Baghlan Boy

by Michael Crowley

  ‘Masood… Masood! Are you okay? Hey!’

  ‘I hear you… I’m okay… fuck… I pissed myself, you know.’

  It was distressing, even for Vinnie, and his lorry would stink to almighty heaven, so he accelerated.

  Then Katz lost O’Grady, who suddenly realised that the white lorry wasn’t around the next shoulder of hedgerow; there was just empty road. He must have clocked them. O’Grady thumped the wheel. Outsmarted by a fucking pikey. He pressed the ball of his foot against the pedal. Hedges like walls, barn-sized houses jutting out from bends, and when the road straightened, nothing in front but a tractor. Bastard must have taken a side track. He hadn’t been looking, but surely he would have noticed any side roads. He did a precarious U-turn with the aid of someone’s front lawn and retraced at forty mile an hour. Entering the cup of the bend, he saw a white stone building that would have been a blur in the other direction. He slowed and picked up on a side entrance. A pub with a car park and there, making an appearance in his wing mirror, was the lorry. He parked up a hundred yards beyond.

  *

  Vinnie was unloading the lorry. Sunlight engulfed the crates and the people inside screened their eyes. He began to break the slats away with a claw hammer, throwing pieces into a corner of the car park. ‘We’re here, you’re here now.’

  For sure more than one had pissed themselves, and more besides. People flopped out like new-born calves. Vinnie collected their water bottles; most were empty, some had left an inch or two, perhaps realising the water was doped.

  ‘Wakey, wakey, everyone. Get on your feet. Once you do that you’ll be as right as rain.’ He demonstrated what walking was by stomping as many paces as the crowded lorry would allow. No one managed to raise themselves. One or two kneeled awkwardly then toppled; others looked up, bewildered by his feat of motion. Vinnie began to massage the doctor’s legs. His eyes were jellied, his mouth like that of a landed fish; he bent one knee then the other, appealing for sensation to return. Taking the doctor by the hand, Vinnie led him Lear-like to the lorry’s edge. He lowered him by the armpits, then, with due warning, let go. Bingo – the doctor stood unaided. That’s one that can stand. Hopefully he’ll be digging up spuds by tomorrow.

  Katz had arrived at O’Grady’s Audi.

  ‘I’ve just seen him in the pub car park down there.’

  ‘So, what do we do now?’ She was more afraid of losing the suspect than losing face.

  ‘Not sure,’ he said graciously, ‘depends on what he does, but I think we need to be out of sight.’

  Katz was fretful. This was all unplanned. She had gambled because she was with Gavin. The sergeant led his superior to a farm track beyond the pub; they parked a hundred yards up. Between them and the car park lay a field of flourishing leeks, a copse of birch trees, a mixed hedge. They wanted to be in the company of at least four gym fanatic officers in black boots, stab vests with radios and a dog or two, but it was just them. An hour ago, she had envisaged winding down a window from a safe distance before ordering in her troops, opening emails the following week that concluded, Once again, congratulations on a real hands-on resolution.

  ‘I’m going to get two units here.’ She made it sound like a question.

  ‘Shall I go over and take a look?’ He made it sound like a fait accompli.

  O’Grady slung on his camera, ran along a row of leeks, before ducking down behind a birch. He crossed the fifty metres to the hedge on all fours. The suspect he could see, was shaking out his legs and arms, jogging on the spot, leading an exercise routine for people who could barely move, could barely see straight. O’Grady filmed the six men and women stumbling their way through Vinnie’s moves as he shouted instructions, their necks too listless to lift their heads. Fifteen minutes later Vinnie had decided they were in reasonable shape for delivery. He clapped his hands and waved everyone back into the lorry.

  O’Grady ran bent double back to Katz. ‘He’s on the move,’ he said, scurrying into his Audi. Then, ‘Wait there,’ before mysteriously driving up the farm track. Two minutes later he returned inside the skeleton frame of a soft-top green Land Rover. ‘We need something different behind him. The farmer was fine about it.’

  Vinnie continued raising morale as he flashed along the road past the end of the track. ‘Anyone know this one? Moving on up…’

  They sang, hypnotised behind a haze of medication, believing themselves to be compelled, sounding fearful of further punishment.

  The farmer’s run-around could shift, and Katz gripped the roof strap as she summoned officers towards their location. Finally, the lorry turned under a sign: ‘Tate’s Farm’. O’Grady rattled to a stop well beyond and ran off to conduct more surveillance. He filmed the new arrivals as they were shuffled into caravans and he saw that Vincent Gilheaney wasn’t hanging around. O’Grady fled in pursuit whilst Katz remained at the farm. It took an hour for a squad car and two vans to arrive, and then Katz had to summon a third van to accommodate all thirty migrant workers at the site, plus the farm manager and his wife. Immigration would come and pick them up from the station, but not before Katz had questioned them about the people who had brought them to the UK.

  *

  Vinnie led O’Grady to an industrial estate in Grimsby. The detective left the mud-bespattered Land Rover in the first bay of the first unit. Right, let’s arrest this fucker. He rang it through and thought it best to locate the suspect on foot whilst he waited for boys with tasers and batons. He walked the cul-de-sacs of the estate, all thirty-seven units, and surprisingly there were several white lorries. When he’d gone full circle he saw one pull up opposite the first unit. The owner got out, looked about cautiously, walked over to the Land Rover, peered in through the windows, looked about some more. O’Grady was rooted to the spot behind a skip. He knew he’d been rumbled. Vinnie went back to his lorry and returned with his claw hammer and a Stanley knife. He slashed two tires, shattered a back window and left with O’Grady’s camera. He sped off. Esther Katz had gone from having her people smuggler in the bag with all the necessary evidence to having lost both.

  Vinnie’s pulse told him he needed to put as much distance between him and anything else plod were driving. On the A180 he passed two blue lights coming the other way and saw it for the posse it was. Watching his tail, he headed for Scunthorpe. He remembered reading that Jesse James had once joined a posse in pursuit of himself, the last thing the Pinkertons had expected. Perhaps it was this unconscious literary memory that urged him to double back, continuously scrutinising the vehicles behind him, in front of him and on the opposite carriageway. Not a lawman in sight. He reached the Travelodge in Hull an hour before he could check in. He sat at the wheel for a good twenty minutes, flicking through the images on O’Grady’s camera. They had him banged to rights at the pub and the farm. He kept going, impressed by the shots of the woodpecker, and who was this, on some beach taking a paddle? They would have his registration, so he would need to lose the lorry this side of the North Sea. This was not the first time he’d had to ditch transport. The same way Jesse had to change horses moving through Missouri.

  Plotting Vinnie’s odyssey and his manoeuvres from a mile and a half away on the second floor of Clough Road nick was O’Grady, muddied and chastened. He might have lost the suspect, his camera and the evidence, but he still had the registration number and a computer, so he could see how Vinnie had been up and down the A180 and the M180 hogging the traffic cams. O’Grady also had his rank and was barking out orders like a crew member at McDonald’s. He had people ringing hotels and the ferry company before finally pinning Vincent down to a room at the Travelodge and a half eight ferry back to Rotterdam that same night.

  Katz came up from the custody suite, calmed by her weariness. ‘You lost him, didn’t you? Christ.’

  ‘And found him again,’ he asserted.

  ‘Then why isn’t he locked up downstairs?’

  ‘H
e’s going back to Rotterdam tonight.’

  She didn’t ask, she didn’t nod, but he was compelled to follow her into her office. Her voice was shrill, less contained. ‘How did you lose him? I told you not to lose him.’ She turned her back on him, looking out on a vast car park bordered by a disused gas works, arguably the worst view in Hull, so dismal she looked at O’Grady’s reflection. ‘I didn’t invite you to sit down.’

  He got back up; he was exhausted. ‘He rumbled me.’

  ‘He knows we’re on to him? Bollocks.’

  ‘I’m sorry. What are the illegals saying?’

  ‘I think the correct term at present is migrant, Sergeant. Sounds like he’s running a hostel of some kind and sending them out to work. He’s got at least two others working with him, one of them an Afghan. The Dutch are very interested.’

  ‘Anyone give you an address?’

  ‘No. Either too scared or they may want to go back there, I guess. I’ll keep trying. Most won’t get asylum.’

  She sat down, rubbed her eyes. ‘I think I might have a name or two. Of the people who suffocated in boxes. But it’s not enough to go on. I’m going to release some details to the media, if only to put the wind up him.’

  She held out her palms; he sat down and made the suggestion she was waiting for. ‘He’s bound to lead us to the hostel. He’s not that smart. He’s all over the traffic cams and might not expect us to follow him to Rotterdam… He’ll be part of a chain, reaching back…’

  ‘I know, I know, Gavin. But, did he get a look at you?’

  ‘No. He recognised the Land Rover. When it was parked up.’

  ‘Sure? …Okay, put someone on him and on his lorry, and this time have a tracker put on it, and book yourself a room at the Travelodge, you’re going to Rotterdam as well.’

  Twenty-Nine

  Hull

  The main attraction of the Travelodge for Vinnie was not its room rates; it was that it was always either under, or completely unstaffed. No one came knocking on your door, or asked you questions at reception when you checked in or out. No one except a computer screen. But neither was there anyone to inform O’Grady if Vincent Gilheaney was currently in his room, which he wasn’t. He had bailed in a taxi, unnoticed by the surveillance officer outside lying flat on his back, placing a tracking device on his lorry, just as the taxi pulled up. Vinnie had abandoned both the lorry and the Travelodge for a public house in downtown Hull. This didn’t stop O’Grady staring down at the vehicle for the entire afternoon from his top-floor room, cossetted in a towelling dressing gown. He had sponged off his muddy trousers, socks and jacket from the elfin bathtub, and they were drying on the storage heater. O’Grady radioed the officer on the ground and told him he was moving away from the window for a few minutes; he wanted to be informed if the suspect even approached the lorry. It occurred to him that he had better be dressed, even if his clothes were still damp. Katz had trusted his instincts for a second time, and this time the suspect would not give him the slip.

  Vinnie wasn’t keen on the pub. It was real ale at made-up prices, fish and chips handed to you on a slab of wood, the clientele wanting of men who worked with their hands, people with whom he might converse about scraping a living. He turned to his phone, his smartphone, and he saw there, under multiple layers of the news app, a headline: ‘Bodies washed up in the Humber estuary’. There wasn’t much else, a line or two about ‘several bodies, several weeks ago, more to follow’. He felt like ringing it in: ‘Listen, if anyone should fuckin’ know’… His composure surprised him. Maybe it was the ale. Maybe it was because there was another occasion when he had been associated with a body that had made the news. He knew they would have a job on to connect him to the corpses in the water. Still, to be on the safe side he should’ve taken the lorry somewhere and torched it. Michael. He wasn’t much for current affairs. If he happened to see something on the news, he wouldn’t ask him outright, ‘Was that you, are they ours?’ But he would be wondering. If it came to it, if plod caught up with him, Vinnie would keep his nephew out of the picture, but he had no idea how he would explain it to him. He had at least given them a watery grave. The fuck-up was in the ventilation. It was a mistake, nothing more. Michael was soft-hearted, though. If he got wind, he would go his own way.

  Vinnie looked at his phone, dialled the number and walked outside. ‘Alright, son? …I’m on the ferry in a few hours… Listen, my lorry, it’s goosed… I don’t know what it is, but I haven’t got time to fix it… Yeah, you need to pick me up, but listen, son… Get hold of a decent car, something with a bit of poke… Yeah, we’re gonna need it. Listen, son, we’re getting out of that hostel, finished with all that now… We’re gonna move on… Copper cables, that’s the thing to get into…’

  O’Grady was sitting on the storage heater in his damp trousers, clutching the radio. Seven o’clock – Gilheaney was cutting it fine. He radioed the eyes on the ground. ‘Are you sure you haven’t missed him?’

  ‘Well, the lorry’s still here and I’ve barely seen anyone come and go.’

  O’Grady turned around and pressed his crotch against the heater. Half an hour later he was ventilating himself when Katz rang. ‘Gavin. How’s the surveillance going?’

  ‘Okay. The suspect hasn’t moved.’

  ‘Well, that’s funny because he’s just walked onto the ferry as a foot passenger.’

  Vinnie had bought himself a trench coat and a fedora hat, but the disguise was made redundant by the ticket officer who signalled up to Katz on the deck as he crossed the ramp.

  Forty minutes later O’Grady made it to the ferry and caught up with her in the onboard brasserie. Katz’s eyes were on the menu.

  ‘I thought he might ditch the lorry. Hopefully he thinks he’s lost us now, but we need to be on our toes. And let’s face it, we lost him when he wasn’t trying. You look a state, Sergeant.’

  He smelled like a damp rag. She was dressed as he’d never seen her before. A fern green dress, a necklace, a bracelet, the vicinity of evening wear and more make-up than in the day job.

  ‘I didn’t have time to go home and change,’ he said, curling his toes gummed to their moist socks.

  ‘Too busy watching a parked lorry?’

  ‘Still, there’ll be forensics all over it. And he wouldn’t’ve left it if he hadn’t rumbled us,’ he said.

  ‘True.’

  They looked at their menus and both could’ve used a drink, but O’Grady didn’t dare ask and Katz didn’t dare suggest. For the inspector the long ferry journey was an opportunity to relax; she didn’t always find it easy to be alone in her house, a silent place. Here there were people around, distractions to indulge in, she had Gavin to talk to and a premium cabin to withdraw to and emerge from. But this, this was not a social occasion, a date of some sort; it was a meeting, wasn’t it? Except there wasn’t that much on the agenda. The only item was also on the boat and would be disembarking at the same time as them. Twelve hours from now. It could only be a chance to get to know one another. She decided to find out whether this man was good company or not. ‘Do you know what? I think I’m going to have a steak. I haven’t had one for ages.’ She closed the menu. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Er… well, I’m a veggie.’

  ‘Oh, sorry, course you are. Well, there’s a cheese and herb roulade.’

  ‘Yep. I think I’m in the process of becoming a vegan.’

  ‘How long do you think it’ll take? Maybe you could squeeze in the roulade before it happens.’

  She smiled, but he didn’t. He was going to have to tell her sooner or later, and he judged the informal context to be the best one. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’

  ‘Is it about seasickness?’ She smiled again.

  ‘He’s got the camera. My camera. He broke into the Land Rover.’

  ‘The one the woodpecker on? …And all the evidence? …Bet he hasn’
t got it now.’ She tried to think through the implications rather than dwelling on the severity of the disappointment. ‘Then we’re going to need to get some of the migrants to ID him. They’ll ask for a deal on residency. And any decent defence lawyer would smell that a mile off. The farm manager better cooperate, or we don’t have much.’

  All of that tear-arsing around Lincolnshire, you crawl around in the mud to film him and then you leave the sodding camera in the Land Rover which you park under his nose. There’re no traffic cams out there, no CCTV.

  She leaned forward with a last complication. ‘Here’s another thing. He’s on foot. He’ll be looking to get off the boat pretty sharp. My car was almost first on, it’ll be last off. What about you?’

  ‘Almost last on, I’ll be near the front when we dock.’

  ‘We take your car. I’ll have to speak to someone about leaving mine here. I’ve asked for the Dutch to have a car in the locale.’

  They didn’t say a great deal during the meal. Katz watched O’Grady dissect a courgette. He was so methodical about his food he could have been wearing a white coat. She wondered if how a man ate a meal was an indication of how he performed as a lover. Afterwards O’Grady bought a change of clothes from the ferry mall; she went to the on-board cinema to watch the latest Jason Bourne movie.