The Burning Girl-4 (23 page)

Hendricks said nothing.

Thorne pul ed back the blind and looked out into the street. The Golf had gone.

18 May 1986

AH and I went into town today. We just hung around real y. AH bought a bag and a couple of new tops and I got some LPs. Afterwards we got a burger and sat on a bench outside the library. A couple of lads were messing around and they were both staring. I started joking around with AH, asking her which one of us she thought they fancied. It's only the sort of thing I would have said to her before. (AH was always the one lads fancied, by the way!) She looked uncomfortable and threw her burger away, and I know I should have left it, but I was just trying to make her laugh. I told her that it was obviously true what they say about how good-looking girls always hang around with an ugly mate, and then she started to cry.

Now I feel guilty that I've upset her, but also angry because her feeling sad or guilty or whatever it is she feels seems so fucking trivial when I look into the mirror on the back of the bedroom door, and half my face stil looks like the meat in her burger.

I know I'l feel differently about today by the morning and AH and I wil be best mates again before the end of school on Monday, but it's difficult not to feel a bit low when I'm writing this stuff down and it's my own fault. I always write at night, staring out of the window and listening to the Smiths or something equal y miserable. Maybe I should have bought some cheerier music when I was in town. The soundtrack to tomorrow's entry wil be courtesy of Cliff Richard or the Wombles or something .. .

Shit Moment of the Day

The stuff with AH.

Magic Moment of the Day

A comedian on the TV making a joke about burn victims sticking together.

SIXTEEN

A single word was written on the white board in red felt-tip pen.

UMIT.

"It means "hope"," Tughan said. "In Turkish .. ."

Feet were shifted uncomfortably, and awkward looks exchanged. Thorne thought that if the people who'd been taken from the back of that lorry were now being handled by Bil y Ryan, hope was something they would almost certainly have run out of.

It was Saturday morning, the day after the discovery of the abandoned lorry. The SO7 team was back at Becke House to work through this latest development. Al that was actual y developing was a sense of frustration .. .

"Customs and Excise are al over this now," Tughan said. "Not sure what they'l get out of it, but it'l probably be a damn sight more than we do .. ."

Thorne stood with Russel Brigstocke and the rest of the core team Kitson, Stone, Hol and and their SO7 counterparts in a corner of the Incident Room. They watched as Tughan wore out a smal strip of carpet in front of one of the desks. Weekend or not, there

1QD

were always those who made no concessions to casual wear, but, despite the sharp and predictably wel -pressed suit, Thorne thought that Tughan was starting to look and sound a little tired. Maybe not as tired as Thorne himself, but he was getting there.

"In terms of the Zarif brothers, you mean?" Thorne asked.

Hol and held up his hands in a gesture of exasperation. "Surely there must be something tying them to this? Something that wil at least give us an excuse to make their lives difficult.. ."

Tughan put down his coffee and began to flick through a hastily assembled report on the hijacking. "It's like six degrees of fucking separation," he said. "Between this lorry and the Zarifs there are any number of haulage companies, leasing agencies, freight contractors. They own the vehicle, theoretical y, but if we spend a lot of time trying to tie them to whatever the vehicle was carrying, we'l be the ones whose lives are difficult."

"I bet they're laughing at us," Hol and said. "Them and the bloody Ryans."

Tughan shrugged. "Without any bodies, without the people who were inside the lorry, we've got sweet FA."

"I can't believe they've got everything covered." Hol and looked around for support, found a little in the way of nods and murmurs.

"I've had a thought," Brigstocke said. Al eyes turned to him. "Have we checked to see if that lorry's tax disc is up to date?"

The joke got a decent, and much needed, response, even if some of the laughter was lost in yawns.

"Do we know what was inside the lorry?" Kitson said. "Specifical y, I mean. Are we ever going to know how many?"

Tughan shook his head. "Anywhere between a dozen and, I don't know .. . fifty?"

"There were that many found dead in the back of that lorry at Dover, weren't there?" Hol and said.

"There were more," Thorne said. He remembered the smel when he'd stepped up into that box the night before. He wondered what it must have been like for whoever had opened a pair of lorry doors a few years earlier and stared as the sunlight fel across the tangled heaps of crushed and emaciated dead. Fifty-eight Chinese immigrants, crammed like sardines into a sealed lorry, and found suffocated when it was opened on a steaming summer's afternoon. Their clothes in nice, neat piles. Their bodies in considerably less ordered ones .. .

There had, of course, been a major outcry at the time. There were demands for tougher controls, for positive action to curb this barbaric trade. Thorne knew very wel that more might have been done had the corpses in the back of that lorry been those of donkeys or puppies or kittens .. .

"How can that many get through?" Stone asked. "Don't these lorries get searched?"

"Sometimes," Tughan said. "They can hide in secret compartments or behind stacks of false cargo .. ."

Stone was shaking his head. "You'd think they'd check the lorries a bit more thoroughly after al that business at Dover, though."

Thorne knew that it wouldn't have taken a particularly thorough search to have found those Chinese immigrants earlier. To have saved their lives. They'd tried to hide behind a few crates of tomatoes .. .

"The smugglers aren't stupid," Tughan said. "They'l try to avoid the ports that have got scanners, but even those that do have them are overrun. They can't possibly check any more than a handful or you'd have queues fifty miles long waiting to board the ferries."

Thorne knew Tughan was right. Unable to sleep the night before, he'd booted up his rarely used computer and surfed the Net for a couple of hours. He'd gone to the NCIS site and taken a crash course in Turkish organised crime. He'd looked at the way the gangs and families operated both in the UK and in Turkey, and had fol owed the link from there to the NCIS pages on people smuggling.

It had made for grim reading. It hadn't helped him sleep .. .

Customs and Excise were stil more concerned with finding il icit alcohol and tobacco than they were with the smuggling of and, worse 197.

stil , the trade in people. Though a few scanners had been instal ed, it was simply too big an undertaking to check anything more than a smal random sample of vehicles passing through most ports. Seven thousand lorries a day came through Dover; on a good day, 5 per cent of them might be searched. It was little surprise that often no effort at al was made to conceal the people being smuggled. Those doing the smuggling knew ful wel that they could afford to be brazen.

Tughan talked some more about the hopelessness of trying to curb the growing trade in desperate people. He mentioned the valiant efforts being made by the police, the immigration services, the NCIS and Customs. He described an operation, yet to yield substantial results, involving MI5 and MI6 agents infiltrating the businesses of those responsible .. .

Thorne listened, wondering if he should jump in and help. After al , it wasn't often that he had the facts and figures at his fingertips. He was not usual y the one who'd done his homework.

He decided not to bother, figuring that it might be a bit early in the morning for some people to handle the shock.

Yvonne Kitson had brought a flask of Earl Grey in with her. She poured herself a cup. "So, until we find these people, find out what Ryan's done with them, we won't know who they are or how they got here."

Brigstocke pointed to the white board to the single word, scrawled in red: Hope. The colour of crushed tomatoes .. .

"Wel , we can be pretty sure that at least some of them are Turkish," Brigstocke said. "Kurds, probably."

Thorne knew the most likely route: "From Turkey and the Middle East through the Balkans." He ignored the look of surprise from Brigstocke, the look of amused horror from Tughan, and carried on, "Then across the Adriatic to Italy."

Tughan took over. "The smugglers have a range of options. They change the routes to keep the immigration services on their toes, but there are a few key places Moscow, Budapest, Sarajevo are al major nexus points .. ."

Thorne smiled. Nexus points! Nick Tughan was not a man to let himself be outdone. Thorne half expected him to march across like a teacher and write it on the white board

"But Istanbul is the big one. It's smack on the most direct route to the West from most of the major source countries."

"Right," Brigstocke said. "And where the Zarif brothers have got plenty of friends and contacts."

Hol and rubbed his eyes. "What about getting in here?"

"I already told you," Tughan said, 'the smugglers aren't stupid."

Neither am I, Thorne thought. "They've got a few choices at this end as wel ," he said. "They can risk a major port or try a back-door route like the one through Ireland. There's another way in that's becoming quite popular via Hol and and Denmark, then over to the Faroe Islands, the Shetlands and across into mainland Scotland." Thorne wasn't sure whether the short silence that fol owed was considered or simply astonished.

It was Yvonne Kitson who eventual y spoke up. "Al right," she said, turning to him, mock-aggressive. "What planet are you from, and what have you done with Tom Thorne?"

DC Richards the tedious Welshman who had so enjoyed making his 'concentric circles' speech cut off the laughter before it had real y begun. "What are we actual y going to do, sir?

About the Zarifs and Bil y Ryan?"

Tughan gave a thin smile, grateful to one of his own for passing the baton back to him. Back where it belonged. "It's tricky, because both sides have got good reason to lie low for a while. The Zarifs know we're looking at their smuggling operation, and Ryan's got any number of immigrants to dispose of."

"I can't see Memet Zarif and his brothers lying low for very long," Thorne said. "They'l want to hit back at Ryan for this. Close to home, maybe .. ."

Tughan considered this for a second. "Maybe, but I think we've got a bit of time to play with. I want a ful -on policy of disruption. Let's make it hard for them to do any business; let's fuck them both around." He pointed at Hol and, reminding him of what he'd said earlier. "Make their lives difficult .. ."

Thorne knew that 'disruption' essential y meant arresting, or, at the very least, hassling a variety of low-rank workers in the two organisations: drug dealers, debt col ectors those in DC

Richards' outer circles. It was time-consuming, heavy on manpower and, worst of al , as far as Thorne was concerned, it had little effect on the people they should be real y going after. It was a policy that could produce results in the right circumstances, but there were just too many bodies around this time. It made him feel like a glorified VAT-man, and he resented it. He wanted to hurt Bil y Ryan and the Zarif boys in more than just their wal ets .. .

"Not convinced, Tom?" Tughan asked. Obviously, Thorne's face was giving away as much as it usual y did.

Thorne hated the eyes on him, the barely suppressed sighs from those without the bol ocks or the brain power to speak up. "It's like we're trying to catch a kil er," he said, 'and while we're waiting for him to do it again, we're busy cutting up his credit cards. Nicking a few quid out of his wage packet.. ."

Tughan's response was remarkably calm, gentle even. "We're not dealing with everyday criminals, Tom. These men are not ordinary kil ers."

Thorne traded smal shrugs with Brigstocke, exchanged a 'what the hel ' look with Dave Hol and. He knew that Tughan was right, but it didn't make him feel any happier, or any less lost.

Thorne had never thought the day would come, but he was starting to yearn for a decent, honest-to-goodness psychopath .. .

There was a message from Phil Hendricks on Thorne's mobile: he'd be spending the night at Brendan's. Thorne texted him back: he was sorry for being a miserable sod the night before, and hoped that wasn't the reason Hendricks was staying away.

"What's Ryan going to do with them?" Kitson asked.

The pair of them were back in their own office, working their way through paperwork, while, up the corridor, Tughan and Brigstocke were stil hammering out a plan for 'disruption'.

Thorne put his phone down and glanced at his watch before he looked up. Another fifteen minutes and he'd head home.

"Probably exactly the same as the Zarifs would have done," he said. "He'l exploit them. The poor sods hand over every penny they've got, and when they arrive here they find that they owe these "businessmen" a lot more. In the time it takes them to get people smuggled into the UK they might be working with criminal organisations in half a dozen different countries. It might take months, even years, and the smugglers are incurring extra costs on the way. Palms need to be greased al along the route, and the cost of that gets passed on to the people in the backs of the lorries."

Kitson shook her head. "So, even if they get here in one piece, they're up to their eyebal s in debt.. ."

"Right. But, luckily, people like that nice Mr. Zarif have lots of jobs they can do to work their debts off. At one pound fifty an hour it should only take them a couple of years .. ."

"And they can't do anything about it. They can't kick up a fuss."

"Not unless they want to get reminded, forcibly, of just who they're dealing with. I mean, there're so many of these buggers over here, aren't there? Nicking our jobs or claiming our dole money. Who's going to notice if a couple of them disappear?" Thorne's voice dropped, lost its ironic swagger. "Or there's worse. Don't forget, back where these people have come from, the smugglers have plenty of friends who know exactly where their families are."