Death by Design

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘But is that our business if those factories are in Vietnam, Mr Üner? Isn’t it a bit arrogant of us sitting on our well-fed behinds here in the west to tell people in places like Vietnam where and how they can work?’

  ‘Possibly but—’

  ‘And what about places where there is no alternative but to work in these factories? And by the way, you still haven’t managed to explain where the funding of terrorism comes into this, have you?’

  It wasn’t the best interview Haluk Üner had ever given. But then Graham Amphill was not giving him an easy time – not that he ever really gave anyone an easy time. But Haluk Üner was a lawyer, he was a professional and he was mayor of London. He smiled.

  ‘Graham,’ he said, ‘this connection doesn’t come from me. I haven’t just made it up in order to underwrite what some have described as my obsession with the counterfeiters. The acting commissioner of police tells me it is so. The Metropolitan Police, in concert with other forces across the country – notably Greater Manchester – have established links between counterfeit production in the UK and abroad, and terrorist organisations they say may include al Qaeda.’

  ‘May . . .’

  ‘Al Qaeda is by its very nature a secretive organisation,’ Haluk Üner said. ‘What ordinary people like you and me know about it is minimal, Graham. But what our security services know is rather more extensive, thank God.’

  ‘And so you just take their word for it?’

  ‘Yes.’ The mayor of London sat up straight in his chair and looked his interrogator square in the eye. ‘I have to. Without other information to the contrary, I have no choice. If the police tell me that these counterfeit operations have links to terrorism then I have to believe them. I have to err on the side of caution, I have to protect Londoners, that is my job. What would you have me do, Graham? Take risks with people’s lives? Good God, if I did that, people like you would come down on me like a ton of bricks!’

  Inspector Patrick Riley of the Metropolitan Police raised his beer can in salute. Personally he hadn’t voted for Haluk, not because he was Turkish but because he’d voted for the Liberal candidate. He always did. But in spite of his initial misgivings, he had to admit that Haluk Üner was doing a good job. Although he’d only been in office a few months, he’d already committed to new children’s play areas and announced several affordable housing schemes, in spite of the fact that economists were forecasting a recession. Downturn or not, the capital had to have more homes, it was just a fact. And then there was his stand on knock-off goods. God, but he had the bit between his teeth about that! Maybe it was the connection to terrorism that got him so agitated. Some said that it was because he was a Muslim and so wanted to prove himself willing to tackle terror plots of all kinds. Riley didn’t have any view on that, he didn’t know Haluk Üner personally or otherwise. But what he had seen of the man he liked. Giving Graham Amphill a verbal run for his money was a joy to see in itself! But then he thought about counterfeit goods once again and his face dropped. What, he wondered, was Ahmet Ülker and the even more shadowy people who ran illegal goods in the capital doing while they watched Haluk Üner on the TV? Were they sneering, laughing, shouting threats at their fifty-inch flat screen digital God-knows-what entertainment hubs?

  When Riley finally reached his sparse and lonely bedroom in the early hours of the morning, he wondered where that other Turk, his İstanbul colleague Çetin İkmen, was now. If everything was going to plan he was probably on his way out of Germany.

  İkmen knew that his driver, who looked like a very much younger version of Wolfgang, would not make it to Calais on the French coast that night. He had no idea how many kilometres Calais was from Berlin but he knew enough geography to know that it would take more than just a few hours. Before they left Kreuzberg, the driver stopped at an ATM machine and told İkmen to withdraw three thousand euros. He’d known this was coming and so he handed the money over without complaint. Only then did the journey begin in earnest.

  The truck was carrying bratwurst and other German sausages to the UK. They apparently liked them over there and the truck was refrigerated in order to preserve the meat on its journey across Europe. If, as İkmen suspected, this man whose name he never learned was Wolfgang’s son, transporting pork products was rather a strange occupation for a Jew to be doing. But then he imagined that religion probably meant very little to someone like Wolfgang. How could anyone who had been through the camps, maybe even suffered at the hands of the Stasi afterwards, believe in anything even remotely divine?

  While they travelled across Germany, İkmen rode up front in the cab with the man. Neither of them spoke although İkmen was heartened to see that his driver smoked almost as much as he did and so they both puffed the miles away in fairly convivial silence. Only on the approach to the Belgian border did this state of affairs change. The man pulled the truck into a deserted lane and told İkmen to get out. He also pulled a gun out of the pocket of his anorak. It had the instant effect of making İkmen’s heart pound.

  ‘What . . . er . . .’ All his German banished by fear, he spoke in English now. Had he been cheated by Wolfgang and his son? Was this where he died, in some muddy German country lane? His head began to spin. But then he noticed that the man had something else as well as the gun in his hands. It was a sandwich. He thrust it at İkmen.

  ‘You people don’t eat pork,’ he said. ‘It’s beetroot.’

  ‘Beetroot?’

  ‘Now you must get in here.’ The man climbed up back into the cab and opened up a small hatch behind the driver’s seat. It was a very small opening.

  ‘You can take the sandwich with you, for the journey,’ the man said.

  ‘I get in . . .’

  ‘It is dark and it is too small for you to do anything other than stand. But it will get you over the border into Belgium and then later across the English Channel to Dover. Get in.’

  It wasn’t easy, even for someone of İkmen’s slight build. First he had to bend double and then somehow thread his body through the hatch and into the pitch-black gap behind the cab. At one point he thought he couldn’t actually do it, which was when he realised why his driver had a gun.

  ‘It is get in there or I shoot you now and throw your body into a ditch,’ the man said. ‘We cannot have failure. Failure for us means that we are found out. Now get in. As soon as we have cleared the border you may get back into the cab again.’

  In spite of the fact that bending that low hurt like hell, İkmen squeezed himself through the gap and then very slowly stood up in the narrow, airless space.

  ‘Eat the sandwich,’ the man said as he closed the hatch behind him. ‘It will take your mind off things.’

  And then there was utter darkness. İkmen, his hand still holding the sandwich, fought for what stale air there was in that tiny, terrifying space. Then the driver started the engine and, rendered totally blind, İkmen began his progress towards the Belgian border.

  Although İkmen did eventually manage to wind down from his sojourn in the cramped compartment, it took some time. They were about thirty kilometres beyond the border when the man let him back into the cab. When he opened the hatch, İkmen felt his body literally ache to be through it. Trembling and panting from the lack of oxygen in there, he scrambled out of the hatch and sat down, blinking in the grey Belgian light, his fingers stained by the beetroot sandwich.

  ‘You’ll have to go in again when we cross the border into France and then you’ll have to go in and stay in for the crossing to Dover when we reach Calais,’ the man said. ‘But you won’t be alone.’

  İkmen looked at him in horror. Alone, he had barely been able to breathe in there. With other people, that might well become impossible.

  ‘But—’

  ‘No one has ever died in there yet,’ the man said irritably. ‘You suddenly don’t want to go to Britain? You know what I will have to do.’ He patted the pocket of his anorak and then he smiled. İkmen felt his face drain of blood. In order to calm
himself, he lit a cigarette and kept quiet.

  Just outside Brussels, they stopped at a transport café where İkmen bought himself a very strong cup of coffee and a cheese sandwich. When he returned to the truck he saw that the driver had picked up some more passengers. A thin black man and a girl, also black and very obviously pregnant. As he approached, the girl pulled the scarf that covered her head over her face. From his small experience of Africans, İkmen deduced that they were probably Somalis. But he never found that out for certain, not even when the three of them were caged up together for eight hours while the truck driver boarded the ship at Calais, crossed the Channel and cleared the port of Dover. Engulfed by darkness and fighting for every breath, İkmen heard the man speak gently to the girl in what he just about recognised as Arabic. But the girl never once replied to whatever he said to her. She just wept and, when the driver finally dropped them off somewhere near Canterbury, she was still crying. İkmen, who thought that his drop-off point was to be the same as the Africans’, made to try and jump down from the cab, but the driver put his hand out to stop him.

  ‘You’re going to London,’ he said.

  ‘Why do you drop those other people here?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘Because they have jobs here,’ the driver said.

  As the truck pulled away, İkmen saw another vehicle pull up beside the African couple and stop. Three men, all big and leather-jacketed and blond, pushed the pair roughly into their truck and then took off at high speed. Who knew what kind of work those men had lined up for them? İkmen guessed the man would do something either dangerous or illegal or both, and the girl? She had been a pretty little thing and the men in the van had leered at her. Once her baby was delivered, he didn’t like to think too hard about what might happen to her. The man driving beside him, Wolfgang’s son as he inwardly thought of him, didn’t show a flicker of emotion, much less concern. But Wolfgang himself, İkmen felt, did really believe that he was doing some good by this. He had in the past helped people to escape from East Germany to the West. He had also intimated that he had assisted some in their flight from Hitler’s concentration camps. His view of refugees and their need to move on at any cost very obviously coloured his view. Whether or not he knew about the crime and prostitution rings that his son delivered these people to, İkmen didn’t know. Whether Wolfgang really did work in some instances for the German police he didn’t know either. Whatever the truth of the matter, he was now in the United Kingdom and as soon as he was alone, there was a phone call he had to make.

  He settled back into his seat and watched the other cars, vans and lorries on the motorway. Unlike in Turkey, where most motorists sounded their horns most of the time, here the vehicles were relatively quiet. But as he watched the traffic he noted that it was no less aggressive for all that. The British drove quietly but with a very evident and smouldering passion to be superior, fastest and best. It was then that he began to actively recall his previous visit to the UK back in the 1970s. How polite and kind he had thought the British to be at first. But then he’d gone to a few pubs and seen another side to that quiet character he did not find so impressive. The cars they drove now were much sleeker and shinier than the old Morris Minors and Ford Anglias they had driven back in the seventies; they were quite clearly much richer now than they had been then. But as the truck was passed by a madly speeding Subaru complete with passengers making rude hand gestures out of the windows, he could see that money had probably not improved them.

  Chapter 8

  * * *

  ‘I don’t want nothing what makes me look common, you get me?’ the young girl said from inside the folds of the scarf that enfolded her head and the lower part of her face. ‘Them little diamonds are well nasty.’

  The woman decorating the girl’s nails, the so-called ‘nail technician’, sighed. Why did so many of the London Turkish girls sound like Jamaicans? They didn’t really sound like that at all. In fact as soon as either their parents or other older extended family members came on the scene they reverted either to Turkish or very well-spoken English. Of course they did! Those parents had worked very hard to send these girls to schools where they were taught to speak like the late Princess Diana. Her own parents, two hundred and fifty miles to the north in Manchester, had been just the same. ‘You speak like that nice Gail from off Coronation Street,’ her mother had told her. ‘She’s northern but she speaks really nice.’

  ‘I quite like them little butterflies there,’ the girl said and pointed to a small plastic tray full of tiny, nail-sized metal butterflies. ‘They’re nice I think, ain’t it.’

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled. She didn’t like this job. It was rather too girly. It was at this moment that her very girly pink mobile phone began to ring. Luckily most people had more than one mobile these days and so she knew that none of her colleagues, other nail technicians, would think anything of her taking a previously unseen phone out of her bag. She excused herself to her client and answered it.

  ‘Hello, Ayşe here.’

  ‘Hello, Ayşe, it’s Çetin Ertegrul here,’ the smoke-dried voice on the other end replied.

  ‘Oh, Uncle Çetin!’ she said excitedly in Turkish. ‘How lovely to hear from you! Where are you at the moment?’

  The client shuffled through the boxes of nail adornments once again and sniffed slightly impatiently.

  ‘I’m outside a place called the Toulouse Patisserie. Very nice cakes, by the look of them. Anyway, it’s off Soho Square. I haven’t been to London for thirty years, I don’t recognise that much.’

  Ayşe laughed. ‘Oh, poor uncle! Listen, do you have any money?’

  ‘Yes. I took some sterling out at an ATM across the road.’

  ‘Then put yourself in a black cab and ask the driver to take you to the Marmaris Nail Bar on Stoke Newington Church Street,’ she said. ‘It’ll probably cost you about twenty pounds.’

  ‘Twenty pounds!’

  ‘Uncle, you’re in the UK now, everything costs!’ Ayşe said. ‘Just get here and then we’ll sort things out.’ She finished the call and looked at her client. ‘Sorry about that, my uncle . . .’

  ‘From Turkey?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The girl sniffed again and then said, ‘I think now I’ll go for butterflies on the fingers and then one of them Chanel logos on each of the thumbs. That is cool.’

  Ayşe smiled as she assembled her materials. Well, at least her colleague from İstanbul had finally made it. Soon, with luck, her ‘Uncle’ Çetin would become integrated into the community and maybe get a really dodgy job. Then, hopefully, she could ship out of this hellish ‘beauty’ parlour and get back to doing what she did best. Ayşe Kudu was one of Greater Manchester police force’s few female officers trained to carry and use firearms. Fiddling about with tinfoil butterflies was most definitely not what she was accustomed to.

  ‘So why did we come here?’ İkmen asked as he sat himself down on the cold wooden bench beside her. While the light still held, his ‘niece’ had taken him to a place called Abney Park, which was actually a graveyard. They each had a small doner kebab. Quite what it was with these people in Europe and meetings in graveyards, İkmen didn’t know. But the kebab was nice.

  Ayşe said, ‘Because on a weekday no one else comes here. There’s the odd drunk and the occasional jogger but the illegals are generally too superstitious to hang out in a foreign graveyard and there’s no need for any of those who exploit them to come here. You and I can talk.’

  ‘And so you are . . .’

  ‘I am a nail technician. I’m thirty-three, I’m single and I come originally from Manchester where my parents run a kebab shop. My name is Ayşe Ertegrul and you are my uncle, my dad’s brother from İstanbul. You’ve come in illegally to find work because you’ve got money problems back home.’

  ‘My son-in-law cannot work and my daughter Çiçek is pregnant,’ İkmen said. ‘I’ll take anything I can get.’ Now that he’d finished his kebab he lit a cigarette. Ayşe pulled a face. />
  ‘You know that smoking has been banned in all enclosed spaces over here, don’t you?’ she said.

  İkmen nodded. ‘And yet you see many people smoking on the street, outside offices and pubs,’ he said. ‘Everyone smoked when I came here in the nineteen seventies. Many people still seem to do so.’

  ‘It’ll take years yet to get rid of the habit completely,’ Ayşe said with rather more glee than İkmen liked. ‘But anyway, look, I’ve managed to get you a room in a place called the Rize Guest House which is basically a big house on Leswin Road. My own bedsit is on the same street and so I’ll be near at hand if you need me. The Rize is owned and run by a man called Abdullah Yigit. He’s not too bothered about who takes rooms in his place, which is why I’ve put you in there. Also we know that at least two of the men currently living in the Rize are working for Ahmet Ülker. Both illegals. One is called Reşat Doğan and the other Süleyman Elgiz. Doğan works at what is the public face of Yacoubian Industries which is a leather clothes shop here on Church Street. Basically he sells intricate and over-the-top leather jackets to Turkish teenagers and very tailored and smart versions to British middle-class mummies. Elgiz, however, works at one or other of Ülker’s factories in Hackney Wick. Ülker owns two big old industrial units down there. It’s where the leather clothing he sells in his shop and elsewhere is made. It is also, we believe, the source of the vast numbers of fake handbags, purses and sunglasses that Ülker’s gang, and others, flood this city with. In recent weeks we’ve also received some intelligence to suggest that Ülker may well be importing fake drugs from Africa and storing them in these units. Basically, these places are slave factories. Süleyman Elgiz works there and enjoys the luxury of living out in Stoke Newington. We know that most of the illegal workers down at Hackney Wick also live on the site.’