Threats and Menaces

by Alan Scholefield

  ‘What are you thinking of?’

  ‘A young woman.’

  ‘Attractive? Nubile?’

  ‘Well… Aye. I wouldn’t say no.’

  ‘You buggers are all the same. Anyway that’s illegal.’

  ‘What about the others?’

  ‘Come from the European Community. Different for the Filipinas. You start fiddling with Filipinas and South Americans and you get the anti-slavery people down on you shrieking blue murder.’ He made to rise. ‘Hang on, hang on, I didn’t say it was impossible, did I?’

  Leo walked in and came up to the desk. ‘Sorry, guv’nor, but I had to go round the block twice.’

  Gillian Hyde-Cooper glared at Macrae. Macrae glared at Silver. Leo looked from one to the other in bewilderment.

  She sat back. ‘I think you’d better tell me who the hell you are.’ Macrae identified them both and produced Alice’s passport. ‘Take a good look. Have you ever seen her before?’

  She flashed her eyes to the passport and back to Macrae. ‘Never.’

  ‘Are you certain?’

  ‘Bloody certain.’ She relit her cold cigar. ‘Now eff off.’

  *

  Lunchtime in the incident room of Cannon Row police station wasn’t exactly the grill room at the Savoy. The entrée of choice was the sandwich — invented less than a mile away in the eighteenth century — with a range of fillings based mainly on ham and cheese. There was ham and cheese with pickled onions and ham and cheese with chutney and ham and cheese with mustard… all made with bread spun out of a fine plastic. Leo was convinced that these sandwiches, although purporting to come from the canteen, in fact came from the great Swindon food factory which Zoe had discovered.

  Macrae stood in the doorway of the incident room looking at the controlled chaos. Once he had visited a glass-blowing atelier and had been struck by the way the men weaved in and out of each other with their long pipes glowing with molten glass. He kept on expecting them to fry each other but they didn’t. Here men and women with computers and phones sat among a mass of wires and managed to control their movements so that the whole room didn’t become entangled and go down on the floor in a heap.

  Phones rang and were answered, keyboards clattered, coffee was slurped, and all the time detectives were asking questions.

  Macrae had read some of the reports on Mr Ibrahim Sadeq as he was called on his Kuwaiti passport and Mr Mohammed Sadeq as he was called on his Saudi Arabian passport. The pages of both had entry and exit visits in a dozen languages and a spectrum of colours. Mr Sadeq was a much-travelled man.

  Even now detectives from Cannon Row were checking his background — that is if it was checkable — at the two embassies involved.

  Macrae had no faith in embassies. In his experience they were almost invariably closed when he needed them or evasive when they were open.

  ‘Excuse me, sir.’ He turned to a young uniformed PC. ‘Phone call for you, sir. From a Mr Goat.’

  Macrae took it in his office. ‘Good day to you, Reverend,’ he said.

  There was a dark, throaty chuckle at the other end of the line.

  ‘Good day to you, Mr Macrae. I’ve come up with some details on our joint project.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘It seems that my brother in Christ finds the maidens of this land most comely. He also seeks variety, and that does not come cheaply.’

  Macrae thought of Rambo with his string of ex-circus girls: fireaters, jugglers, whip artists — but no, it would be too coincidental.

  ‘Who’s the ponce?’

  ‘Remember PC, Mr Macrae. We’re all sex-industry workers nowadays. I don’t think you’d know him. Anyway I promised confidentiality.’

  ‘OK. Go on.’

  ‘It appears that to pay for his pleasures the Bishop of Zombo has had to sell much of the Church plate.’

  ‘The Zambezi Chalice?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Macrae waited. ‘Any more?’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s it. Oh yes, the chalice is at present with Lymans of Bond Street.’

  ‘All right, laddie, you’ve done well.’

  ‘Goodbye, Superintendent. I wish I could say it had been a pleasure.’

  Later Macrae passed this information to Silver. ‘You see what the bugger’s done?’

  ‘Reported it as a theft for the insurance?’

  ‘Don’t think so. Not if he’s placed it with a dealer. No, my bet it’s to con his mother. Tell her it was stolen. Lots of burglaries in the area. Why not? And a copy of his statement to the police in the letter home. With any luck she sends him money to buy another.’

  ‘And more comely maidens.’

  ‘You’re learning, Sergeant. And you can bet that the missionaries who went out from here all over the world in the last century… you can bet they fiddled the books sometimes.’

  ‘You’re a cynic, guv’nor.’

  ‘So will you be, laddie, when you’ve been in this business as long as I have.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘Irony, Superintendent. Life is filled with irony, wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘Aye, I’m sure that’s so, sir.’

  ‘I mean to say William Wilberforce was the first and greatest of the emancipators while Captain Bullfinch Lamb was an out and out slaver. And here am I, named for both.’

  Macrae and Silver were sitting in the director’s office of the Slave Emancipation Society in Southwark. It occupied a Georgian house that fronted the Thames. The outer office was staffed by two young women who worked amid a clutter of filing cabinets, box files, newspaper files, magazine files, photocopying machines and elderly typewriters.

  The director’s office was different. It was like a stage set portraying an earlier age. Everything from the past, even the gas jets, had been preserved, and the furniture was a mixture of shiny mahogany and dark red leather.

  In the midst of this sat Mr Wilberforce Lamb, small, spry, and nut-brown. Leo guessed he was in his seventies.

  Around the walls of the office were engravings of West African barracoons in the eighteenth century, others showed the grim interiors of slave ships in the Middle Passage, and there was a large painting of HMS Teaser capturing a slaver off the African coast in 1857.

  ‘People think that slavery is a thing of the past,’ said Mr Lamb. ‘Couldn’t be more wrong.’

  ‘Today?’ Leo’s voice was sceptical.

  Mr Lamb looked at him in irritated amusement. ‘Because you don’t see or hear about that sort of thing’ — he pointed to the painting of HMS Teaser — ‘it doesn’t mean slavery has gone away. Oh, no, my boy, it’s alive and well and living all over the globe. People forget it was only in 1965 that the Roman Catholic Church came out against slavery. They’d been pondering the question for nearly two thousand years and finally decided it was not a good thing.

  ‘There are still plus or minus two hundred million slaves in the world, from people working off debt bondage, to serfs, to women sold in marriage, and to the child soldiers made to clean up the minefields after the Iran-Iraq war.’

  As he spoke his voice had been rising until he finally rose himself. Leo thought he looked like an enraged garden gnome.

  ‘Go and ask the child protection agencies what happens to half the kids who go missing… Go and —’

  ‘We will, sir, we will,’ Macrae said, cutting across him. Mr Lamb’s passion had caused him to go pink in the face. ‘But we’ve come about a particular person.’

  Wilberforce Lamb subsided gently into his chair. ‘Right, then. To be specific. From what you tell me she’s a Filipina. They’re the commonest servant/slaves in Britain. There are probably between a thousand and two thousand in London alone. Some are treated reasonably well, but others, like your girl, are made to sleep on floors or in passageways, given a few scraps to eat, treated like dogs. They are what I would call modern-day slaves.’

  ‘You mean this girl qualifies as a slave in the real sense?’

  The moment he
spoke Leo regretted it.

  ‘There is only one “sense”. Is she or isn’t she? Let me give you a typical case: poor Filipino family needs money desperately. Can’t save because the wages in the Philippines are so low. Can’t go to banks or money lenders because they can’t repay and have no collateral anyway.

  ‘So one of the females in the family offers herself as a domestic worker. And believe me we get all kinds, from school teachers to engineers. One woman engineer who worked in London as a servant was earning thirty-seven pounds a month at home. A qualified engineer! She could earn five times that amount by doing domestic labour here in London.

  ‘So… anyway… our woman goes to an agency in Manila who places her, for a fee of around a thousand pounds, with a family, usually wealthy Arabs, Pakistanis or Indians. The family often has a home in London and the servant enters the country with them.’

  Macrae said, ‘But how would she get a work permit? I mean — ’

  ‘Because in spite of campaigns by organizations like ourselves, and just plain common humanity, the British Government lets them in on work visas provided they remain with the family who brings them in. Can’t work for anyone else. You see the problem?’

  ‘No,’ Leo said.

  Mr Lamb moved restlessly in his chair. ‘Come along, come along. You say you found her passport in the murdered man’s desk. You’re supposed to be a detective, aren’t you? The employer takes away her passport, and then she’s trapped. Can’t work for anyone else; can’t travel without her passport, doesn’t have any money. Because the employer is still paying off the Manila agency on her behalf.’ He threw up his hands.

  ‘We’ve had cases that would make strong men weep. Sexual abuse, physical abuse — and it’s the Arab wives who are the worst — starvation… beatings… imprisonment in dark rooms, even cupboards. Goodness me, I despair of the human race sometimes.’

  ‘But what if she does run?’ Macrae said. ‘Where could she go?’

  ‘Limbo. Can’t turn to anyone, much less the police.’ He leaned back. ‘If she killed him after what you say he did to her then I say good riddance.’

  ‘Unfortunately we can’t,’ Macrae said.

  ‘I suppose not. Where would she go? Let’s see. There are one or two agencies who deal with Filipina work problems but someone on the run without a passport might decide not to go to them because she’d know what their advice would be: give yourself up. And that would mean deportation — and the object of the exercise is to earn money, don’t forget.’

  ‘She might go to an agency and offer herself as a cleaner or something like that,’ Leo said.

  ‘Excellent!’ Mr Lamb spoke as though Leo, a backward student, was showing sudden promise. ‘Unscrupulous agencies place these people in even more grisly households. Often they can retrieve the passport from the original employer by threatening to expose them to the police for ill treatment. That’s just a sham, really.

  Most agencies wouldn’t dare go to the police. But the Arabs don’t know that.

  ‘And now, of course, the Filipina has a real problem. She is no longer legally in this country. She’s changed employers, you see. She no longer has even a modicum of protection. Her new employer can do with her as he likes: pay her or not pay her, feed her or not feed her, abuse her or not abuse her.’

  ‘Slavery,’ Leo said.

  ‘Good boy,’ said Mr Lamb.

  *

  ‘A roof garden?’ Sophia said. ‘Oh, yes, I see.’

  ‘It’s not supposed to be Kew,’ Zoe said. ‘This is Pimlico.’

  Sophia had phoned earlier in the day to say she was coming up to London and could they meet. Zoe had suggested that her mother come to the flat and have a drink. Sophia had brought her own camomile tea and was now drinking it as Zoe gave her the tour.

  ‘That’s the old Battersea power station,’ she said, pointing south across the Thames to the four great chimneys.

  ‘Very phallic,’ Sophia said. ‘I hope they don’t affect Leo.’

  ‘In what way?’ Zoe’s voice was carefully neutral.

  ‘Well, that kind of thing was supposed to have affected Christie. There was a long factory chimney at the end of his street. Can’t remember — yes, I can — Rillington Place. And every time he looked out of his window he saw this chimney — and look what he did! Murdered his wife and two other women. Or was it three? And then had sexual relations with them.’ She sat down in one of the deck chairs. ‘The pansies need dead-heading. You should have gone to one of the nurseries. They’d have sent a professional to plan it properly and give you a start.’

  ‘I’ll mention it to Leo. Tell him to ask for a raise. Look, let’s not talk about the garden. The important thing is how you and Daddy are getting on.’

  ‘That’s why I came up to town. I had to get away. Harold’s still there.’

  ‘What? A menage a trois?’

  ‘Don’t be disgusting, dear. There’s no menage of any kind — if that’s what you mean. No, Harold’s sleeping in his bus in the garden.’

  ‘And Father doesn’t mind?’

  ‘Mind? He positively welcomes it! He and Harold are as thick as anything.’

  ‘Harold struck me as pretty thick by himself.’

  ‘Not in some ways. Anyway, I don’t like it at all. It’s unnatural. I mean think how you’d feel if you lived with your estranged husband and your… well, your former lover… ?’

  ‘Mother! You never told me Harold was your lover.’

  ‘I never said he wasn’t either.’

  ‘I’m really shocked.’

  ‘Don’t be so conventional!’

  ‘Me? Conventional?’

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  ‘Because I’m not a hippie? Because I wash and go to work and earn my bread?’

  ‘You live with a policeman. There’s nothing more conventional than that.’

  ‘He is not a policeman. He’s a detective and he’s Jewish and he went to university. Nothing conventional about that. Anyway, let’s not fight. It’s too hot.’

  ‘Yes, let’s not.’

  ‘Go on about Harold and Daddy.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can.’

  ‘Good lord, they're not having an affair, are they?’

  ‘Of course not. You’ve got a rather dirty mind, darling. I’ve always said so.’

  ‘That’s my line.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘Well, Harold and your father are always going off to the pub together and on walks. And it’s very humiliating. I mean Harold wanted to marry me, and your father wanted me back — at least I think he did — and now they never ask me to go with them. It’s as though Brian has found the son he never had.’

  ‘Harold, my brother! Thanks a lot.’

  And they sit talking and planning. They wanted to build a windmill to generate electricity but then they discovered that the wind didn’t blow much in that part of Surrey and even if it did it would take nearly a hundred years to pay for itself. So they’ve gone on to… She paused, unable to continue.

  ‘Here, let me get you a proper drink.’

  Zoe poured her mother a glass of wine.

  ‘That’s better,’ Sophia said. ‘Camomile tea gets me down after a while.’

  ‘I’m waiting.’

  ‘They’re going to make gas. I think it’s called methane. Anyway it’s the most ghastly thing you’ve ever heard of. They were talking about it all last night. Making drawings of something called a “digester”.’

  ‘A digester! Ugh! Wait a second. Methane. That’s the gas you get from — ’

  ‘Dung. Ordure. Slurry. Animal waste. Oh, God, the very thought of it!’

  ‘And this thing digests the — ’

  ‘Don’t go on about it.’

  ‘But I thought you were part of all this. It’s “green”, isn’t it?’ ‘It’s brown. And they’re even talking about using — I can hardly bring myself to think of it — human waste.’

  ‘Have another
drink.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  They sat back in their deck chairs and stared at each other. Zoe said, ‘Just suppose it works, that you get gas from this… this digester. What on earth are you going to do with it?’

  Sophia looked at her with large, solemn eyes. ‘Cook with it,’ she said.

  *

  Trevor’s mum said, ‘You’re early.’

  Trevor pushed past her into the flat.

  ‘You’re not sick, are you?’

  He didn’t feel like talking, didn’t feel like seeing her, or being in the same flat, or on the same planet. But if he didn’t reply she’d get upset and he didn’t feel like that either.

  ‘I’ve got a headache,’ he said.

  ‘Poor little soldier. Take some aspirin. There’s some in the bathroom cupboard.’

  ‘They upset my stomach. I’ll lie down.’

  ‘Let me see you. Oh, Trevor, your face is so white.’ She put her hand on his brow. ‘And you’re perspiring.’

  ‘It’s hot, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘Let me see your hands.’

  ‘I’m sick of this.’

  He went into his room and locked the door.

  She knocked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s my “circle” tonight.’

  She had what she called a ‘beauty circle’ once a fortnight. Half a dozen women on the council estate about her own age and circumstances would give each other face packs and shampoos and do their nails and hair, all under her instructions. She would also give them tea and potted meat sandwiches or something similar. For this they paid a nominal fee and were expected to buy their shampoos and cold creams from her afterwards. Mrs Tulley got these at wholesale prices from a small cosmetics company she had worked for in the 1950s. It was a way of supplementing her pension.

  Once, some years before, Trevor had entered the lounge when her mother was teaching the ‘circle’ an exercise in which the ladies moved their elbows back to expand their chests, saying, with each movement, ‘I must… improve… my bust!’

  The embarrassment had been shattering for everyone, and after that Trevor usually liked to go out on his mother’s ‘circle’ nights.

  ‘I won’t come in,’ he said.