The Fire Baby (6 page)

And the same promise. Jobs. Pickers in the fields. An idyllic picture, laughably misplaced. Dryden scanned the horizon. Miles of empty dry peat. Thousands of acres and not a single living thing on two or four legs except the wheeling birds and a single conspicuous black cat picking its way across the ridges of a vast field. No pickers. Even at harvest time you couldn’t see them in the fields. They shuffled along in the shade of the picking machines. An ambling production line. Then they disappeared inside the sheds for the rest of the summer. Sorting, cleaning, and packing, but always hidden.

He knew that several police forces were tracking the illegal trade. ‘Operation Sardine’, as it was called, had been coordinated by East Cambridgeshire and the East and West Midlands forces with help from Norfolk and Suffolk. He’d been given a briefing in Coventry at the regional crime squad’s HQ by the detective leading the operation. Dryden had been on several raids but little of substance had been found so far. So he’d started to made his own enquiries, which was why he was going to try his luck at Wilkinson’s celery plant.

‘Appointment’s at six o’clock,’ said Dryden, checking his watch.

Humph grunted and pressed the tape button on the dashboard. All the cabbie’s copious spare time was devoted to taped language courses. Each Christmas he would take a holiday in the country of choice, neatly avoiding the necessity to endure the festive season alone. Greek this year, Polish
last year. Only France was taboo. He and his ex-wife had gone there for their honeymoon. That was before she’d run off with the postman. Humph had seen him once, loitering outside the divorce courts in London. He’d been balding, with sloping shoulders and a paunch and Humph’s daughters had held his hands with, he judged, obvious distaste. So not France.

On the tape Andreas, his imaginary friend from Thessa-loniki, asked him the time. Humph repeated the question and gave an answer in what he understood to be elegant Greek.

Then he asked Dryden a question, a rare enough occurrence in itself. ‘Why Wilkinson’s?’

It was a processing and packaging plant for celery, one of several small-time businesses which had sprung up on the Black Fen. They employed a silent workforce several thousand strong. The big operators, like Shropshire’s outside Ely, had multi-million pound premises and a workforce recruited from agricultural colleges across Europe. To compete, places like Wilkinson’s had to cut corners. That meant cheap labour and safety regulations stretched to breaking point.

‘Illegal immigrants,’ said Dryden, reaching into his pocket and extracting two-thirds of a miniature pork pie gently dusted with fluff. Humph was steering using his elbows as he tore the cellophane off a diet sandwich. He loved diet sandwiches: hundreds of them. ‘Who says?’

Dryden was guessing. He’d recognized long ago that his interest in the people smugglers went beyond a story. Claustrophobia was one of the many things that terrified him. The thought of being entombed in a container lorry was a cliché of hell, but no less real for that.

He flipped down the sun-shade as the car turned due west on the old road by the Forty Foot Drain – a drove known
with affection by the locals as the Fen Motorway. A large reflective sign shouted: 5 DEAD, 18 INJURED in the last TWO years. Dryden considered briefly the chilling horror behind those bald statistics: at least three of those killed had drowned in their cars.

The sun was setting on the razor-sharp edge of the horizon and cutting its throat as it slid out of sight. Dryden felt his spirits rise; a sure sign something was about to go horribly wrong.

To the south a farmstead stood about a mile back from the road. The only way to get to it by car was over a small private cast-iron bridge across the Forty Foot Drain. A wind pump on the roof span in the evening breeze. It was the kind of place he and Laura had talked about the last time they’d talked at all. Since then it had been four years of monologue. He’d talked for both of them as she lay in her coma. Sometimes he would imagine her part of the conversation, and when the messages started he would say the words out loud, trying to recall the exact inflection of her voice, the subtle combination of a Neapolitan childhood and a north London adolescence.

The last time they’d talked, really talked, they’d been on their favourite walk, along the bank-top by Little Ouse, past the old Victorian grain silos at Sedge Fen, then over the iron bridge to the north side and the wide desolation of Adventurer’s Fen. It had been the day before the crash in Harrimere Drain. It was their spot, the place they’d daydream about most. But there were only two houses – two pathetic brick semis built for farm workers in the 1920s. Both were criss-crossed with cracks in the brickwork, the peat beneath their flimsy foundations shrinking as the new electrical fen-land pumps sucked the moisture out of the peat below. Tiles slipped from the roof as the houses tipped forwards into the
fen, the window frames twisting and splintering with the movement.

Mist that day. A swirling soup of it which opened up for half a mile and then descended like a cotton-wool blindfold. They’d stood in the solid whiteness of the day and held each other close.

‘A house,’ said Dryden. ‘We should decide. Move out of London and start a family.’ He kissed her hair but she hadn’t answered, and in the long silence a crow had called from the rooftop of one of the crumbling cottages.

He wanted to walk on, towards Adventurer’s Wood, but she pulled him back. Something was wrong. He knew it then, and he knew it now. But what? A house and a family were what they wanted, but only after: after she’d done one last series of
Clyde Circus
, after he’d done one more year at the
News.
After – the word he hated most now, after Harrimere Drain.

What did he doubt in those final hours they were together? Her love? Commitment? Whatever it was, it had disfigured that last memory, possibly for ever.

It wasn’t as if money was a barrier to fulfilling their dream. One of the many aunts from Campania who had emigrated with Laura’s parents to help run the family restaurant in north London had left her a nest-egg: £80,000. It was all they needed out on the fen. It sat in Laura’s trust account, getting fatter, and it sat there still, administered by the solicitors and her parents. None of Laura’s family had mentioned the bequest since shortly after the accident, an act of faith which signalled their belief that one day he and Laura would buy the house, start the family, and begin again.

Humph flipped open the glove compartment and fished out two bottles of vodka. He collected miniatures on runs to Stansted Airport. Some of his regulars gave them as tips. He handed one to Dryden, sensing that his friend was
descending into a rare bout of depression. Since Laura’s accident they had maintained an almost constant mood characterized by either irrational exuberance or mutual indifference.

‘Cheers,’ said Humph, repeating a few random phrases in Greek.

They’d reached Manea. At least that’s what the sign said, otherwise you wouldn’t know. It was the archetypal Fen town. Most of the houses lined the sinuous main street with back garden views that stretched twenty miles to the horizon. Manea had a claim to fame, a railway station. Unfortunately it was three miles outside town.

Wilkinson’s stood on the edge of Manea. A triple set of mammoth MFI-style blocks with a windswept car park full of the kind of cars which spend half their life up on bricks, and the other half breaking the speed limit. Most of the workforce, which had to support a twenty-four-hour production line, were picked up by the company coach on bleak street corners in the middle of the night.

Humph swung the cab in off the road and met an articulated lorry coming out. The stove pipe belched black exhaust as the driver swung the wheel with his forearms so that he could roll a cigarette and light up before he hit the road. He wore the sort of vest which only lorry drivers can, the colour of dirty snow with ash highlights.

They parked under a sign which said: Wilkinson’s Celery Ltd. UK Headquarters. Below that another sign hung from one hinge: Research Department.

The staircase was steel and ran in a zig-zag tower up the outside of the main block. At the top was a door with no handle but an entryphone, so he pressed the button and after ten seconds of crackle he heard the lock turn automatically. He pushed the door open and walked down a long neon-lit
corridor to another single door, which was half glazed with milky-white glass reinforced with chicken wire. There was a strong smell of disinfectant and his shoes stuck to the featureless cream lino.

He knocked once and walked in before anyone could stop him. A man in a shabby suit stood up from the only desk. He was a bit like a stick of celery himself. About six feet six, with white hair and narrow shoulders. ‘Mr Dryden? Ashley Wilkinson. Don’t think I can help you any more than I did on the phone. But sit down.’

Behind his desk was a plate-glass window, a good ten feet long and five feet high, looking down on to the shop floor. The light, entirely artificial, had the flat depressing effect usually reserved for deserted seaside aquaria. Dryden expected to see a bored shark cruising over the three identical production lines. On the conveyor belts salad crops, a livid lichen green, shuffled forward between lines of workers in bleach-white overalls.

Meat-eaters’ hell
, thought Dryden.

It was the celery shed. Tractors brought the crop in off the fields and dumped it down chutes at the far end from Ashley Wilkinson’s office where it tumbled on to conveyor belts. By the time it got to the other end it was cleaned, trimmed, and neatly packaged. Radio I blared from a crackly tannoy system and the workers, each with a white plastic hairnet, moved with that odd combination of listlessness and physical economy born of the production line.

Dryden decided to be nice, a little-used tactic in his repertoire, and one invariably unsuccessful. But the blood-red sunset had lit up his mood. ‘I understand West Midlands Police have been making enquiries. Illegal immigrants. I’m told two men have been arrested and removed to the Home Office detention centre outside Cambridge…’ Dryden
flicked open his notebook until he reached a page which contained an illegible shorthand note of three tips for the weekend’s race meeting at Newmarket. ‘Two West Africans I understand. Sierra Leone.’

Wilkinson didn’t look wildly interested in the geography of the Dark Continent.

‘Sub judice,’ said Wilkinson. This, Dryden recalled, was ‘fuck off’ in Latin.

‘This is all for my background, Mr Wilkinson. No names.’ Dryden shut his notebook, slipped a large rubber band round it, and lobbed it on to Wilkinson’s desk.

‘Your numbers are wrong. They had papers. There’s no suggestion we knew they’d come through Felixstowe. We’ll check the references next time,’ said Wilkinson.

Dryden noted the disguised admission. ‘Where were they living?’

‘Police never found out. Out there somewhere – plenty of places.’

‘Good workers?’

‘Fine. Darn sight better than the locals.’ Wilkinson looked down through the plate glass at his workforce. ‘Lazy bastards, most of ’em.’ British management at its motivational best, thought Dryden, as he produced another miniature pork pie from his pocket and popped it, whole, into his mouth.

Outside, the musical wallpaper was interrupted as a voice cut in: ‘Mr Wilkinson to the loading bay. Mr Wilkinson to the loading bay.’

‘I’ll show you out.’ Dryden noted relief in the voice, and made a silent bet with himself that the call had been pre-arranged to cut short his visit.

‘Ever been done before for employing illegal immigrants?’

But Wilkinson was already hitting numbers on a mobile phone. Interview over.

A door led out of the office to an observation balcony, from which a stairway dropped down to the shopfloor. They made their way between the production lines, watched by every worker in the shed. In a whites-only fastness like the Fens, the workforce looked like an outpost of the Notting Hill Carnival. Three women working together on the first line were black. Almost the entire second line was ethnic Chinese. ‘Cheap labour,’ thought Dryden. But he said: ‘Mind if I have a chat with one of the workers?’

Wilkinson hesitated. Dryden decided to push his luck: ‘I could always just hang around by the gate and catch them on the way home.’

‘This is Jimmy Kabazo,’ said Wilkinson, leading him over to a half-partitioned office at the side of one of the production lines. ‘He’s the day-shift foreman. Talk to him, if you like. He’ll show you out too.’

Jimmy was black. Night black. Dryden guessed he was Nigerian.

‘Follow me, sir,’ he said, the voice pitched high and singsong. Jimmy was short and wiry with tight-curled hair and the kind of smile that could hide any emotion. He wore the regulation Wilkinson’s white overalls with a laminated badge: ‘Foreman’.

Dryden told him what he’d heard about the police raid. The smile never flickered: ‘Yeah. Bad news for the rest of us.’

‘Police?’

Jimmy nodded, still beaming. ‘They bin round. Yeah. Times. Everyone upset now. We’re legal. We got the papers. They left a poster – you want to see it?’

‘Why not?’ said Dryden, and followed Jimmy down the production line and into a small staffroom. There was the girlie calendar, of course, with Miss June’s thighs spread to reveal an anatomical level of detail. Some dried-out tea-bags
stained the worktop while a spoon stuck up out of a tin of powdered milk. On the table the
Mirror
was open at the racing pages.

Kabazo closed the door to reveal the police poster.

£500 REWARD

Police at Ely and Peterborough are investigating the illegal entry into the United Kingdom of immigrants lacking correct documentation. Several lines of enquiry are ongoing and arrests are imminent. A reward of £500 is offered for any information leading to further arrests and conviction of any person involved in the organization or execution of such activity. Contact may be made via the dedicated freephone hotline number below or by e-mail. All information will be treated in the strictest confidence. Immunity from prosecution will be considered in exceptional circumstances.