A Darker Shade of Blue (31 page)

‘Don't,' he said.

‘These people,' Adina said, ‘they are police?'

‘Yes.'

‘Of course they are police.' She stood up and studied the bite mark on her arm. ‘You trust them?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Okay, for Alen's sake I will talk to them. But you must be there with me.'

Kiley nodded. ‘The cafe across the street.'

‘Portuguese or Italian?'

‘Portuguese.'

‘You go. Five minutes, I come.'

‘Don't duck out on me.'

‘Duck out?'

‘Never mind.'

Jenkins sat reading
A Short History of Europeans and the Rest of the World from Antiquity to the Present.
Masters held a small espresso cup in his hand and stared at a lithograph of Lisbon on the wall. Kiley ordered coffee for himself and, believing one of those intense little Portuguese custard tarts was never quite enough, bought two; he didn't offer to share them round.

‘When you were helping your friend out of her little difficulty,' Masters said, ‘you ran across Sali Mejdani. Aldo Fusco, he sometimes likes to call himself.'

‘We had a conversation.'

Jenkins chuckled softly, possibly at something he'd just read.

‘He brought her into the country, your Adina?'

‘Not directly.'

‘Of course. From Romania to Albania and then to Italy, Italy to France, Belgium or Holland. Into Britain from somewhere like Zeebrugge. Fifteen or twenty people a day, seven days a week, three hundred-plus days of the year. Approximately five thousand sterling per head. Even after expenses – drivers, escorts, safe houses, backhanders …'

‘Plenty of those,' Jenkins said, without looking up.

‘… it all adds up to a tidy sum. And the punters, what they don't pay in advance, they pay with interest. For women and boys it's the sex trade, for the rest it's hard labour.'

‘Mejdani,' Kiley said, ‘why can't you arrest him, close him down?'

‘Ah,' said Jenkins.

‘For the last couple of years,' Masters said, ‘we've been building a case against him. Ourselves, Immigration, Customs and Excise, the National Crime Squad.' He set down his cup at last. ‘You know when you were a kid, building sandcastles on the beach, Broadstairs or somewhere, you and your dad. You're putting the finishing touches to this giant, intricate thing, all turrets and towers and windows and doors, and just as you turn over the bucket and tap the last piece into place, one of the bits lower down slides away, and then another, and before you know it you're having to start all over again.'

‘Accident?' Kiley said. ‘Over-ambition?'

Masters sat back. ‘I prefer to think the fault lies in the design.'

‘Not the workmanship?'

‘Get what you pay for, some might say.'

Jenkins laid aside his book. ‘Mejdani certainly would.'

‘He's bribing people,' Kiley said, ‘to look the other way.'

‘I didn't say that.'

Kiley looked across at Masters. Masters shrugged.

‘'Tis but the way of the world, my masters,' Jenkins said.

‘Not Chandler again?'

‘A little earlier.'

They all looked round as Adina stepped through the door. She had changed into black jeans and a black roll-neck sweater, an unbuttoned beige topcoat round her shoulders. Some but not all of the make-up had been wiped from her face. She asked at the counter for a Coke with lemon and ice.

Kiley made the introductions while she lit a cigarette.

‘Alen,' she said, ‘what happened to him?'

Masters showed her the photograph.

For a long moment, she closed her eyes.

‘You're not really surprised,' Masters said.

‘I don't understand.'

‘You thought he might get into difficulties,' Kiley said. ‘You gave him my card.'

‘Yes, I thought … Alen, he was someone important in my country, high up in trade union …'

‘We used to have those,' Jenkins said, as much to himself as anyone.

‘… there was disagreement, he had to leave. Rights of workers, something. And here, I don't know, I think it was the same. Already, he told me, the people he work for, they warn him, shut your mouth. Keep your mouth shut. I think he had made threat to go to authorities. The police.'

‘You think that's why he was killed.'

‘Of course.'

Masters glanced at Jenkins, who gave a barely discernible nod. ‘We have a number of names,' he said, ‘names and places. We'd like to run them past you and for you to tell us any that you recognise.'

Adina held smoke down in her lungs. What was she, Kiley wondered? All of twenty? Twenty-one? She'd paid to risk her life travelling to England not once, but twice. Paid dearly. And why? Because the strip clubs and massage parlours of London and Wolverhampton were better than the autoroutes in and out of Bucharest? As an official asylum seeker, she could claim thirty quid a week, ten in cash, the rest in vouchers. But she was not official. She did what she could.

She said, ‘Okay. If I can.'

‘Wait,' Kiley said. ‘If she helps you, you have to help her. Make it possible for her to stay, officially.'

‘I don't know if we can do that,' Masters said.

‘Of course we fucking can,' Jenkins said.

Adina lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the first and asked for another Coke.

Kiley caught the overground to Highbury and Islington. In an Upper Street window a face he recognised stared out from a dozen TVs; the same face was in close-up on the small Sony Kate kept at the foot of the bed.

‘Kramer seems to be getting a lot of exposure,' Kiley said.

‘The wrong kind.'

Dogmatic, didactic, distinguished by a full beard and sweep of jet black hair, Martin Kramer was an investigative journalist with strong anti-capitalist, anti-American left-wing leanings and a surprisingly high profile. Kiley had always found him too self-righteous by half, even if, much of the time, what he said made some kind of sense.

Kate turned up the volume as the
Newsnight
cameras switched to Jeremy Paxman behind an impressive-looking desk. ‘… if it really is such a small and insignificant point, Mr Kramer, then why not answer my question and move on?'

She flicked the sound back down.

‘What was the question?' Kiley asked.

‘Was he entertaining Helen Forester in his flat on the night she was attacked?'

‘And was he?'

‘He won't say.'

‘Which means he was.'

‘Probably.'

Sitting, propped up against pillows, Kate was wearing the faded Silver Moon T-shirt she sometimes used as night-wear and nothing else. Kiley rested his hand above her knee.

‘They were at Cambridge together,' Kate said. ‘Maybe they had a thing back then and maybe they didn't.'

‘Twenty-five years ago,' Kiley said. ‘More.'

Kate turned in a little against his hand. ‘Kramer's been making this programme for Channel 4. Illegal workers, gangmasters, people trafficking. Pretty explosive by all accounts.'

‘Not the best of times for the wife of a Home Office minister to be sharing his bed.'

‘Needs must,' Kate said. ‘From time to time.'

*

Helen Forester denied and denied and finally admitted that she had, indeed, had dinner with Martin Kramer on the night in question, had enjoyed possibly a glass of wine too many, and gone for a stroll to clear her head before returning home.

Kramer's programme was moved to a prime-time slot, where it attracted close on seven million viewers, not bad for a polemical documentary on a minority channel. Standing amidst the potato fields of East Anglia, Kramer pontificated about the farming industry's increasing dependence on illegal foreign labour, comparing it to the slave trade of earlier centuries, with gangmasters as the new overseers and Eastern Europeans the new Negroes; from the lobby of a hotel in Bays water he talked about the dependence of the hotel and catering trades on migrants from Somalia and South-East Asia; and at the port of Dover he made allegations of corruption and bribery running through Customs and Immigration and penetrating right up to the highest levels of the police.

‘That's the thing about Kramer,' Masters said, watching a video of the programme in Jenkins' office high above the Thames. ‘He always has to go that little bit too far.'

Two days earlier, with the assistance of officers from the Cambridgeshire force, they had arrested two of Alen Markovic's fellow field workers for his murder. The foreman, they claimed, had given them no choice: get rid of him or get sent back. They had clubbed him to death with a spade and a hoe.

In one of his last actions as a minister before being shuffled on to the back benches, Hugo Forester announced a further toughening of the laws governing entry into the country and the employment of those who have gained access without proper documentation. ‘The present system,' he told the House, ‘in its efforts to provide refuge and succour to those in genuine need, is unfortunately still too open to exploitation by unscrupulous individuals and criminal gangs. But the House should be assured that the introduction of identity cards to be announced in the Queen's speech will render it virtually impossible for the employment of illegal workers to continue.'

Coordinated raids by the police on safe houses and farms in Kings Lynn and Wisbech resulted in twenty-seven arrests. Two middle-ranking officers in the Immigration Service tendered their resignations and a detective chief inspector stationed at Folkestone retired from duty on medical grounds. A warrant was issued for Sali Mejdani's arrest on twenty-seven separate charges of smuggling illegal immigrants into Britain. Mejdani, travelling under the name of Aldo Fusco, had flown from Heathrow to Amsterdam on the previous morning, and from there to Tirana where he seemed, temporarily, to have disappeared.

Adina was duly given a student visa and enrolled in a course in leisure and travel at the University of North London.

Hugo and Helen Forester announced a trial separation.

Kiley, feeling pleased with himself and for very little reason, volunteered to treat Kate to one hundred and thirty-eight minutes of
Mystic River
with supper afterwards at Cafe Pasta. Kate thought she could skip the movie.

When she arrived, Kiley was already seated at a side table, Irena bending slightly towards him, the pair in conversation.

‘Ordered the wine yet, Jack?' Kate said, slipping off her coat and handing it to Irena. Irena blushed and backed away. ‘Oh, and bring us a bottle of the Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, will you? Thanks very much.'

‘She was telling me about Adina,' Kiley said.

‘How was the film?' Kate asked.

‘Good. Pretty good.'

Irena brought the wine and asked Kate if she would like to taste it, which she did.

‘She's lovely, isn't she?' Kate said as Irena walked away.

‘Who?'

‘Irena.'

‘Is she?'

JUST FRIENDS

These things I remember about Anna Shepherd: the way a lock of her hair would fall down across her face and she would brush it back with a flick of her hand; the sliver of green, like a shard of glass, high in her left eye; the look of surprise, pleasure and surprise, when she spoke to me that first time – ‘And you must be Jimmy, right?'

The way she lied.

It was November, late in the month and the night air bright with cold that numbed your fingers even as it brought a flush of colour to your cheeks. London, the winter of '56, and we were little more than kids then, Patrick, Val and myself, though if anyone had called us that we'd have likely punched him out, Patrick or myself at least, Val in the background, careful, watching.

Friday night it would have been, a toss-up between the Flamingo and Studio 51, and on this occasion Patrick had decreed the Flamingo: this on account of a girl he'd started seeing, on account of Anna. The Flamingo a little more cool, more likely to impress. Hip, I suppose, the word we would have used.

All three of us had first got interested in jazz at school, the trad thing to begin with, British guys doing an earnest imitation of New Orleans; then, for a spell, it was the Alex Welsh band we followed around, a hard-driving crew with echoes of Chicago, brittle and fast, Tuesday nights the Lyttelton place in Oxford Street, Sundays a club out at Wood Green. It was Val who finally got us listening to the more modern stuff, Parker 78s on Savoy, Paul Desmond, the Gerry Mulligan Quartet.

From somewhere, Patrick got himself a trumpet and began practising scales, and I kicked off playing brushes on an old suitcase while saving for the downpayment on a set of drums. Val, we eventually discovered, already had a saxophone – an old Selmer with a dented bell and a third of the keys held on by rubber bands: it had once belonged to his old man. Not only did he have a horn, but he knew how to play. Nothing fancy, not yet, not enough to go steaming through the changes of ‘
Cherokee
' or ‘
I Got Rhythm
' the way he would later, in his pomp, but tunes you could recognise, modulations you could follow.

The first time we heard him, really heard him, the cellar room below a greasy spoon by the Archway, somewhere the owner let us hang out for the price of a few coffees, the occasional pie and chips, we wanted to punch him hard. For holding out on us the way he had. For being so damned good.

Next day, Patrick took the trumpet to the place he'd bought it, Boosey and Hawkes, and sold it back, got the best price he could. ‘Sod that for a game of soldiers,' he said, ‘too much like hard bloody work. What we need's a bass player, someone half-decent on piano, get Val fronting his own band.' And he pushed a bundle of fivers into my hand. ‘Here,' he said, ‘go and get those sodding drums.'

‘What about you?' Val asked, though he probably knew the answer even then. ‘What you gonna be doin'?'