‘And you have no witnesses to the attack?’
‘Not so far. Zalewski lived on his own, and he didn’t seek treatment for his injuries, so he died in his flat.’
‘If nobody saw it, and Mr Zalewski lived alone, who reported finding the body?’ asked Cooper.
‘No one,’ said Fry.
‘How could it be no one?’
‘The landlord downstairs came in to open his shop early next morning and found a stain on his ceiling. A red stain, and it was spreading. Not surprisingly, it took a while before it dawned on him he had blood dripping through the floor of the flat above. But then he went up to check. He has a duplicate key of course, but the door was bolted on the inside. So the landlord made a call. That’s Mr Pollitt.’
Cooper thought he detected a peculiar emphasis on the name ‘Pollitt’ as if it caused a bad taste in her mouth and she was spitting it out.
‘And response officers came and broke the door open,’ he said.
‘That’s it.’
‘But I gather that EMSOU were here before that.’
‘Possibly.’
‘Possibly? Is that all you can say?’
‘I’m restricted in what I can tell you,’ said Fry. ‘But when Krystian Zalewski was killed, we thought it was connected to an existing operation.’
‘An existing operation?’
‘Yes.’
‘So what did bring EMSOU to Shirebrook,’ asked Cooper, ‘if it wasn’t the murder?’
‘Come with me. I’ll show you.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Not far.’
Just to the south of the town centre was the Model Village, the estate built for miners and their families. Rows of terraced house with narrow strips of front garden. Back alleys lined by brick privies and scattered with wheelie bins. Lines of washing filled many of the front gardens, where grass had been allowed to grow rank. One or two had squeezed a trampoline in for the children, leaving no room for anything else.
Cooper recalled his father talking about the Miners’ Strike of 1984–85. Shirebrook had been the scene of fighting between pickets and police escorting working miners. Women and children had shouted ‘Scab’ at men going to work, the wives of working miners had their windows smashed, and their children were bullied at school. A striker had been injured in an attack. At a mass meeting, NUM members had decided they would refuse to work with men who crossed picket lines, but by the February of 1985, Shirebrook miners had become so desperate that most of them went back to work.
They drove past a parade of shops, turned a corner, and reached the furthest part of the estate. Fry pulled up a few short yards from the end of the road.
‘We’re about to raid an address here,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘Incident reports showed that police officers have been called to this address almost twenty times since it became an HMO,’ said Fry. ‘That’s a house in multiple occupation.’
‘I know what it means.’
‘For months now we’ve had surveillance on a Czech gang believed to be involved in slave trafficking. We’ve been working closely with the National Crime Agency, of course.’
‘Slave trafficking?’ said Cooper.
‘It’s a modern form of slavery. Victims are housed in appalling conditions, living in garages or in cupboards. Some have to forage for food in bins. They can’t wash, they don’t get clean clothes — they may be charged a pound a time by their gangmasters just to use the toilet. Most of the men are sent out to work in factories, or used as domestic servants. They’re threatened with violence or beaten to keep them frightened and submissive. Ben, the trafficking network is like a spider’s web that goes right across the continent of Europe.’
‘It’s almost unbelievable that it happens here in the UK.’
‘Not unbelievable once you’ve seen it at first-hand.’
‘Are we about to do that?’
‘Perhaps.’
Fry drew out a folder with a series of photos.
‘Katerina Drenkova is the godmother of the gang,’ she said. ‘She organised the trafficking and controlled the finances. Her husband and son were the enforcers, Ladislav and Pavel Drenko. They assaulted and threatened their victims with baseball bats.’
She shuffled the sheaf of photos to show two more men.
‘These two victims tried to escape,’ she said. ‘Two Czech men, Josef Hajek and Mikolas Zeman. Hajek turned up at A & E with a head injury after one of the Drenkos hit him with a baseball bat. He was interviewed by local police at the hospital. Hajek had been constantly threatened by the Drenkos that if he tried to leave, or did something at work to lose his job, he would get a beating.’
‘Where did he work?’ asked Cooper.
‘At a car wash. The manager described Hajek as a good worker, but said he always seemed to be hungry. He always turned up for work in the same clothes, and had er... poor hygiene habits.’
‘I see.’
‘Mikolas Zeman was trafficked into the UK by someone else and sold to Katerina Drenkova.’
‘Sold?’
‘That’s the way slavery works, Ben.’
‘I know, I know.’
‘When Zeman was trafficked, he was told he’d have a better life here in the UK. He’d be able to get work and he’d have a roof over his head. It looked like a good option for him, a new start. A more comfortable way of life than in his village in the Czech Republic. It didn’t turn out that way, of course. He and five other men shared one room at the house owned by the Drenkos, with three sleeping on the floor and two in a single bed, like sardines. Others had to sleep on the floor in a garage. They urinated into bottles and had to eat outside. One of the men was treated as a household servant, doing the cooking and cleaning. Others were sent out to work in factories.’
‘And car washes.’
‘Yes. Anyway, the NCA launched a seven-month surveillance operation, and a series of raids were subsequently carried out on addresses across the Midlands. We estimate that several dozen men were trafficked over about six years. The gang will be charged with conspiracy to traffic for the purpose of exploitation, requiring a person to perform forced or compulsory labour, and acting as a gangmaster.’
‘I don’t think those offences even existed when I was in training.’
‘The Modern Slavery Act 2015,’ said Fry. ‘I’m sure you’ll have had the updates.’
‘Of course I will.’
‘The NCA’s financial investigations found bank accounts worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. So slavery can be quite profitable for the owners.’
Fry looked at her watch. Moments later, several cars and a van load of uniformed officers raced into the street. They piled out and entered the garden of a house about six doors down.
‘There are officers in the back alley too,’ said Fry.
One officer wielded the battering ram and broke down the door in three or four blows. His colleagues ran in and began leading people out and loading them into the van.
Cooper was surprised how many people came out of the house. He lost count of them after six. They were all males of working age too. Not your normal household of two parents and two and a half children. He looked to Fry for a cue.
‘Okay, we can go in now.’
A concrete path ran through a few yards of grass that could barely be called a lawn. A wheelie bin stood by the white PVC front door, which had splintered under the impact of the battering ram. Fry and Cooper stepped through the gap into a hallway. The carpet was trampled with mud, and a line of men’s work boots stood against the wall.
The interior of the house was overheated. It smelled rank and stale, thick with the stink of cigarette smoke and the sour dregs of beer. Downstairs the walls were a uniform dull grey, with net curtains and roller blinds at all the windows. The kitchen was barely seven feet wide. If he stretched, he could almost have touched both walls at once. Not that he would have wanted to. They looked as though they had absorbed years of grease and food splashes. The smell of cooking practically oozed from the paintwork.