by Knight, Ali
Kelly threw open the doors of the inbuilt wardrobes. The faint smell of mothballs drifted out. She glanced along the rows of clothing: a fur coat, hermetically sealed in its dry-cleaning wrapper, summer dresses, several pairs of slippers; clothes for all seasons. Medea had arrived, and she wasn’t going anywhere soon. She had slipped seamlessly from her flat near Primrose Hill to the Euston Road. The spy had been sent in to watch her more closely. She felt as if she were lying in the black box again, the lid slowly closing over her, cutting out the light. She ran to her bathroom, opened her bottle of pills and swallowed two.
Twenty minutes later her panic attack had subsided, so when she heard the movement of the lift and realised her kids were coming home, she felt prepared. A few moments later the lift opened and they piled out, but they looked embarrassed to see her. They shuffled and examined the floor as she wrapped them in awkward hugs. She ignored Sylvie, who stood proprietorially in the doorway, a large bag filled with gaudy plastic toys in her hand.
‘Kids, cut it out, your mom’s not been well.’ Sylvie studied Kelly as she bent over and reached out, pleading with her kids to respect her, forgive her, love her. As if blood bonds alone were enough. Sylvie had been pretty convinced this afternoon that they weren’t. It was interesting to see how easily a child’s mind could be turned with a few cheap bribes. How easily their affections could be bought. The young one was already sorted; he was as malleable as his pudgy skin, squeally and demanding with his own needs. Narcissism started young. The daughter was more of a problem. She was a watcher. Sylvie would need to be careful. If Florence ever made a scene, people would listen. She needed to spend some time thinking up clever ways to pander to her. Ways Florence wouldn’t expect. Then again, how hard could it be? An eleven-year-old couldn’t know the base nature of the world. She would be undone by her need for love, the social pressure to feel wanted, to feel it.
Wait, were those tears in Kelly’s eyes? Of course. Her failed escape attempt would have brought her low. She must feel like shit. After all, Kelly was stuck in a marriage that was beyond repair, she had a dead kid and husband and needed a pile of pills and who knew what crap to get through the days. But here was the thing about Kelly, she never looked like shit. Because with a face and body like that, no one could believe that you could suffer.
Sylvie dug her nails into her palm so hard she nearly drew blood. Kelly was a winner. She had won the great race of a woman’s life; she was more beautiful than 90 per cent of the bitches out there. She hadn’t had to scrabble for the scraps left after the desirables had had their pick. Sylvie watched Kelly hold her son’s head in her hands, her fingers entwined in his hair. Kelly’s nails were short and unvarnished, she’d probably never bothered with a manicure. Kelly didn’t sit in salons inhaling acetate fumes and listening to hip-hop bullshit about women workin’ it, or waste hours of her life staring at the bitchy Korean girl in the mask because there’s fuck all else to look at. Good looks got you a free pass from having to maintain, from having to buff and wax and starve. And in its wake came allure, and choice, and power.
And Sylvie wanted that. She wanted it badly.
She studied Kelly as she ran her untended fingers down Florence’s arms, engrossed in her children.
You’ve got your looks and your kids. I’ll take them from you. Just you watch.
Kelly knelt in front of Yannis, holding his uncertain face close to hers. ‘Everyone gets ill once in a while, Yannis, even your mum. But I’m fine now.’ She took his hands and shook them in hers, trying to pull him out of it. She forced herself to stay calm, she could win this battle, she was their mother, after all. He didn’t answer. She looked at Florence, standing taller next to him. She got up and smoothed down her daughter’s hair. ‘I’m going to make you your favourite meal. No one makes a spaghetti carbonara like your mother.’
The children looked at each other and smiled, smiles that seemed as bright as a thousand suns to Kelly.
25
The Saracen began to rock in the ocean swell. To the Wolf it was like riding an elephant, a rhythmic rising and falling as the ship powered through the Atlantic. The sea turned darker blue as they moved off towards the ocean depths. The wind freshened. The sun was lower in the sky now and not as strong. The rest of the crew had their shirts tied round their waists but he kept his on his back to keep the rays off and the skin cancer at bay. As the swell deepened the ship began to creak, the engines a constant low-level rumble beneath them. He watched the white boats (anything smaller than this beast of a vessel was dismissively called a white boat) scurry out of their way. Container ships were an expression of pure power, they threw their weight around. A bit like their owners. If the Saracen hit something in its way, you wouldn’t even feel it.
He picked up the portable chiller cabinet of steak and walked through the doorway to the leeward side, where the rest of the crew was setting up the barbecue. It was a ritual that crews often performed before they hit the big ocean. There was a crew of fifteen aboard the Saracen, under the President’s command, but there were always a few stragglers paying for rides home and company men doing company stuff as well. The only women present were two squat Indonesians in flip-flops and sarongs. They were threading lamb chunks on to kebab sticks, wiping away the sweat on their brows with their wrists. Luciana was stashed away in his cabin. The President was pissed at him, but the Wolf had paid for her and as long as she didn’t show her face and upset the crew the captain was happy to live with it.
The gang was assembling around the barbecue with the grateful air of those for whom a long shift has just finished. Before leaving port they worked non-stop to load the ship, returning to regular shifts only when out in the ocean. They all wanted the overtime, all craving the extra cash. What the Wolf could earn with his brawn and his hands was never quite what he needed and way less than what he desired. He popped a top off a beer and tossed it over the side into the vast garbage can of the Atlantic.
The President came out and introduced a young man he had with him, Jonas Wyman. ‘He’s a paying passenger so treat him kindly, boys. I’ve told him to stay out of your way.’
They raised their beer bottles to Jonas in a tired welcome.
‘Where you from?’ the Wolf asked.
‘London. I’m travelling home from South America. I was supposed to start college in October. Guess I’ve slipped by a couple of weeks.’
‘Gap year stuff, eh?’ the President added indulgently.
Jonas nodded again. ‘I thought I’d see the world by travelling across it.’
‘Well, this is what you see,’ said a Pole, throwing his arms out around him. ‘Water. Nothing but water.’
They laughed, but the Wolf was taking a long hard look at Jonas. He was thin with pitted skin and looked older than a student at the end of a gap year. He felt holes would open up in that story pretty quickly if he found some leverage.
Jonas came forward again and asked if he could help.
‘Yeah. Chop this salad.’ The Wolf handed him a knife and some tomatoes. ‘You been on a ship before, Jonas?’
He shook his head. Christos would be keen for any extra income, the Wolf felt. When he’d boarded he had noted that the angle of the gangway was steep, steeper than he had ever seen it. The ship wasn’t full. The recession was biting; they were carrying fewer containers, lifting the ship out of the water and lowering the profits. Christos could be hurting.
‘You worked on ships for long?’ Jonas asked.
The Wolf took a swig of beer. ‘Years.’ He said it like there had been too many.
‘I guess it’s a very different kind of life.’ Jonas was getting cocky, thinking he wanted to talk to him.
‘It can make you rootless.’
‘Does it make you start to wonder where home really is?’
‘This monster of a thing is my home for now. This ship burns about two hundred and fifty tons of fuel a day. I think of people back home stressing about their light bulbs, and I laugh. This animal take
s a mile and a half to stop. But you gotta get those red kidney beans to the vegetarians somehow. Perhaps if they knew how it got to their supermarkets they’d stop pretending they enjoyed them.’ He skewered the meat with a fork and held it over the barbecue for Jonas, almost as a challenge. ‘How do you like your steak?’
‘Rare.’
The Wolf smiled. Jonas had an unpredictable look that he responded to. ‘You’ll go far.’ They stopped talking and listened to the satisfying sizzle of burning fat.
Even with such a big, powerful machine as this there was always a chink. The Death Star came to mind, an empire destroyed by a small, old-fashioned jet. The Wolf took a deep glug of beer and felt the bubbles catch at the back of his throat. Even the strongest outfits were vulnerable if you knew how to strike them.
A sullen-looking man who had a stink of the company about him had just come outside and was standing nearby. The Wolf understood at once. Here was the guard, pure and simple, for the cargo.
The sun dipped lower behind the bridge and cast this side of the ship into shade. The Wolf looked at the shadow the hundreds of containers threw far out into the ocean. If he played this right he would be coming home for good. He was sailing into London, the beating heart of Christos’s empire. A small, old-fashioned jet.
26
Georgie coasted her bike down the ramp into the station car park. She was in a bad mood: on her journey in she’d noticed both her lights were missing – her brother Karl had taken them and not returned them and she would have to cycle home in the dark. It didn’t help that a sports car, reversing aggressively to fit perfectly into one of the parking spaces, nearly clipped her front wheel as she came down the ramp. She skidded to a halt and shouted at Preston. ‘You nearly knocked me off.’
‘Calm down, calm down.’ He said this in a pantomime Scouse accent which infuriated her. The fool was born and bred in Dorset. ‘You on the rag, Georgie?’
She was so angry she wished she’d knocked into him and scraped his car. She locked her bike to a railing and looked at the Thames, its grey expanse visible between a series of grotty Portakabins and the squat brick customs offices. This far downriver the Thames was as wide as a sea. Today the wind was warm, gusting hard, blowing straight from the Caribbean.
A customs officer’s job was to stop banned goods coming into the country. Unless they were lucky, or smugglers were stupid, the most effective way to do that was to work on information given to them – tip-offs. To search a container ship properly for its secrets would take weeks, long weeks where the bananas rotted and the grain sprouted and the electricity bill for the refrigerated units ramped up and the insurance claims spiralled. Trade had a momentum and an importance all of its own. They weren’t even cogs in a machine, they were ‘flies on the arse of the great beast mammon’ as Anguish liked to say from behind his piles of paper.
She had been proud when she’d got the customs job; she could turn it into a career. She’d be the first person in her family to have one. She’d been here a year after her training period and was beginning to get a feel for how things worked. How rumours circulated. How good or bad internal affairs were at rooting out corruption.
Her dad and her brothers laughed when she got the job. They constantly talked about how people down here were on the take, supplementing their state salaries with private contributions, insisting that people had been bought. ‘Human nature, you can’t argue with human nature,’ her dad had said.
No, Georgie thought as she pulled open the door and took the stairs to the first floor, you can. She wanted to believe that you could be good and get on; she was determined to prove her family wrong. Not all people were liars. Mo waved at her from his desk and made hand gestures suggesting Anguish was in a bad mood. She nodded to show she understood. She saw Preston swaggering down the corridor behind her.
Mo came over. ‘Anguish wants to see us. He’s got something to show us.’
‘What does that mean?’ Georgie took off her reflective jacket and put down her bag.
Mo shrugged. ‘The more he bigs it up, the more unimportant it is.’
She smiled. When they discussed corruption Mo would joke that no one ever dared bribe him, they thought that he was too angry, and anyway, he knew where the plutonium was already.
Angus came out of his office and beckoned them over. ‘Come and see the mess we’ve got outside.’
They followed the boss out of the side of the building and along the dock towards a faded red container placed far away from any storage facility, marooned in a sea of tarmac.
‘What’s that smell?’ Mo asked. Something in the container had gone bad, that much was clear.
‘You really want to know? I’ll show you.’ They walked a bit further on. ‘You can’t get any nearer,’ Anguish said. They were standing with their hands or shirts over their noses and mouths. ‘Twenty tonnes of rotting New Zealand lamb. The refrigeration connection failed on ship. One of the worst cases I’ve seen.’
‘That’s disgusting,’ Mo exclaimed. ‘You know how if the heating fails in an office and the temperature falls below a certain level, you can have the day off? Can we do that for smell?’
Anguish gave him a withering look. ‘If I was being mean, I mean really mean, I would make you guys search it.’
‘If that was pork, I’d be excused,’ Mo argued, voice muffled through his shirt sleeve.
Georgie didn’t dare breathe. The stench was making her stomach heave. This must be how human flesh smelled. It was a marvel how quickly it transformed and corroded.
‘Now let’s get back inside and you can tell me what’s happening with the Malamatos case.’
Mo looked at her with pity as they trailed back to Anguish’s office. Angus sat down behind his desk and stared at them, his bad mood radiating towards them.
‘I don’t think the wife is the tip-off. She told me pretty convincingly to eff off,’ Georgie said.
‘Charming.’
‘The charity he runs and that the mistress – but not the wife – is a director of, is opposite the drop for the wood.’
Angus looked up at her in surprise.
‘I’ve talked to the residents near the drop point and they say that there are never trucks pulling up and switching trailers. I drew a blank there,’ Mo added. ‘But the only time there’s activity in that yard is every six months when there’s a charity event and caterers and prop companies deck out the play centre and park up next to it. Perfect cover for another lorry to pull in and a waiting flatbed to drive away.’
Angus steepled his fingers. ‘So we think they’re doing deliveries every six months?’
Mo and Georgie nodded.
‘When was the last charity event?’
‘Early May. Their next charity event is Halloween – and one of Christos’s ships is docking here the day before: the Saracen, coming from Belém, northern Brazil,’ Mo said.
‘But if they’re shipping it every six months, why did we find this stuff two weeks ago? It breaks the pattern.’ No one had an answer. ‘We’ll have a good rummage over the Saracen when it arrives, of course.’ Anguish threw up his hands. ‘I don’t get it. Why is this stuff being imported into London? The market for illegal hardwood is China.’
‘There seems to be nothing hidden inside the wood, and anyway, you’d use cheap pine to hide stuff, not something illegal to start with,’ continued Mo.
‘We’re looking at a hell of a lot of wood,’ added Georgie.
‘So we’ve still got nothing.’ Angus’s voice was flat. He rubbed his forehead, trying to smooth away the tension lines. ‘If Christos is hiding something on the Saracen, we’ll find it.’ He nodded his head towards the tonnes of rotting meat outside on the dock. ‘I’ve even seen that used before. Smugglers might think they’re being original, but nothing is a surprise to us, absolutely nothing.’ He paused. ‘But find me something, get this thing moving. You’re not the only ones with a boss.’
They left his office and Georgie told Mo she wanted to
have a look at something. She walked along the quay to one of the customs storage facilities, stacked with impounded goods from all corners of the globe. She had a quick chat with the man organising crates at the entrance and went to look at Christos’s container of logs. They were unsawn, still with their bark. Each trunk was about two metres across, giant, jungle-fixing trophies. She was looking at one of the most magnificent things the earth produced. Cut down in its prime and stacked in a cold metal box in a warehouse. What a waste. She hoiked herself over the first trunk and began to walk into a space along the side.
‘Ever seen what a weight like that’ll do to your bones?’
She turned too quickly and banged her head on top of the container. A man in his fifties with a serious weight problem and too little hair stood behind her. ‘Come out slowly. The whole thing’s unstable. Logs like that’ll crush you to death.’
‘I just wanted to have another look. It’s beautiful stuff.’
He blinked at her as if she had started talking Bantu. ‘I’ve got imitation Gucci jackets, fake Sony PlayStations, a ton of knock-off Marlboros, and you want to look at wood.’
She jumped down from the logs and held out her hand. ‘I should have introduced myself. Georgie Bell, Customs and Excise, from up in the offices.’
He didn’t take her hand. ‘One of the new ones.’ He said it without affection.
She put her hands in her pockets, pulled herself taller. If he wanted to play it this way, that was fine by her.
She saw that nearby was a small table where another man close to retirement sat on a swivel chair, a copy of the Sun in his hands. She could see a portable radio through the steam from two teas rising lazily in the warehouse draughts.
She ignored the first man and bent to look closely at the grain of the rosewood end-on. She traced a finger across it, the whorls and circles of life rough from where the teeth of the chainsaw had chewed through. The man didn’t move away.
