Carver sat back with a sigh.
“Why go to the locker first?”
“When they run, they take their things with them. If they’ve just sneaked out for a night on the town or to meet a boyfriend or something, the clothes are still there.”
“This happen often?”
Johnson was staring at Thackeray with a venomous expression.
Clearly, the man was letting out more than his boss wanted. Equally clearly, once started, he was going to be impossible to stop.
“More often than we would like,” he admitted, meeting his superior’s eye squarely.
“How...”
“Just a minute,” Lovegod interrupted. “I think this is becoming police business. Just how often do kids get out of here, Mr Thackeray?”
“Thirty in the past year.”
“All reported to the police. Half found instantly. I can show you...”
“Just a minute. I’m coming to you,” Lovegod told him. “Is this the normal number of runaways from a home of this size?”
“No, it isn’t,” said Thackeray, firmly. “But the numbers are rising steadily all round. Aren’t they, Mr Johnson?”
Johnson nodded. It looked as though he was having a tooth pulled without anesthetic.
“Much as it pains me to admit it,” he said with an I’ll-talk-to-you-later look at Thackeray, “I have to admit we are finding it hard to cope with. We have to tread a very delicate line between too much control and too little. There are habitual absconders and we naturally keep a very careful eye on those. But this is not a prison, after all. We can’t treat the children as criminals. In a supportive and liberal system there have to be open doors and unguarded gates. We’re not trying to run a modern poorhouse. On the other hand the price we pay for that system – which works very well with the vast majority of children – is that from time to time it is abused by a minority.”
“And some of them,” said Carver grimly, “end up dead.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“You’ve got company,” said Lovegod as they turned the corner and the Daihatsu came into view. Carver crossed the road and walked up to the car. The man sitting in the driving seat, playing the radio and smoking was compact and fair haired. He was wearing a pink sports top, faded jeans and trainers.
“Morning, Carver,” he said without moving. “Nice car.”
“Well, Hi there Larry,” said Carver. “Thought I might find you here. You got my message.”
“Yeah.” Manning swung his legs out of the Daihatsu and dropped onto the road. He landed lightly like an athlete. Lovegod got a whiff of perfume.
“Morning, Mr Lovegod. Sorry to find you in bad company.”
Lovegod nodded.
“Larry. I didn’t realise you were out.”
“Good behaviour, Mr Lovegod,” said Manning. But he never took his eyes off Carver. “I was a good boy, and they let me out early. Bit of luck, really, Mr Lovegod. I might have missed a reunion otherwise.”
Carver smiled like a cat. His eyes looked sleepy.
“I’m busy and I’ve got no business with you, Larry,” he said.
“If you’re wise you’ll leave it that way. Otherwise get started now. I’m in a hurry.”
“I know. Irene disappeared,” said Manning.
There was the kind of stillness Lovegod had once heard before the buildings of Agadir fell about his ears in a long gone holiday far away. Carver’s eyes did not look sleepy any more.
“Suddenly, I do have business with you, Larry-boy,” he said.
“Go on.”
Manning grinned into his face. “Nothing. I just heard she’s gone missing from the Mowhitty. Not the first won’t be the last, Carver. Just gone, that’s all.”
“That isn’t enough,” said Carver. “Not nearly enough, Larry-boy. I think you can tell me more.”
Manning twisted adroitly away and ran a couple of steps up the pavement.
“Maybe I can and maybe I can’t, you bastard,” he said through his teeth. “But you can put your shirt on one thing. I ain’t going to!”
He moved a few paces further back, but Carver didn’t move. He just stood, watching the man, waiting.
“You put me away, you shit! You put me away! I was gone – on my way and you came and brought me back and they stuck me in that place. You any idea what it’s like for a gay, doing porridge? They hurt me, Carver! They really hurt me! Now it’s your turn. I’m going to hurt you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
He was round the corner and off before Lovegod could get to him. The policeman swore.
“Don’t worry about him,” Carver said. “I know where he lives. I’ll have a word with him later. Help me check out the car.”
Lovegod looked as though he had swallowed razor blades.
“Now, Carver,” he said, “I’m an older man these days. I can’t cope with violence the way I used to.”
Carver brought his head out from the under the bonnet and started to check the wheels. One was loose, and he swore gently, produced a wheel nut from his pocket and screwed it firmly into place, with a wrench from under the dashboard.
“That’ll be it,” he said. “Let’s go. Where was the next place we’re going to visit?”
“What about Larry-Boy Manning?”
“What about him?”
“You going to leave him alone?”
Carver laughed.
“Larry-boy’s just a spiteful little fag who latched onto something and now he’s using it to try and hurt me. If he knew anything, he’d have said it,” he said. “Forget it.”
“Why don’t I feel reassured?” complained the policeman, climbing into the passenger seat, and reaching for the safety belt automatically. The diesel wheezed into life and the car swung out of the space and pulled out onto the main road.
“Gently this time, for the love of God,” he said. “I can’t take Rambo driving.”
“Where to?” said Carver. “Left or right? And where are we going?”
“Left,” said Lovegod. “We’re going to see a slave driver.”
*
Alison Sugrue looked, thought Carver, like a dumpy Florence Nightingale – the real thing, not the dewy-eyed ministering angel of the Victorian paintings. A hard, determined woman whose passion left no room for any other emotion and whose obsession left no room for any other interest.
The room itself was a strange place. Perched on the tip of a triangular Victorian building, it was circular and its ceiling was a dome, elegantly finished with lavish plaster moldings now submerged in a century of emulsion. At one time it must have been a charming turret room.
Now, it was a place of nightmare.
Not an inch of wall space could be seen, because of the photographs which had been pasted, tacked, pinned or stuck into place. And from every picture, eyes stared out.
There were pictures of shackled people, some black, some white, many Asian.
There were pictures of luxurious apartments in which naked and semi-naked women reclined on overstuffed furniture.
There were pictures of boys, small and thin or round and chubby, working at machinery made oversized by their own tiny proportions, or sitting or standing in surroundings which varied between disgusting and decent.
There were chain gangs in fields and crop-pickers moving among bushes and fishermen fishing and cane cutters cutting cane.
There were miners and quarry workers, cooks and cleaners, porters and painters.
They all had one thing in common. Their eyes held no hope. Only suffering.
In a line around the room, about hip height, hung instruments of repression like an echo from the middle ages.
There were manacles and leg irons, waist belts and collars, head cages and gags. Between them hung whips and truncheons, spiked sticks and electric cattle prods.
“Does my office shock you, Mr Carver? It should.”
The woman who spent her working life in
the geometric centre of this catalogue of cruelty was a completely incongruous figure.
She was round and soft and comfortable. Her grey hair was piled on top of her head like a cottage loaf and through it two pencils had been pushed at right-angles. Her robin-bright, blue eyes sparkled at him over the gold frame of a pair of half moon spectacles.
When she smiled, well worn laugh lines webbed her cheeks, and there was a deep, warm, cosy quality in her voice when she talked. She would have looked completely at home in a village cake shop.
In this chamber of horrors, she was as out of place as a nun on a battlefield.
“Slaves,” she said brightly as though she was recommending a candied peel in a cake recipe. “Slaves every one of them. Bond slaves or sex slaves or work slaves or just plain old fashioned field slaves. Looks like a page out of history, doesn’t it? But every one of those photographs was taken within the last twelve months, Mr Carver. I keep my collection up to date, oh yes indeed.”
There was no part of the room from which the eyes could not be seen, staring out of their misery into a hopeless future. No way to turn a back to the appeal, no way to escape the accusation.
“I don’t know how you stay sane,” he said to the motherly creator of the place.
She hooted with laughter.
“What makes you think I do, Mr Carver? How would you tell in this insane world, anyway?”
Carver knew obsession when he saw it, and ducked out of that one. He waited instead for Lovegod to explain why they were there.
“Allie,” said the policeman. “Tell Carver about the slave racket in North Africa.”
Her eyebrow twitched.
“North Africa?” she said, turning towards a filing cabinet. “Now there’s an interesting area, wouldn’t you say, Lovegod? Lovely spots there in North Africa. Know how much a blonde thirteen-year-old virgin will raise in North Africa, Carver?”
“No? Well, I’ll tell you. A virgin of either sex would raise around twenty thousand pounds. A very special one – platinum blonde, for instance, with good bone structure and no health problems – twice that much. Peachy, hey?
“Then you get the trained ones. Speak several languages. Value works of art. Play musical instruments to concert standards. You can double the price again. Triple it, maybe. Not bad, eh? Good price. Not as much as you’d give for a blood horse, but then human beings are easier to get than horses. You can’t pull a horse into a car and drive off with it, for instance. You can’t take a horse through customs without someone asking some very pointed questions about its medical papers, home, and destination. You can’t rely on the horse’s mother selling it off for the money to bring up the rest of her family. Worst of all, you can’t train a horse to obey through a system of whispered threats. And you can’t work a horse close to death in public without someone, somewhere, protesting about it.”
She had a deep, pleasing voice and a lightly amused expression on her face as she ran through her prepared speech.
“See those?” she pointed at a line of filing cabinets within arm’s reach of her desk. “Newspaper cuttings, Carver. Try one at random?”
She dipped into a drawer and handed him a slip of card on which a tiny scrap of newsprint had been glued.
“GIPSY CHILDREN HELD BY POLICE” read the headline. The body of the type was only three paragraphs long.
“Yugoslav police have foiled a new attempt to smuggle gipsy children abroad to be sold or trained as petty criminals,” said the story.
“A man and ten children were detained at the border village of Badina as they were about to cross illegally into Italy. Earlier this year, four Yugoslavs trying to smuggle 11 children into Italy were arrested by Austrian police. Reuters.”
He stared at the clipping until his eyes began to water.
“Are you trying to tell me that Irene has been kidnapped by some kind of white slave ring?” he asked huskily.
Two pairs of eyes watched his and waited.
“But how?”
“Easy,” said Lovegod. “She’s in a children’s home. She’s got nobody – literally nobody – to look after her, to keep after her. She has the same rights as anybody else. What about you? What about the police?”
“Chase white slavers? You jest!” Lovegod sneered. “White slavers, Lovegod? You’ve been seeing too many Fu Manchu movies on telly! White slavers in this day and age? Those kids – they’re dead, Lovegod, in some stinking culvert somewhere, and we’ll find them sooner or later. Only we don’t. Not all of them. Not even many of them. Any idea how many kids there are just picking up their traps and going missing every day in this country, Carver? There are three hundred listed missing by Scotland Yard at this very moment, and that’s just the official figure. There are hundreds more of them, but the parents haven’t reported it or the local bobby hasn’t got round to listing them yet. Some turn up in London, working as prostitutes. Boys or girls. Makes no difference. With some of them, it’s better than the home they ran away from anyway. Some get fed up and go back home. Some have been murdered. Some have just had accidents and never been found. But some of them are being taken off and made into slaves, Carver. I’m certain of it, and I won’t have it. Not on my patch. Not now.”
For the first time in years Carver felt lost. It was a new feeling. Usually, he could handle almost any situation. But this one stunned him.
When he had heard that Irene was missing and believed to he dead, he had been horrified, but his grief had given way to a determination to find her killer.
Then had come the picture in the magazine, and the knowledge that she was still alive or at any rate had been only a few weeks ago.
Now, the repulsive possibilities opened up by Lovegod’s account put him into a mental turmoil. Alive – but in the hands of slavers.
“I have heard of modern slavery,” he admitted. “But I didn’t think that there was much of it in Europe.”
“Peter Davies at the Anti Slavery Society reckoned a couple of years ago that there are probably more slaves in the world today than there were when William Wilberforce was alive,” said the woman grimly.
“In Mauretania, one out of three of the population is born slaves. Old fashioned owned slaves. In Italy, there are kids working in factories for twelve hours a day six days a week. They don’t go home. They’re there. That picture...” she swung round in her chair and pointed at one. “That one there. That was taken in Italy last month. Last MONTH!”
She reached out and grabbed one of the chains attached to the wall.
“You know what these are? They’re leg irons. Antiques? Not on your Nellie! Made in Birmingham last year. How about this little lot then? Ain’t they the cat’s pyjamas? This has been described to me as the ultimate instrument of torture.”
She got out of her chair and took the contraption off the wall. It was a rigid steel bar with shackles at each end.
“You fasten the wrists in this lot and the ankles in the other. Sound simple, pussy cat? Nothing very terrible about that, is there?”
“Not when they’re fastened in front,” said Carver. “When they put you in it backwards, with your hands behind you, it’s a different matter.”
She looked dashed.
“You’ve seen them before?”
“A few weeks ago, I was wearing one,” said Carver expressionlessly. He held out his hands and her breath caught in her throat when she saw the newly healed skin over the raw places on his wrists.
“Is it very bad?”
“It’s bad. The cramp starts in the legs but after a while it’s everywhere,” he said, trying to sound clinical. The sweat was making his skin itch.
“Imagine spending a month in it, then,” she said.
“A month?”
“The man it was taken off had spent a month fastened to it. They had to hose him down before they could get it off. It was sticking to him.”
Carver shut his mind against the memory and the thought of the agonies
the unknown sufferer must have born.
“And now?”
“He won’t walk again. Or do anything much, I imagine. His mind is very sorely disturbed.”
“Where was he found?”
“Paris,” she said, and watched him for a reaction.
“Paris,” he said flatly. “Not in North Africa.”
“Not in North Africa. But they have to get them from somewhere, don’t they? Have you been in Paris recently, Mr Carver?”
“No,” he said. “Or at any rate, not to stay.”
“I am told they have gangs of young pickpockets there. About nine or ten year olds. Once, they were just gipsy children. Now many of them are bought slaves like the ones in your cutting,” she said pointing to the newsprint. “Nice racket, eh, buster?”
The odd bite of slang with which she larded her business like manner were as out of place as she was herself. Carver had to fight against the slowly growing suspicion that he had somehow become involved in a Lewis Carroll story.
“But what proof have we that Irene is involved?” he said, determined to bring the conversation back to reality at least.
“None. But she has disappeared from London and you have proof there that she is alive and in France, No explanation,” said Lovegod. “Where’s your imagination, Carver? Isn’t it better that she’s at least alive?”
“Not necessarily,” said Carver. There was a faraway look on his face and Lovegod, who had a pictorial memory, felt the hair begin to lift on the back of his neck.
“Any ideas?” he said.
“I know the Arabs,” said Carver simply. “I’ve been there. Death is not the worst thing that can happen to you. Particularly if you happen to be female.”
CHAPTER SIX
It had been a satisfactory day for Larry Manning. He had risen late, done some excellent business in his own field, cemented a friendship with a young man of like mind and habits to his own, and even tasted the sweet and heady flavour of revenge.
A rather petty revenge, it had to be admitted. He would love to have been able to tell Harry Carver exactly what had happened to his beloved daughter. But Larry had learned to be very careful indeed how much he let out and saying too much was as dangerous as it might have been satisfying.
The Guardian Page 5
