Until Death

by Knight, Ali

  Christos’s face loomed ever closer to her own. ‘Recognise anyone on this wall?’

  She shook her head, dragging her eyes from the wall to his. ‘No. What’s on that ship, Christos?’

  She braced herself for a raised hand flying towards her head or a punch in the stomach, but he did something worse. He looked as if he might cry. She stepped back, her bum hitting the side of a desk. ‘What have you done, Christos?’

  ‘I’ve realised something as I’ve got older. Life has only a few moments that really matter – just a few moments when all the shit makes sense. It’s when you realize what you really love, who you really love.’

  Kelly stood staring at her husband, at the man she had adored with such intensity, once, such a long time ago. ‘You can tell me what you’ve done. For the sake of our children tell me how I can help you.’

  But he didn’t answer, standing there among his piles of paper, staring at his estranged wife as she stared back at him.

  57

  With each hour that passed, Georgie felt the gnawing of something in her stomach, a twitchy feeling that something was missing. The deep rummage team were already aboard the Saracen, in breathing gear and protective suits, burrowing into the intestines of the ship, into smaller and smaller storage holds, into areas toxic with the build-up of oil and fumes over the years, looking for those prized triple-wrapped packages in clingfilm, a box of something that would make it on to the six o’clock news.

  Preston swaggering over earlier that day saying that their tip-off had phoned again – Preston had spoken to him – claiming they needed to take a look at Southampton had also annoyed her. She wished she had got the call.

  Mo was sitting at his desk beside her – and they had been arguing. She had told Mo that Kelly was from Southampton, maybe there was a connection.

  ‘Stick to the wood trail,’ he’d said sharply. ‘It’s what Anguish asked us to do.’

  ‘I know, but Kelly is from Southampton.’

  ‘She’s irrelevant to this case, G.’ Mo yawned.

  Georgie leaned forward and began typing on the computer. ‘Kelly told me she was married before, that her husband and kid died before she married Christos. Why can’t I find any record of her?’

  ‘I don’t know. This is irrelevant, Georgie!’

  ‘There are more than sixty thousand people working for Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise. I’m sure we can find someone in Southampton. I’ve probably got a contact on Facebook.’

  Preston walked down the office, a pile of folders in his arms. ‘Here’s information on Malamatos ships calling at Felixstowe. For your reading pleasure.’ He dumped the files on her desk and walked away.

  Georgie watched as several of them slid slowly off her desk to the carpet. She was twenty-eight. Anguish was nearly fifty; his paper towers covered his entire office. Slowly but inexorably over the years she would be buried by procedure, by failures, by following the letter of the law and letting the crooks get away with it. And she didn’t know how to stop it. She had no strategy to stop this bureaucracy lapping higher and higher up her neck until it drowned her with barely a whisper. Up a sheer rock face, looking straight into death’s jaw, she could choose a path, use her mental and physical agility to save herself.

  She felt helpless and frustrated. After everything she’d battled against with her family to get this job and it wasn’t a better life, it was just a more boring one. She stood up.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  She ignored Mo and picked up her phone and walked outside and along the dock. She called Dad. ‘You know anyone who ever worked at Southampton?’ She watched the giant cranes unloading the containers from the Saracen further down the dock. And then she asked something she always swore she would never stoop to. ‘Does Uncle Ed?’

  It turned out they were happy to help. She turned circles on the tarmac as she listened to a lot of reminiscing about the seventies and catching up with people. She was passed from one person to the other but no one knew very much or offered any insight, until she got hold of a former union rep at Southampton docks, now retired to Torquay. He was full of life and stories and gave her a name: Ricky Welch. He’d gone down for murder but was probably out now; it had been a very unpleasant business indeed.

  Georgie wasn’t convinced he could help. ‘I think I really need to talk to someone who works at the docks there now.’

  ‘That’s just the thing, the way it works now is because of what happened back then, because of the hornet’s nest stirred up then. If you want to glance at the underbelly, you could do worse than talk to Ricky. There was a lot of talk back then that the rot went all the way up. That people had been bought who should have known better, that Ricky was the fall guy.’

  ‘Can you be more specific?’

  He laughed. ‘No, I can’t.’

  ‘Do you have a number or an address for Ricky?’ Georgie asked, not very hopefully.

  ‘Try the phone book, I would. Don’t say I gave you his name,’ the man counselled. ‘I’m too old for any aggro.’

  She hung up and saw Mo walking towards her. His anger was present in every stride. ‘What the hell are you doing out here?’

  ‘I’m just making some calls—’

  ‘About Southampton? You’ve been told to stay away from that. It’s a distraction.’ She had rarely seen Mo so livid. ‘You might fancy your boss but this is really some way to piss him off – and me.’

  She was really furious with Mo now, partly because she had been caught out, her feelings for her boss had been spotted by her partner. She turned away and began striding past the warehouses, keen to hide her blushes. ‘Oh that’s it, march off in a huff.’

  ‘Leave it out, Mo, I’m not doing any harm.’

  They were behind some containers now. ‘No, but you’re wasting my time.’

  She saw Lukas the Pole with the flat tyre having a cigarette.

  ‘What makes you think I’ve got time to waste, eh? However hard this job is for you, it’s doubly hard for me.’

  Georgie had a think about that. ‘OK. I’m sorry.’ She tried to keep her voice low, but Lukas could hear. ‘It was just an hour or so, no harm done.’ She tried to change the subject by turning to Lukas. ‘Hi, this is Mo, my partner. How are you?’

  Lukas said nothing, he just smoked.

  ‘Come on, let’s get back to work,’ said Mo and he began to walk away.

  Lukas said something quiet that she couldn’t quite catch.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You still looking for rosewood?’

  Georgie took a step closer. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I heard a story in the pub a few months ago. I listen a lot in the pub.’ Lukas glanced around to make sure no one was watching. ‘Two dockers were laughing with a lorry driver. This driver’s often hanging around looking for extra work, he has a gambling problem they say.’ Mo had walked back over to them and was listening. ‘The first docker is telling the other a story about this driver, about how he tries to find extra work by calling at the freight offices behind Terminal 3, asking the young girls on the desks for driving jobs. One of these girls is sexy, and the driver is trying to impress her, telling her he can maybe get her special things. She’s interested, because she’s thinking it’s something like Chanel, a Beckham handbag, and the driver says pot-pourri. The other docker says, “What, that crap your gran puts in the khazi to hide the stink?” The dockers start laughing and the driver, he gets very defensive. He says, “But this stuff smells like real quality.”’ Lukas dropped his cigarette and stubbed it out, bent down and picked it up. ‘Then the driver said that he did a delivery once when he could smell the pot-pourri coming from the back of the truck. It was lovely, he said. It smelled like roses.’

  Georgie looked at Mo. ‘Pot-pourri is always packaged, or in bags. Its smell would degrade otherwise.’

  ‘It’s unwrapped,’ said Mo. ‘Raw state.’ They nodded at each other.

  ‘What’s this guy’s name?’ Georgie asked, mo
re urgently now.

  ‘Ian Scanlon.’ Lukas turned and headed off without a backward glance.

  58

  Kelly walked out from behind the screens surrounding her husband. She got up the stairs somehow and through the doors back to reception. She needed air. She needed her car, because there was one place she had to go, but Christos wanted two extra sets of eyes and ears on her all day. She put a hand on the wall to steady herself and turned around quickly in case he was following.

  ‘You OK, love? You look ill.’ Mary had rounded the front desk and was coming over, bosom ready for her to fall into.

  ‘I’m fine, I’m fine.’

  Mary was pulling an eyelid out of shape, picking off a clump of mascara. Kelly saw the two guards waiting by the door. She glanced round the offices, unable to remember the layout of the building very well. ‘I’m just going to the toilet.’ She walked down the corridor away from the entrance. She went into the bathroom. No windows. She wheeled around and came out, headed further into the building, past Christos’s normal office. She glanced into two rooms – the heads of people at desks making her move on. She saw a fire exit at the end of the corridor. Put her hand on the metal bar, then wondered if it was alarmed. She ducked into an empty office, swept files off a windowsill and opened the window. It was hinged at the middle and swung outwards at the bottom, big enough for her to slither through. She put her bum on the windowsill and lifted her legs. It would be a six-foot jump to the concrete below. She pulled the window open to the maximum and was just about to drop through when one of the guys in black rounded the corner of the building and saw her.

  Kelly swore silently.

  ‘Put your legs back in and walk out of the front door please.’ She stared at him through the glass. ‘We’re here for your own safety.’

  The situation was hopeless. She swung her legs back in and walked stiffly out of the room. She went back into the toilet, sat down and tried to think. Her urge to be rid of these two men, to get where she needed to go, was a fire growing inside her. She took her purse and her keys from her bag, stuffed them in the pocket of her coat and left her bag where it was – she could run faster without it. She came out of the toilet, said goodbye to Mary and went out of the front door. The two men walked either side of her back to the car. She took in the details of what they wore and how they moved. They were in dark suits and shiny leather shoes, heavily built and lumbering.

  They all got in the car, one next to her in the passenger seat, another in the back. The one in the back made a call as she started the car.

  ‘We’re heading off now.’ He turned to Kelly. ‘Where are we going?’

  She looked at him in the rearview mirror. ‘Back into town, I have some shopping to do.’

  She pulled out of the car park and made her way towards the A13, queuing on a slip road in the rain. They inched forward, bumper to bumper. She looked at the time: 9.30, the day would get eaten up in a moment. They inched forward again, the sound of horns carrying over the asphalt from the main road westwards into the city. They were coming down a hill on a bend towards the four-lane road, the east–west flow separated by the low metal rail of a fence. The traffic slowed and stopped, then sped up into second gear as a traffic light further along the road changed to green. She began to count the time between moving and stationary traffic.

  The car in front moved forward. Kelly released the brake and coasted towards it, picking up speed as the car came down the hill. She opened the door and jumped out on to the verge and began to sprint down the grassy bank to the A13. She heard a grunt of surprise from the man in the passenger seat as he reached out to grab her and missed, followed by the hard crunch of the car rolling into the back of the car in front. Louder shouts carried across the wind towards her. She looked back. A big man had got out of the car in front, shoulders back and finger pointing. Only the man from the back seat was following her, slipping in his city shoes down the muddy bank.

  Kelly could see the brake lights turn off on a tail of cars in the nearside lanes. She ran to the central reservation as the cars began moving behind her, facing faster-moving traffic flowing east. She went for it, jumping out with arms held high as horns honked and cars slammed on their brakes. She was across the A13 and running up a grassy mound on the other side past saplings striving skywards, encased in plastic tubes. She ran down the other side and pelted into a small estate of semi-detached brick houses. The roads were curved into closes and cul-de-sacs. She saw an alleyway edged with fencing and ran down it into another cul-de-sac. She ran on and turned a corner into a long Victorian street. She saw a woman get out of a car on the opposite side of the street and turn back into a house, leaving the front door ajar. She was in a hurry, would obviously appear again in a second or two as she hadn’t turned off the ignition. Kelly could hear the car idling loudly in the mid-morning silence. She looked behind her. Christos’s man was jogging down the street towards her. He looked tired, but he was keeping pace.

  She had one objective: to get away. She didn’t hesitate. She climbed into the idling car, slammed the door, jammed the gearstick into first and roared away up the street. Five hundred yards away was a left-hand turn. She looked in the mirror, could see the man in black sprinting fast after her. He couldn’t outrun a car. She’d drive for a few minutes and dump the car when she was sure she’d lost him. She made the turn left, and then a noise made her slam on the brakes in horror.

  The baby in the back car seat began to coo.

  Kelly froze, staring in the mirror at the little boy in a striped hat and a blue all-in-one. His fat little arms were stretching forward, straining at his straps as he held a multicoloured toy in his hand.

  Kelly’s panic as he grinned at her was all-consuming. She had just kidnapped a child. In seconds the mother would come back out of her door and stand still on her path, searching for her car and, above all, her baby.

  At that moment the man in black rounded the corner and stopped in confusion at seeing her parked right next to him. As he tried to grab at the door handle Kelly shoved the car into reverse and backed round the corner, flying up the road, the horrible ramifications of what she’d done mounting in her. The street was still empty, the woman had not reappeared. Kelly skidded to a halt outside the house and had just got out of the car as the woman came out of her front door, a baby gym in her arms.

  Their eyes met. The driver’s door was still wide open. The woman stared at her car, then at Kelly. She frowned.

  Kelly smiled. ‘What a beautiful baby.’

  The woman’s eyes slid to her baby in the back seat. Kelly could hear the slap slap of the man in black’s shoes as he lumbered down the street towards her. He was a hundred metres away. The woman would notice the open door. Remember that she’d closed it. She’d open her mouth and scream. ‘They grow up so fast,’ Kelly added.

  The baby burbled and stretched towards his mother. The woman, ambushed by the strength of her primal bond, smiled at Kelly as the baby cooed.

  ‘Have a nice day,’ Kelly added and then she took off. She ran hard down the road away from her pursuer. He was tired after his long sprint after her in the car and she lost him as she cut through a small park and turned twice, on to a bigger road with free-flowing traffic. She jogged along for a while, cutting west, trying to find a minicab office or a black cab. She found neither, was stuck in an area of storage companies, haulage firms and low-rise offices. She saw a cement mixer rumbling along the road and on a whim stuck out her thumb. The truck coasted to a halt.

  An old man sat in the cab looking down at her. She could see he was swearing behind the window glass. She opened the door to his cab. He was furious. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? Hitchhiking? If my daughter did that I’d bloody kill her.’

  ‘I’m desperate, I really have to get to central London.’

  ‘Desperate? That’s the sorriest excuse I’ve ever heard. I’ll give you a lift if you promise me you’ll never, ever do something so bloody stupid again. Do you
know the creeps and perverts out here?’

  Kelly nodded and climbed in. ‘I really can’t thank you enough.’

  ‘You’re a stupid woman, so bloody stupid.’ He shook his head and put on his indicator before pulling away, continuing to lecture her. He took her all the way to Bank, proclaiming long and loudly about the idiocy of the world and everyone in it.

  59

  Georgie and Mo were in a car outside a betting shop on the Bethnal Green Road, Georgie in the back seat next to Ian Scanlon, Mo in the driver’s seat.

  ‘Come on, Ian, help us here and we can help you,’ Georgie said.

  ‘I don’t know nothing.’

  ‘You pick up this delivery of pot-pourri, take it to Casson Street, and hand it on to someone else,’ continued Georgie. ‘Only it’s not pot-pourri, is it? I looked at the paperwork for this job. These goods are listed as weighing seven tons; pot-pourri, apart from smelling awful, weighs nothing.’

  Ian was staring at the black crescents under his fingernails, morose.

  ‘Tell us where that consignment goes, and who picks it up,’ said Mo.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Mo sighed. ‘This can is listed as going to Leicester, but you don’t take it there, you take it to Casson Street and hand it on to someone else.’

  No reply.

  ‘We’re taking you to the customs office now, where you’ll be booked. Unless you can come up with the names of who hired you, who you work with, you’ll be left in a cell—’

  ‘You’re picking on the small guy. I just got a phone call, I’m desperate for any work I can get. It’s me and that rig and that’s it. If someone pays me for delivery, I’m happy. What they’re shipping is none of my business.’

  ‘What they’re shipping is entirely your business. How often do you deliver to Casson Street?’ asked Georgie.