Leaving her bag on her seat to be guarded by the kind-looking Aruban woman next to her, George took the dregs of her gin and a packet of cigarettes to be alone at the back of the ship with the other smokers. She needed to process all that had come to pass in the last four hours.
After several failed attempts in the stiff North Sea wind, with the shoreline of the Hoek van Holland growing small and insignificant in the distance, George lit her cigarette and watched the foaming wake that trailed behind the ferry, hoping to cast her regrets into the sea and look only ahead to the future. Van den Bergen was a dick and had chosen his adult daughter over his long-term girlfriend, sacrificing the happiness in his own life to service that of a child who had a life of her own and who wouldn’t thank him for it.
As she had hastily packed sufficient clothes to last her a week or so, he had called for a fleeting two minutes to tell her how concerned he was that some guy had delivered a complimentary organic veg box to Tamara, and how he was convinced it was some kind of threat. Crapping on about how he feared for his daughter’s safety, as if malformed carrots and unwashed potatoes were calling cards for death.
‘Paranoid old bastard,’ George said, flicking her ash over the railing, though the treacherous wind whipped the ash back onto her, covering her nearly new duffel in smudges of shitty grey. ‘Best part of ten years.’ She exhaled heavily, annoyed when hiccoughs sucked the air out of her lungs and put paid to her smoking attempts, as though Van den Bergen had somehow foiled her from across the waves. ‘All that time and sod all to show for it.’
‘Talking to yourself, pet?’
She turned to her right and drank in the sight of an oversized Geordie who looked, judging by the plaster on his workmen’s boots, as though he had been working over the water and had just finished a shift. He reeked of stale alcohol and unwashed arse.
George wrinkled her nose and put her cigarettes and lighter in her pocket. ‘Only time I get a sensible answer, innit?’
‘I thought you were trying to chat us up, like. Fancy a top-up on your disco-lemonade? You look as though you could use it.’
Jesus. He was hitting on her. George flushed hot, suddenly feeling claustrophobic in the wide-open space. More so when she noticed the three other men behind him, similarly dressed, whose red noses and whisky breath attested to rather more than the effects of the sea breeze on a cold autumnal evening.
‘No, ta.’
She clutched her coat tighter to her, taking a step towards the door. The warmth of the ferry’s stuffy interior beckoned. Except, as she pulled the door open, she felt a hand grab at the back of her coat.
‘Come on, pet. Let’s have some fun, eh? You look like a girl who likes to enjoy herself.’
‘Get fucked!’ George said, feeling the red mist descend as she caught sight of the oversized Geordie’s guffawing travel companions. She tried to wrench herself free, but her captor wouldn’t let go. ‘You fancy a fishy on a little dishy, twat-boy, just carry on. ’Cos the way I’m feeling right now, it wouldn’t take much for me to tip you over that fucking railing into the sea, big as you are. Do you get me?’
He relinquished his grip as a hatched-faced older woman emerged onto the outer deck, clutching a packet of Superkings. George took the opportunity to scoot back down to the main lounge, but her ridiculed pursuer was following her, jeering, letting her know at the top of his croaking smoker’s voice that she was a cheeky black slag and that he’d give her fucking fishy on a dishy when he got hold of her.
With her breath coming short, George hastened towards the grand staircase, stumbling down the steps. No sign of a steward. Down, down, down she descended into the cabin decks, until she had lost sight of the persistent prick.
‘Thank Christ for that,’ she said, holding her knees and panting. She looked from side to side along the cramped corridor, which sported uniform, anonymous cabin doors on one side. The air was stale as hell down here, causing her to sneeze. Stumbling as the ferry started to lurch in earnest now that they had reached the open sea, George realised she was lost. She steadied herself against the utilitarian plastic walls and made her way carefully to the far end of the corridor, in search of a map. Squeezed past a man with a giant beer gut who emerged from one of the cabins, tucking his shirt into his trousers. Catching a glimpse of his tiny cabin interior before he shut his door, she realised these rooms were below deck. She had come down further than she’d thought. Seeing the dark stain on the crotch of the man’s trousers, she opted not to ask him which deck they were on or which way the main lounge lay. Sod that.
With a thudding heart, George realised that she might have inadvertently cut herself off from safety down here, given how silent it was but for the distant thrum of the ferry’s engine rooms. Deserted too, now that the man with the gut had gone. Pitching and rolling, she reached a narrow, uncarpeted staircase. In the harsh artificial light, she spotted a map just below. Carefully, she climbed down the stairs, clinging tightly to the metal handrail.
‘Shitting Nora,’ she said, spying row after row of cars, all parked bumper to bumper. ‘The bloody car deck.’
The ferry heaved violently on the waves. Feeling nausea sweep over her, George swallowed down a lump of gin-flavoured regurgitation. She was about to climb the perilous steps back up when she heard whimpering from the car deck. What the hell was that? An abandoned dog? Surely not. But then she heard a child’s voice quite clearly above the tinnitus hum of the ferry’s bowels, crying and shouting in a small voice. Speaking a language she didn’t at first recognise, but then realised was an Arabic dialect.
‘Hello! Who’s there?’ she called out in Arabic. She wasn’t fluent, but she’d picked up enough to get by over the years – always handy in the wilds of multi-ethnic South East London, and especially so now that her life revolved around research into trafficking, where a good proportion of the victims, often from the Middle East and Central Asia, spoke little English, if any.
From between the gleaming bonnets of the BMWs and Audis and Citroëns, a small child crawled towards her. He couldn’t have been more than six or seven, George assessed, though she was fairly hopeless as far as children were concerned.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked, extending a hand to him whilst clinging to the bottom of the handrail. ‘Come on. Don’t be scared.’
The little boy was dressed in filthy jeans and a hoodie. Tears poured from huge, sorrowful brown eyes, streaking his dusty skin with clean furrows. His lip trembled.
George didn’t understand much of his response, but she did pick out the word ‘Ummi’. He was looking for his mother. Where the hell had he come from?
‘What are you doing on the car deck, kiddo?’ she asked, knowing the child couldn’t understand her. But, of course, she was fairly certain she knew what a dishevelled, lost kid on the lower decks of the Stena Line ferry from the Netherlands to Harwich might feasibly be doing.
Enveloping the small sobbing boy in her arms, she stroked his thick black hair and shushed him until he began to calm. Two broken hearts in one day on one ferry. But George suspected there were rather more, hidden somewhere among the stationary vehicles on some lower deck. This boy’s mother, for one, no doubt anguished at the disappearance of her son. She had a decision to make: alert the authorities now, or let the boy lead her to the vehicle in question and then raise the alarm? Her common sense screamed at her to find a steward.
‘Take me to Ummi,’ she told the boy. ‘Are you in a car?’
Hadn’t she cast her common sense aside already, when she’d phoned her father and asked him to pick her up from Harwich in the morning in Aunty Sharon’s old VW Polo? Bollocks to it. George wasn’t about to hand this boy back to his captors, but she at least wanted to get a good look at who’d had him, and still possibly had the rest of his family – perhaps concealed under some blankets in a boot or in the back of a van.
Scanning the deck they were currently on, she thought it unlikely a people trafficker would own a family saloon or premium est
ate car.
‘Did you climb steps?’ she asked in Arabic, using her walking fingers as supplementary explanation.
He nodded, and made to wipe the glistening string of snot from his upper lip with his sleeve. George whipped out a tissue and cleaned his nose. Her senses quickened as they climbed further into the belly of the vessel, feeling their way along the dark places where the light didn’t reach, holding on to whatever they could as the ferry fought against the pitch and roll of the stormy seas. They crept low, avoiding the scrutiny of whoever might be down there.
Suddenly, the boy yelped, and pulled her back with some force. George placed her hand firmly over his mouth and shushed him.
‘Where?’ she asked.
But she needn’t have asked. In the far corner of the lowest deck, she spotted an almost familiar livery on a long-wheel-based van.
‘BBT,’ she whispered. ‘Bosch, Boom & Tuin Bloemen.’ Forest, Tree and Garden. She imagined desperate people being smuggled from war-torn parts of the world amongst unseasonal tulips, roses and amaryllis bulbs, en route from the glasshouses of Western Europe’s breadbasket to the crappy small-town florists of Beckenham, Blackpool or Bridgend. It was so very reminiscent of Groenten Den Bosch; even the van’s logo was written in an identical font. Similar. But not the same.
Getting close enough to make a note of the van’s number plate would be impossible without putting her and the boy at risk, even if they continued to crawl along at tyre height. His mother would certainly raise the alarm when she realised he was missing, wouldn’t she? Or perhaps Ummi was dead beneath some bombed-out masonry in Aleppo. It was impossible to know; her Arabic was so unreliable and the boy was shaking with fear.
‘Ummi!’ he whimpered, pointing at the van.
It was time to get the authorities involved, George decided. She was in an enclosed, deserted space with no way to defend herself, and in charge of someone else’s precious son. No. She had seen enough. But at least from this distance, she might get a quick snapshot of the van’s livery to send to Marie.
Raising her index finger to her mouth, willing the boy to remain silent, she took out her phone. Fumbling fingers failed to bring up the photo function. The ferry tipped violently. The boy wailed, falling into the side of a car.
‘Hey, you!’ A gruff voice in Dutch resounded throughout the industrial vastness of the lower deck.
George looked up from her phone to see a brick wall of a man, dressed in a high-vis jacket and jeans. The van door was open. This was the driver, no doubt. A scream from the boy rent the still air.
Clambering to her feet, George snatched the boy up. She glanced behind. The stairs weren’t far. She could make a run for it with the kid, couldn’t she?
The driver took something from his pocket. Was it a gun? She had time neither for fear nor recrimination nor understanding of what in fresh hell was going on. He held the black thing in his hand up. A phone. He pointed it at her – click – and winked.
As George sprinted with her trafficked charge to the safety of the stairs, she realised two things: if she raised the alarm, she would be putting the trafficked cargo in that van in mortal danger. It took only a moment to shoot someone or cut their throat, and she’d heard often enough of how expendable these refugees were to their traffickers, if they thought their necks were on the line. But perhaps most worryingly of all, the driver had taken her photo. His boss would know who she was. And nowadays, she wasn’t that hard to find.
CHAPTER 22
Harwich International Port, then Cambridge, 19 October
‘Oh, thank God you’re here,’ George said, throwing her bag onto the back seat of Aunty Sharon’s VW Polo.
Looking round furtively, she checked that there were no customs officials marching towards her, no transport police and, most importantly, no trafficker the size of a brick outhouse. She kissed her father. He smelled of the same deodorant as Van den Bergen. Shuddering, she slapped the dashboard. ‘Go! Come on!’ she said in Spanish. ‘Let’s get as far away from here as possible.’
‘What’s wrong, cara mia? You seem on edge.’ Her father negotiated the snake of traffic queuing to leave the port, looking at her askance when she ducked, curling up in her seat with her head almost between her knees.
George looked up at him, praying she wouldn’t vomit in the pristine interior of the car. But seasickness had kicked in in earnest, and the seat beneath her felt as though it were rising and falling, like she was still being tossed around on board the ferry. ‘You wouldn’t believe the journey I’ve had. I’ve just left a little boy with the authorities and given them a tip-off about some people-trafficking arsehole I came up against on the car deck.’
‘What were you doing down there?’
‘Long story,’ she said. ‘Jesus. How can I live with what I’ve just done? I’ve separated a small child from his mother and possibly put a load of illegal immigrants in mortal danger. I’m some kind of proper class-A shithouse.’
Peering over the top of the dashboard, she saw that the Bosch, Boom & Tuin Bloemen truck was being ushered by a gang of port authority police and customs officials into a special bay. She said a silent prayer to the universe, hoping that the driver had been taken by surprise. Perhaps he’d thought that George was some random weirdo, snooping around a lower deck, hoping to break into a car. That was the most hopeful scenario. She remembered the little boy’s bewildered expression and apologised to him in her mind’s eye.
Finally sitting up in the passenger seat, she cast an appraising glance at her father. ‘You look well,’ she said. ‘It’s only been a couple of weeks, but you’ve put on weight. You look relaxed. You’ve got good colour.’
They turned onto the motorway. Her father shot her a mischievous grin. ‘Your mother’s in Spain. I’m in England. The house is empty. It’s bliss.’ He was speaking in English now.
George laughed at his pronunciation of ‘bliss’ as ‘blees’. All those long years without her father in her life, and now here he was, finally playing Dad Taxi and being the shoulder she so desperately needed to cry on.
‘Enjoy it while you can. They’re back tomorrow – Letitia in all her glory, weighted down with duty free and a donkey piñata.’ She swallowed hard, pushing down the pain that threatened to surface along with the contents of her stomach. ‘I’ve left Paul.’
‘What? You’ve been together for nearly ten years, haven’t you?’
‘Long enough. After you came back, I asked him if he wanted to get a place with me. Properly commit. Either in London or Amsterdam. Maybe even Cambridge. I’m sick of this rootless, flitting-back-and-forth, long-distance crap.’
‘And he wouldn’t?’
‘He was always commitment-phobic, but since his granddaughter came along, he’s been using that silly cow – his daughter – as an excuse to push me away.’
‘Self-sabotage,’ her father said. ‘Your mother did the same to us when you were little. She picked and picked at me, at our relationship, until we fell apart at the seams.’ He patted her hand. ‘She’s intolerable though. I could never have stayed with her. She would have driven me crazy.’ The car whizzed under the sign that told them Cambridge was only ten miles away. ‘But you two… I thought he was The One. You guys have something really special.’
George wiped the slightly steamy passenger window with her sleeve. Looked out at the flat, brown expanse of the tilled East Anglian countryside. So much like the Netherlands and yet…not. ‘Do we? You can’t know what goes on between two people behind closed doors, Dad. I’m not letting him treat me like this. He needs to shit or get off the pot. If he wants to abandon his happiness by the roadside of middle age, I ain’t going on that journey with him. Life’s too short…or too long, depending on how many years you get given.’
Checking the side mirror to see that her hair still passed muster, George balked as she caught sight again of a car that had been following them since Harwich. A coincidence. Britain’s roads were full of silver Mondeos. Weren’t they? Sudde
nly, anguished thoughts of her stagnating love life were displaced by the fear that she was being trailed by some faceless thug in cahoots with the driver from the ferry. Bosch, Boom & Tuin. Forest, Tree and Garden. The name struck a chord deep in the complexity of her subconscious, and not because Bosch put her in mind of Den Bosch. Den Bosch was, after all, just an abbreviation of ’s-Hertogenbosch, which was a town in the middle of the Netherlands. There was something about the combination of those three words, though, that made perfect sense for a wholesaler of florist supplies.
As Cambridge came into view, George scrolled past the unread emails and missed call notifications on her phone from Van den Bergen, who had finally worked out that she had left the country – and him. She picked up a text thread between her and Marie. Thumbed out a message.
‘Can u look into Den Bosch’s records 2 see if involvement in a co. called Bosch, Boom & Tuin Bloemen?’
Parking up in Cambridge was, as ever, nothing short of a nightmare, so her father dropped her at the side entrance to St John’s and arranged a rendezvous some thirty minutes later, beyond the backs by the University Library.
George marched through the courtyards, stepping back through time architecturally from the early twentieth century to Henry VIII’s time, until she reached the staircase that led up to Sally Wright’s set of rooms. Her breath steamed on the autumnal air, but she had no time to soak up the beauty of Cambridge dressed in its fiery October finery, nor did she have the inclination to marvel at the extreme youth of the freshers who were wandering round in their smart, washed-by-Mum jeans and new trainers, still looking pristine; still looking like they couldn’t quite believe they’d left home and gone to heaven.
Pride was an unpalatable repast, but George had determined to swallow hers. Didn’t the recognition that bending over was sometimes necessary come with maturity? Dragging her wobbly, seasick legs up a staircase that had been worn smooth and shiny over the centuries, she found the Vice Chancellor’s door, knocked once and burst in.
The Girl Who Got Revenge Page 15
