Now I feel guilty that I've upset her, but also angry because her feeling sad or guilty or whatever it is she feels seems so fucking trivial when I look into the mirror on the back of the bedroom door, and half my face still looks like the meat in her burger. I know I'll feel differently about today by the morning and AH and I will be best mates again before the end of school on Monday, but it's difficult not to feel a bit low when I'm writing this stuff down and it's my own fault. I always write at night, staring out of the window and listening to the Smiths or something equally miserable. Maybe I should have bought some cheerier music when I was in town. The soundtrack to tomorrow's entry will be courtesy of Cliff Richard or the Wombles or something.
Shit Moment of the Day
The stuff with AH.
Magic Moment of the Day.
A comedian on the TV making a joke about burn victims sticking together.
SIXTEEN
A single word was written on the white board in red felt-tip pen.
UMIT.
"It means "hope"," Tughan said. "In Turkish." Feet were shifted uncomfortably, and awkward looks exchanged. Thorne thought that if the people who'd been taken from the back of that lorry were now being handled by Billy Ryan, hope was something they would almost certainly have run out of.
It was Saturday morning, the day after the discovery of the abandoned lorry. The SO7 team was back at Becke House to work through this latest development. All that was actually developing was a sense of frustration.
"Customs and Excise are all over this now," Tughan said. "Not sure what they'll get out of it, but it'll probably be a damn sight more than we do."
Thorne stood with Russell Brigstocke and the rest of the core team Kitson, Stone, Holland and their SO7 counterparts in a corner of the Incident Room. They watched as Tughan wore out a small strip of carpet in front of one of the desks. Weekend or not, there were always those who made no concessions to casual wear, but, despite the sharp and predictably well-pressed suit, Thorne thought that Tughan was starting to look and sound a little tired. Maybe not as tired as Thorne himself, but he was getting there.
"In terms of the Zarif brothers, you mean?" Thorne asked. Holland held up his hands in a gesture of exasperation. "Surely there must be something tying them to this? Something that will at least give us an excuse to make their lives difficult." Tughan put down his coffee and began to flick through a hastily assembled report on the hijacking. "It's like six degrees of fucking separation," he said. "Between this lorry and the Zarifs there are any number of haulage companies, leasing agencies, freight contractors. They own the vehicle, theoretically, but if we spend a lot of time trying to tie them to whatever the vehicle was carrying, we'll be the ones whose lives are difficult."
"I bet they're laughing at us," Holland said. "Them and the bloody Ryans."
Tughan shrugged. "Without any bodies, without the people who were inside the lorry, we've got sweet FA."
"I can't believe they've got everything covered." Holland looked around for support, found a little in the way of nods and murmurs.
"I've had a thought," Brigstocke said. All eyes turned to him. "Have we checked to see if that lorry's tax disc is up to date?" The joke got a decent, and much needed, response, even if some of the laughter was lost in yawns.
"Do we know what was inside the lorry?" Kitson said. "Specifically, I mean. Are we ever going to know how many?" Tughan shook his head. "Anywhere between a dozen and, I don't know… fifty?"
"There were that many found dead in the back of that lorry at Dover, weren't there?" Holland said.
"There were more," Thorne said. He remembered the smell when he'd stepped up into that box the night before. He wondered what it must have been like for whoever had opened a pair of lorry doors a few years earlier and stared as the sunlight fell across the tangled heaps of crushed and emaciated dead. Fifty-eight Chinese immigrants, crammed like sardines into a sealed lorry, and found suffocated when it was opened on a steaming summer's afternoon. Their clothes in nice, neat piles. Their bodies in considerably less ordered ones. There had, of course, been a major outcry at the time. There were demands for tougher controls, for positive action to curb this barbaric trade. Thorne knew very well that more might have been done had the corpses in the back of that lorry been those of donkeys or puppies or kittens .
"How can that many get through?" Stone asked. "Don't these lorries get searched?"
"Sometimes," Tughan said. "They can hide in secret compartments or behind stacks of false cargo."
Stone was shaking his head. "You'd think they'd check the lorries a bit more thoroughly after all that business at Dover, though." Thorne knew that it wouldn't have taken a particularly thorough search to have found those Chinese immigrants earlier. To have saved their lives. They'd tried to hide behind a few crates of tomatoes.
"The smugglers aren't stupid," Tughan said. "They'll try to avoid the ports that have got scanners, but even those that do have them are overrun. They can't possibly check any more than a handful or you'd have queues fifty miles long waiting to board the ferries." Thorne knew Tughan was right. Unable to sleep the night before, he'd booted up his rarely used computer and surfed the Net for a couple of hours. He'd gone to the NCIS site and taken a crash course in Turkish organised crime. He'd looked at the way the gangs and families operated both in the UK and in Turkey, and had followed the link from there to the NCIS pages on people smuggling.
It had made for grim reading. It hadn't helped him sleep. Customs and Excise were still more concerned with finding illicit alcohol and tobacco than they were with the smuggling of and, worse still, the trade in people. Though a few scanners had been installed, it was simply too big an undertaking to check anything more than a small random sample of vehicles passing through most ports. Seven thousand lorries a day came through Dover; on a good day, 5 per cent of them might be searched. It was little surprise that often no effort at all was made to conceal the people being smuggled. Those doing the smuggling knew full well that they could afford to be brazen. Tughan talked some more about the hopelessness of trying to curb the growing trade in desperate people. He mentioned the valiant efforts being made by the police, the immigration services, the NCIS and Customs. He described an operation, yet to yield substantial results, involving MI5 and MI6 agents infiltrating the businesses of those responsible.
Thorne listened, wondering if he should jump in and help. After all, it wasn't often that he had the facts and figures at his fingertips. He was not usually the one who'd done his homework. He decided not to bother, figuring that it might be a bit early in the morning for some Page people to handle the shock.
Yvonne Kitson had brought a flask of Earl Grey in with her. She poured herself a cup. "So, until we find these people, find out what Ryan's done with them, we won't know who they are or how they got here." Brigstocke pointed to the white board to the single word, scrawled in red: Hope. The colour of crushed tomatoes.
"Well, we can be pretty sure that at least some of them are Turkish," Brigstocke said. "Kurds, probably."
Thorne knew the most likely route: "From Turkey and the Middle East through the Balkans." He ignored the look of surprise from Brigstocke, the look of amused horror from Tughan, and carried on, "Then across the Adriatic to Italy."