbutted the wall as if his life depended on it, mainly because by then he’d realised that it did. He would die inside that box if something didn’t happen soon. Slamming his forehead into the wall three, four, five times, he went reeling backwards, losing his balance and ending up back on the floor. On his knees, he went for the wall again. The electric lantern finally gave up the ghost. In the perfect dark he hammered, shouting, yelling, screaming, until his voice was nothing more than a whisper. Then an engine started up and everything started moving again. Bart lay down and let defeat shrivel him into submission.
It was impossible to know how long the journey had taken. Bart had either slept or passed out. His head was thumping and there was blood crusted on his forehead and down his cheeks. The memory was vague, but at some point his body had assumed control of his brain and apparently tried to break through the walls. He was paying for it now. Bart tried to stand and failed.
From the far end of his prison box came the squeal of metal then something else, and for a moment he couldn’t identify the change. The quality of the blackness changed. Not dramatically. No one switched on a light, but there was a new duskiness to the dark, shifting from black to the deepest of greys. Particles of light were invading his atmosphere. He’d assumed the space was completely sealed. Not so. Crawling on hands and knees, he made for the wall closest to the noise.
‘Open it up,’ a man shouted. Someone answered with an accent Bart recognised as French even if he couldn’t speak the language.
He stared at the walls, as if by concentrating hard enough he would be able to see the faces that lay beyond. Were these his rescuers? His assailants? Raising one bruised and shaking hand, he paused before knocking. He had no idea how long he’d been trapped inside – days, he assumed – but already his prison felt safer than the unknown beyond. In the outside world he’d been kidnapped and removed from everything and everyone he loved. He had no idea why or by whom. He’d never expected to fall victim to such evil. Now it was all he could think about. Every face he saw would be a mask, every word a lie. He would never be able to trust anyone again.
A scraping-crunching came from one upper corner of the cell before Bart found his courage. He backed away. The first clear light pierced the gloom to reveal a scene that had him cringing with embarrassment in spite of the horrors he’d endured. A blast of fresh air only served to intensify the stench of human waste that Bart had become used to, but now he could see it. The bucket he’d been using had overflowed with the journey and the floor was awash. He held his filthy hands in front of his face. Now he could smell himself, too, and felt a desperate urge to vomit as the end of his prison was crowbarred away to the sound of ripping wood. Beyond the opening it was too bright for his eyes to focus.
‘Help me,’ he whispered.
‘Pick him up,’ a man said. Heavy boots crossed the wooden cell. Two men took an arm each in gloved hands, dragging him out into the daylight.
Bart breathed deeply, his eyes closed, feeling weak sunlight on his face and doing his best to muster some strength in his legs. His eyes were taking their time adjusting to the brightness. After a few steps, the men lowered him to the ground and he sank gratefully to his knees. An open bottle was thrust into his hands. He sniffed it, registered nothing but cold water, and swallowed the bottle in one go. A car park appeared in blurred patches. A few vans, gravel, brown grass around the edges, no buildings in sight – nothing that gave him any indication where he was. Behind him, on the back of a massive lorry, was a cargo container. He blinked, made an effort to keep down the water, and rubbed his sleeve over his eyes. Inside the container was a thick-walled wooden cell, the end wall prised off. A second bottle of water was handed to him.
‘Slowly,’ a man said. ‘Then eat.’ A loaf of bread in a tatty brown paper bag was thrown down to him. The tone and the treatment were all the confirmation needed of his status. His vision was clear now, as was his sense of smell. He stank. Not like he imagined a human who’d been incarcerated would, but like an animal. All filth and sweat, the sort of smell found in farms and abattoirs. The men around him seemed not to notice. They weren’t surprised by the state of him. Which meant they’d done it before.
He grabbed the bread, which looked like a gourmet offering compared to the box of stale snacks that had been left in the container for him. Even so, he’d consumed it all early in the journey and been left desperate for more. Once you realised what true hunger was, seizing food no matter what position you were in was more instinct than choice. As he ate, men wandered into his former home with buckets. The sound of sloshing water hit the floor and streams of filth ran out. Another brought several heavy-duty plastic cartons from the back of a van, with boxes of what must have been food supplies, similar to those he’d found.
‘I can’t go back in there,’ he told the man closest to him through a mouthful of bread. ‘Can’t do it.’
The man ignored him, and barked orders to others, tapping on his watch. Faster movement followed, guns were drawn
and men approached the backs of two vans.
‘Head down,’ Bart was ordered. When his reaction time wasn’t fast enough, he was assisted with a slap to the back of his scalp.
He kept his head angled down, but his eyes up. The van doors opened slowly. The men reached in, pulling out the occupants of the vehicles. One by one, women appeared, hands tied, moving slowly, blinking at the sudden change in environment. Their faces were dirty and their clothes shabby, but they weren’t in the same dreadful state as Bart. Not yet, but then they were ushered towards the container. One woman began to cry, and it spread through them like a virus, the women either side succumbing to tears, another going straight into a wailing sound as if she had only been waiting for a prompt. Bart kept count. Four women from one van, five more from another. He hoped for their sakes that they were given several more buckets for the journey.
One woman fell to her knees, then let herself go to the floor face first, sobbing, begging in the universal language of terror and desperation. A guard gave her an order. She didn’t move. That earned her a kick. She reached out for the man’s ankle, grabbing it, pulling herself towards his feet. He leaned down, snatching a bunch of her already matted hair, wrenching her face upwards to look into his eyes. He spat, waved the gun in her face. She sobbed some more.
Bart wanted to say something. In the dim recesses of his mind he imagined a braver man, a stronger male specimen who had not been so broken by his ordeal, springing up, wrestling a gun from one of the men, shooting off a couple of bullets to show he meant business, before taking command of the situation and freeing them all. What he did was let his face fall to the dirt. What he didn’t see couldn’t hurt him. Instead, he heard all he needed. In spite of the constant mechanical noise of the previous days – he wasn’t quite sure of the time period – his ears were as alert as ever. He heard another kick, that soft whoosh of air as foot contacted stomach. More crying. Laughter. Another man’s footfall, heavy, slow, deliberate. Then the unmistakable sound of a zip being lowered. Liquid hitting skin in a constant stream. The woman let out a howl that was end-game hopelessness. The reduction to nothing more than disposable goods was complete. As Bart opened his eyes, the woman was crawling away through the dirt, following the others into the black hole that he’d just escaped. The men picked up the wooden end wall of the cell, took nails from their pockets, gathered hammers, and began to seal it up. The hammering from the outside was matched blow for blow by the sound of fists hitting the inside of the wood. Bart had time to wonder if the men had bothered to replace the batteries inside the lamp. As pathetic as it was, that tiny spark had been everything to him in the endless dark.
He looked past the man standing over him.
‘I need to pee,’ he said. ‘Where do I go?’ The bottles of water had run through him like fresh rain off dried mud.
The man pointed at the ground where Bart sat. He was going nowhere. If he needed to piss, it was right there or not at all. He did what he needed, watching as the enormous container door was swung shut. A wooden cell within a metal prison. Enough noise externally that no one would ever be heard within. He wished vaguely that he hadn’t bothered ripping his vocal chords to shreds for nothing. With one hand taking care of business, he used the other to dip into the rear pocket of his jeans, clutching his most treasured possession, loath to sacrifice it, but who knew where he might end up next? If this was his only chance to leave a note, a record of his passing, then he had no choice. He waited until all eyes were elsewhere, then dropped the photo of his father behind him in the dirt as he zipped up his jeans.
Ten minutes later and the container was gone, driven away on the back of a lorry by three of the men. Two others climbed into the unmarked white vans from which the women had disembarked, leaving one final van and a car. The women were obviously being trafficked, presumably for sexual exploitation or into slavery. What he had no understanding about whatsoever was why he was there. He figured he would find out soon enough, and the answer wasn’t going to be one he wanted to hear. So he just didn’t ask. He wondered what the men thought of him, on his knees between a puddle of his own urine and a stream of someone else’s, not even asking for his freedom. Not begging, not trying to run. Just doing nothing. His life had gone from hopes and dreams to a nightmare in such a short timeframe that his head was spinning with it. Just survive for the next five minutes, he thought. After that, I’ll worry about another five. If I make it to tonight, I’ll worry about the morning. The bread sat in a hard lump in his stomach. He would comply. There was no point annoying his captors. He would watch and learn. Information, he heard his father say inside his head. You can’t run if you don’t know where you’re running to. You can’t fight if you don’t know your enemy’s strengths. And you can’t do anything at all dehydrated and starving. Eat and drink whatever they offer, Bart told himself. Sleep when it’s safe. Don’t hope. Plan.
‘Car,’ one of the men said. ‘Now.’
Bart stood up and stretched.
‘More water?’ he asked.
The men looked at one another, until someone shrugged and reached into the van, throwing another bottle in Bart’s direction.
‘Piss in my car and I’ll cut your dick off,’ he was warned. ‘Turn round.’
He was marched to the boot of the car and told to climb in. The floor was covered in old blankets that smelled of dog. He was given a moment to take another drink before his hands were tied behind his back.
‘I hear you bang or shout, I pull over and fucking gut you. Get in.’
Bart did as he was told. The container lorry had headed north, as far as he could tell from the position of the sun and the fact that the day was still warm with some hours of sunlight to go. The car was pointed in the other direction. It was a straightforward exchange then. Made sense. Why pay for a container if it only held goods to trade in one direction? Two or three of the men had spoken French to each other. His journey, while it had seemed endless, could only have been a couple of days. France seemed like the logical point for them to have docked in that timescale. The women had spoken a language he hadn’t recognised though. A couple of them had been very dark-skinned, but the majority looked more Eastern European. Either they’d been kidnapped or they’d thought they had found a passport to a new and better life. That was almost crueller. Paying their captors for the prospect of safe passage and finding the opposite, their families left to wonder what had happened to them and why they’d never contacted them again.
It made Bart think of his own mother. She, at least, would have called the police by now. People would be looking for him, retracing his last known steps. His friends would be plaguing social media with requests for shares and information. Somewhere, someone had to have seen something that could lead to him. The woman he’d dated twice, if meeting for coffee could be considered a date, had offered him a lift home from the restaurant. Her name had been Kitty, or maybe she’d said it was a nickname. They hadn’t progressed to surnames. That was as much as he could recall. There was no CCTV in the main restaurant dining room, but there was a camera on one of the doors to capture images of any diners who decided that paying for their meal was not a good option. Would Kitty have thought of that? Perhaps she’d worn a wig, or changed her face with makeup. Even he couldn’t quite reconstruct her in his mind.
His poor mother. She would be frantic. That was a good thing in the circumstances. She wouldn’t rest until he was found. The car started up, and he jammed his feet to keep from rolling around and hurting himself. Steady, he told himself. Don’t get injured. He tried to focus on the distance as they travelled. He tried to figure out the left and right turns, and to create a map in his mind. But it was warm, the car rocked gently, and the stinking blankets were a soft enough bed. And he was exhausted. When Bart woke up, the first thing he saw was chain-link fence.
Chapter Eight
Indrani Desai was waiting in Jean-Paul’s office – currently also Callanach’s desk space – at 7.30 a.m., wearing a traditio
nal sari and spaghetti-strap gold sandals. Jean-Paul took the seat nearest her, offering drinks that she refused and his hand that she also opted not to shake. Callanach watched Jean-Paul look at her admiringly. His old colleague had never had much of a poker face when it came to women.
‘Forgive me if it seems rude, but I try not to transfer any oils onto my own skin. Sometimes a residue of a scent can throw me off when I’m working,’ she explained.
‘You’ve been to see Malcolm Reilly’s body?’ Callanach asked.
‘I have,’ she nodded. ‘Not a normal part of my job. Aromachologists design scents for shops and supermarkets. Sometimes I work with athletes putting together aromatherapy packages for them. That was the first time I’ve worked on a dead body and even though I only saw the head uncovered it was … awful.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jean-Paul said. ‘It’s the worst part of what we do. I know it was an unusual request for you to smell his hair. Were you able to pick anything up?’
‘I was,’ Indrani confirmed. ‘He was in a sealed bag, so when the plastic was first opened I caught a strong whiff. It dissipated in minutes though. I’m afraid it wouldn’t pass a scientific test if you were looking for me to give evidence in court.’
‘At the moment we just need whatever leads we can get,’ Callanach said. ‘What was your conclusion?’
‘Myrrh. Burned near to his head. The smell was smoky and slightly impure, but myrrh itself has a very specific liquorice note to it. Earthy and rich, but with a contrasting lemon scent. Some people say they smell latex, too. It’s quite unique. I’m surprised you picked it up given all the chemical odours in the mortuary,’ she told Callanach.
‘Sorry, how did you know it was me?’ he asked.
‘The pathologist described you to me. He said you were the one with the symmetrical face.’