The Angel of Whitehall

by Lewis Hastings

  People too, here and there, each trying to find a way to survive through fair means or foul.

  The night shift, those lucky enough to have work, returned, grey faced, impassive, passing their equally drained morning equivalents, heading to the port or the new refinery. The only advantage of making it through the night was that you got to smile at your early rising neighbours, knowing that for now you had the best of two options.

  A bed and a chance to dream of a happier place.

  The day and night dwellers had missed the monthly cargo operation that had occurred just north of the expanding port that lay on the west coast of Africa between Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone.

  Actually, most hadn’t missed a thing. They went about their daily routines and kept their heads down, drove their pink-dust-covered old Nissans and Toyotas to and from the port, and turned a blind eye. It was what you did in that part of the world. That and avoid the heat.

  If and when they were asked, the one export the local population knew about was Bauxite.

  And that was all. Ask them anything else they’d just smile a nicotine-stained smile and walk off, or shrug their colourful yet weary shoulders and pretend they could not understand you. It’s how it was. How it would probably always be.

  Another nameless ship had sailed. North, out of the warm waters of the tropics towards a European winter. Another cargo of dusty orange-pink Bauxite destined for the land of milk and honey.

  But the valuable mineral wasn’t all they carried. Why waste valuable space? It would be a crime to do so.

  The British have a saying: where there’s muck, there’s brass.

  In Kamsar, the locals had their own. Where there are ships, there are people. And where there are desperate people there is money to be made.

  And where there were people queuing, gripping onto their life savings and a few meagre possessions, there was always a man in an expensive suit, with the latest phone and an open and seemingly ever-generous wallet.

  ‘Come aboard tonight, we sail at three. This is your one chance to be free, to live the life that you can only dream of – then one day return, to see your family and be treated like royalty.’

  It was what they had been saying for years. And a select few families had made it work and were treated as celebrities. And that alone was reason enough to risk everything. For some it meant putting your eldest child on board with their sibling, throwing a rope, looking the other way, blaming the dust for your tears, watching them cast off into the night. The chance of a better life. A chance to live.

  The journey had been longer than expected, as if the old ship had detoured, waited out at sea, then run at full speed. Its passengers, down below in the bowels of the ship, were at one with the rusting hulk. They could sense when the old iron lady slowed and when she sped up. And now she was running at full steam. The hull shuddered, but the ship sailed on, pounding through a force seven north-easterly, hugging the central shipping lanes, trying to avoid any form of contact. If they were challenged, they responded with an efficient, professional and polite radio message.

  “Change course? Yes, sir. As you say. Thank you.”

  They had been sat out in the North Sea for two days. Somewhere off the coast of Lincolnshire. Three thousand miles from home as the crow flies, with a few necessary detours. It was more like three and a half.

  The call came. Now or never. Stick to the plan. Creatures of habit.

  The British-flagged freighter MV Argonaut docked half an hour late. She was soon alongside, cranes lifting her wares up, over and onto the quayside that had existed in one form or another since Roman times.

  NLS was a family company which had employed local people to conduct the unloading of small to medium freighters for years, clinging onto a meagre living. As around them and north across the Humber estuary, larger multi-nationals watched their operations grow; roll-on roll-off vessels arriving with new cars from around the world, and nearby an oil refinery did its bit to supply an ever-hungry market.

  Once the vessel was unloaded, the nightshift cleaned down, secured the site, checked and re-checked the storage facilities and headed off home to bed, so that they could return the following day to watch the ship depart at high tide.

  The locals called her the Argo, and they held her in high esteem. She, or rather her contents, kept a roof over their heads and a meal on the table in a part of England that had seen years of unemployment and uncertainty.

  The Master of the ship held Jimmy Cossins, the Director of North Lincolnshire Stevedore’s Ltd, in higher esteem. For the last twenty years he had accepted a Christmas card from him, handed over on the frigid quayside, and in return had handed one back. They raised a glass to see in the festivities, then both men went about their business.

  All very above board. Unless you considered the number written on the inside of each envelope. Each year, a new bank account number; monies taken out and paid in, once, on the eve of Christmas.

  It was what the ship held below board that made their relationship far from pleasant.

  “How long before we go?”

  “I don’t know, but I will be right here, little sister, right here.”

  She held her tighter than she had ever done. She was as afraid but couldn’t let it show.

  The gates opened at just before midnight, and four white Volvo tractor units drove into the compound. They were as anonymous as possible. No company names and number plates that were cloned.

  Each was reversed up to an awaiting trailer that in turn held a container. The driver never checked the load, just drove to the nearby disused Royal Air Force airfield at North Killingholme.

  As a place name where your future began, it did not bode well.

  Less than half an hour later, the containers were inside the former Lancaster hangar and the main doors shut and double locked.

  Now a solitary German shepherd dog and its handler patrolled under the dim sodium lighting, as a cold mist rolled in off the sea.

  Inside the first container they moved quietly, trying to stretch weary limbs. Some slept, some tried to eat, some desperately held onto the contents of their bladders, others had long since stopped worrying about pride and squatted in the darkened metal box, in a corner designated for such activities.

  The container was damp. The container was freezing cold. It reeked of ammonia and fear.

  Thirty men aged from eighteen to thirty and ten women of a similar age. They huddled together, frigid and afraid.

  In the next container the story was the same, and the next, and the next.

  “When will they come, sister?” the youngest girl asked, still full of hope.

  “Soon, they will come soon and then we can eat and start our new lives.” She tried to peer out through the smallest of cracks in the door, but all she saw was darkness, her cheek sticking to the freezing metal, her tears running down and onto the floor. She was more afraid than her little sister, for she knew just what a terrible situation they were in.

  When they had left their home, it had been a warm, sultry, almost unbearably humid night with a promised daytime temperature in the high eighties. Now she shook involuntarily as the temperature dropped below freezing. She had never been so cold. Somewhere in the darkened void a male voice let out a deep moan that signalled he had given up hope.

  Actually, he had lost his fight with the cold and hunger and was the first in that container to die. His brother held him in his dying moments, also perilously close to death. Most had brought basic provisions and the simplest of food – for that’s what they were told to bring.

  They were a commodity with a value just like the Bauxite – but less important. If half survived, it was a bonus. Three quarters, a miracle.

  It had taken eight days to make the journey. They didn’t stop once, pounding north as fast as they could. Time was money. Eight days of living in a sealed tomb with people she either knew vaguely from her home or had never met before. They all had a common bond, a goal and a vision that stay
ed with them until now, as they began one by one to slip into unconsciousness. Victims of their own hopes and aspirations and the greed of their fellow man.

  They were modern slaves – destined for a life of servitude, bound by contracts tied up with fear.

  Slaves. The year was 2016 and contrary to the wishes of one old man, it was still happening.

  The girl from Guinea and her sister didn’t have a name, she was just known as woman No. 5 and her sister No. 6.

  That’s how important they really were.

  She woke with a jolt. Her heart beating faster than it had for days. There was a sense of animation, a pinprick of golden light lit up her face with its small scar on the left cheek. The temperature had risen a degree or two.

  She stared out of the gap that had been her porthole to the future – she saw trees. They were different to the ones back home. And wooden poles with wires slung from post to post. And fences, and fields, all laden with pure white. Animals were here and there, also making the most of the natural shelter to avoid the onslaught of the vicious wind that swept in across the flat Lincolnshire countryside.

  A house. Then another. Then more fields. She relayed back and soon the whole container, minus the two that didn’t make it, was awash with elaborate and seamlessly embellished stories of hope.

  ‘Yes, brother, she saw beautiful houses and horses and sheep. We are here, in beautiful England.’

  She became the lookout – for no one else had the energy to even stand.

  “There are no more houses now, just white fields,” she said in her native tongue. “Just white fields…”

  The four containers split up in north Lincolnshire. One headed further north, and three headed south, using country roads until they reached larger, more direct routes that with luck would remain open, free of the snow.

  One container reached an old RAF base in Yorkshire and was reversed into a surviving hangar now used as a logistics base. It was detached from the tractor unit and left. The driver obeyed his briefing to the letter.

  His instructions were very clear.

  Deliver the container, secure it in the hangar using the key provided. Do not open it, as it contains potentially harmful chemicals. He was no fool and wanted to get home to his family. And besides, the job paid well.

  The third container arrived at RAF Syerston or what was left of it. Another old building and another abandoned container. The third one reached the now partly private airfield in Langar on the border or Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire. The largest of the main hangars was being used by a transport company, its more remote sister was ideal as a place where not even nosey children would go. The signs told of great danger, of dogs and electrified fencing. Now and then a few ardent Irish travellers would pitch up and spend as many nights in their caravans as the local council would allow, themselves nomads, they missed nothing, not a trick or a chance to profit, but they knew to keep away from this particular building. There was entrepreneurial and there was plain stupid. And this place gave them the feeling that the dead patrolled at night. They didn’t stay long.

  The enormous door was slid shut, bolted and double locked as the driver clapped his gloved hands together to try to warm up. He drove north east and never looked back.

  The last vehicle pulled into the former RAF station called Bottesford near the small village of the same name in North Leicestershire, now partly derelict, it retained one large former Lancaster bomber hangar and had been leased years ago by a syndicate that no one ever bothered to research for they paid on time each and every month.

  The driver swung the cab around and backed the vehicle up to the door. It was getting light, but the temperature was set to remain around freezing all day. The sooner he got home to bed, the better.

  He backed in, disconnected the trailer and stood for a while listening. A few wild pigeons scattered, startled by his presence. He had a fascination for derelict military buildings, trying to imagine what it would have been like in the war, a hive of activity, people everywhere, fighting the enemy from afar.

  And now the place was silent. Apart from a low-level sob. He was told that he was carrying agricultural chemicals. He’d been around long enough to know that as a commodity they remained pretty quiet.

  There it was again. His head dropped.

  “Oh, bloody hell, that’s all I need,” he said in a broad Yorkshire accent. “Stowaways…”

  He fetched a torch and walked back to the rear of the trailer, got his gloved fist and banged on the door. Nothing. But no, there it was again. It sounded like a child.

  He put his face up to the corner of the container and shone the torch into the gap.

  “Jesus H Christ!” He almost fell backwards.

  A dark brown eye was staring back at him. It looked like that of a solitary despondent cow, waiting at the market for its fate. He’d never hunted, but he knew that if he was to ever look into the eye of a frightened animal, it would be like this. And there was no way he would be able to pull the trigger.

  “Please, sir. Help us…” a female voice, whispering in broken English, trailing as if it was the last thing she might ever say.

  “What would our Pat say?” he asked, mumbling as he strutted around the vast building, his voice echoing, only the pigeons for company, staring down at him, willing him to make the right decision.

  “She’d say open the bloody thing, Pete Hopkins, that’s what she’d say.”

  Hopkins, nearly sixty, going on seventy and longing for retirement, grabbed a crowbar and began to work at the locks. Nothing. He wasn’t strong enough. His cheeks were already ruddy and lined with myriad micro veins. His nose was bulbous and pockmarked and his short stature, powerful arms and a habit of pipe smoking earned him the nickname Popeye.

  He wrapped a chain around the lock and backed the wagon up to a girder, then wrapped it around that and hoped for the best. He jumped up into the cab, forgetting how cold he had been. Then started the powerful engine and surged forward. The whiplash crack told him one thing.

  He ran to the back and found the door open.

  Then he sank to his knees, staring back at a young black girl and an even younger one in her arms.

  “Thank you, sir. She is my sister. Please take her.” She looked like she had seen a saint. “Please…”

  He moved forward to take the girl who could have only been ten, twelve at the most. She was as cold as a morgue and stank like a public toilet during a month-long strike. The smell was overpowering.

  Then, as his eyes became accustomed to the light in the metal box and his nose to the stench, he began to retch.

  He counted, one, two, five, ten…

  “Oh, no. No, please, not this. Not to me.” He laid the girl down on the concrete floor and ran to his cab, got in and started it up. Sat there, waited, then went back, got the girl and her sister and walked one, carried the other to his portable home. Once he was sure they were safely inside, he got behind the wheel and drove north, leaving his troubles behind.

  None of them said a word.

  What was there to say?

  ‘When I parked the trailer up, it was secure and I didn’t see anything wrong.’ That would be his defence if and when they came for him.

  An hour later he spoke.

  “I need to drop you off at a hospital or a police station.”

  “No sir, we must not be found. Only the nice man can help us. You ring him for us?” She pushed a grubby piece of paper at him. It had a printed phone number on one side and stains on the other.

  It couldn’t hurt, could it? And at least he’d be doing the right thing.

  He dialled the number, waited, aware it was early. A voice answered.

  “Where are you exactly?” Not who are you? Or, what do you want?

  “Erm well I’m somewhere between Bottesford and home, I was heading towards Nottingham, to the hospital to get these girls checked…”

  The voice interrupted. Checked a map. Gave directions. The driver listened.
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br />   “Well I can, if you think it will help?”

  It would. He’d wait.

  He pulled off the A52, the main road between Grantham and Nottingham, into a looping tree-lined muddy layby. He’d been there before a few years ago, when there was a woman in a caravan selling tea and coffee and bacon sandwiches to the weary truckers who hauled their goods from east to west and back again.

  The trees had grown a lot since then.

  He waited. It was daylight and bitterly cold. His beloved Volvo was cooling rapidly, so he turned the engine on again to try to keep the girls from freezing to death. He asked no questions. They waited and asked none in return.

  An hour later a vehicle approached from behind, another from the front. Dark saloon cars, navy blue and grey, each containing two well-dressed men. The grey car stayed back, its occupants watching back towards the main road. The men from the blue car approached the Volvo. One opened the passenger door, held his arms up and gathered the youngest girl, carried her safely back to the grey car, a Vauxhall of some kind.

  The driver opened the cab door and smiled. “We won’t keep you long, sir. You’ve done the right thing.”

  Immigration. Or Police. Some sort of government agency. He’d know them anywhere with their haircuts and confident stance.

  The blue car driver waited a moment as his mate collected the older girl and repeated the journey. The grey car accelerated, spinning its front wheels in the icy mud, and turned onto the main road and headed towards Grantham.

  The driver of the blue car smiled once more. “Thanks, you’ll be rewarded in heaven.”

  “Well, it’s certainly nice to be able to tell my wife I did a good deed today; can I ask one question?”

  “Of course.”

  “Will they be OK?”

  “Absolutely. You have my word.” There was that smile again, cold air spilling out from the corners of his lips.

  “Right then, I’ll be off home to bed. It’s been a long night.” He went to pull the door shut when a whistling whip crack alerted his mind to danger. The hollow point 9mm round hit him in the right temple. It was enough, no need to fire another.