‘Cheers,’ said Humph, repeating a few random phrases in Greek.
They’d reached Manea. At least that’s what the sign said, otherwise you wouldn’t know. It was the archetypal Fen town. Most of the houses lined the sinuous main street with back garden views that stretched twenty miles to the horizon. Manea had a claim to fame, a railway station. Unfortunately it was three miles outside town.
Wilkinson’s stood on the edge of Manea. A triple set of mammoth MFI-style blocks with a windswept car park full of the kind of cars which spend half their life up on bricks, and the other half breaking the speed limit. Most of the workforce, which had to support a twenty-four-hour production line, were picked up by the company coach on bleak street corners in the middle of the night.
Humph swung the cab in off the road and met an articulated lorry coming out. The stove pipe belched black exhaust as the driver swung the wheel with his forearms so that he could roll a cigarette and light up before he hit the road. He wore the sort of vest which only lorry drivers can, the colour of dirty snow with ash highlights.
They parked under a sign which said: Wilkinson’s Celery Ltd. UK Headquarters. Below that another sign hung from one hinge: Research Department.
The staircase was steel and ran in a zig-zag tower up the outside of the main block. At the top was a door with no handle but an entryphone, so he pressed the button and after ten seconds of crackle he heard the lock turn automatically. He pushed the door open and walked down a long neon-lit corridor to another single door, which was half glazed with milky-white glass reinforced with chicken wire. There was a strong smell of disinfectant and his shoes stuck to the featureless cream lino.
He knocked once and walked in before anyone could stop him. A man in a shabby suit stood up from the only desk. He was a bit like a stick of celery himself. About six feet six, with white hair and narrow shoulders. ‘Mr Dryden? Ashley Wilkinson. Don’t think I can help you any more than I did on the phone. But sit down.’
Behind his desk was a plate-glass window, a good ten feet long and five feet high, looking down on to the shop floor. The light, entirely artificial, had the flat depressing effect usually reserved for deserted seaside aquaria. Dryden expected to see a bored shark cruising over the three identical production lines. On the conveyor belts salad crops, a livid lichen green, shuffled forward between lines of workers in bleach-white overalls.
Meat-eaters’ hell, thought Dryden.
It was the celery shed. Tractors brought the crop in off the fields and dumped it down chutes at the far end from Ashley Wilkinson’s office where it tumbled on to conveyor belts. By the time it got to the other end it was cleaned, trimmed, and neatly packaged. Radio I blared from a crackly tannoy system and the workers, each with a white plastic hairnet, moved with that odd combination of listlessness and physical economy born of the production line.
Dryden decided to be nice, a little-used tactic in his repertoire, and one invariably unsuccessful. But the blood-red sunset had lit up his mood. ‘I understand West Midlands Police have been making enquiries. Illegal immigrants. I’m told two men have been arrested and removed to the Home Office detention centre outside Cambridge…’ Dryden flicked open his notebook until he reached a page which contained an illegible shorthand note of three tips for the weekend’s race meeting at Newmarket. ‘Two West Africans I understand. Sierra Leone.’
Wilkinson didn’t look wildly interested in the geography of the Dark Continent.
‘Sub judice,’ said Wilkinson. This, Dryden recalled, was ‘fuck off’ in Latin.
‘This is all for my background, Mr Wilkinson. No names.’ Dryden shut his notebook, slipped a large rubber band round it, and lobbed it on to Wilkinson’s desk.
‘Your numbers are wrong. They had papers. There’s no suggestion we knew they’d come through Felixstowe. We’ll check the references next time,’ said Wilkinson.
Dryden noted the disguised admission. ‘Where were they living?’
‘Police never found out. Out there somewhere – plenty of places.’
‘Good workers?’
‘Fine. Darn sight better than the locals.’ Wilkinson looked down through the plate glass at his workforce. ‘Lazy bastards, most of ’em.’ British management at its motivational best, thought Dryden, as he produced another miniature pork pie from his pocket and popped it, whole, into his mouth.
Outside, the musical wallpaper was interrupted as a voice cut in: ‘Mr Wilkinson to the loading bay. Mr Wilkinson to the loading bay.’
‘I’ll show you out.’ Dryden noted relief in the voice, and made a silent bet with himself that the call had been pre-arranged to cut short his visit.
‘Ever been done before for employing illegal immigrants?’
But Wilkinson was already hitting numbers on a mobile phone. Interview over.
A door led out of the office to an observation balcony, from which a stairway dropped down to the shopfloor. They made their way between the production lines, watched by every worker in the shed. In a whites-only fastness like the Fens, the workforce looked like an outpost of the Notting Hill Carnival. Three women working together on the first line were black. Almost the entire second line was ethnic Chinese. ‘Cheap labour,’ thought Dryden. But he said: ‘Mind if I have a chat with one of the workers?’
Wilkinson hesitated. Dryden decided to push his luck: ‘I could always just hang around by the gate and catch them on the way home.’
‘This is Jimmy Kabazo,’ said Wilkinson, leading him over to a half-partitioned office at the side of one of the production lines. ‘He’s the day-shift foreman. Talk to him, if you like. He’ll show you out too.’
Jimmy was black. Night black. Dryden guessed he was Nigerian.
‘Follow me, sir,’ he said, the voice pitched high and singsong. Jimmy was short and wiry with tight-curled hair and the kind of smile that could hide any emotion. He wore the regulation Wilkinson’s white overalls with a laminated badge: ‘Foreman’.
Dryden told him what he’d heard about the police raid. The smile never flickered: ‘Yeah. Bad news for the rest of us.’
‘Police?’
Jimmy nodded, still beaming. ‘They bin round. Yeah. Times. Everyone upset now. We’re legal. We got the papers. They left a poster – you want to see it?’
‘Why not?’ said Dryden, and followed Jimmy down the production line and into a small staffroom. There was the girlie calendar, of course, with Miss June’s thighs spread to reveal an anatomical level of detail. Some dried-out tea-bags stained the worktop while a spoon stuck up out of a tin of powdered milk. On the table the Mirror was open at the racing pages.
Kabazo closed the door to reveal the police poster.
£500 REWARD
Police at Ely and Peterborough are investigating the illegal entry into the United Kingdom of immigrants lacking correct documentation. Several lines of enquiry are ongoing and arrests are imminent. A reward of £500 is offered for any information leading to further arrests and conviction of any person involved in the organization or execution of such activity. Contact may be made via the dedicated freephone hotline number below or by e-mail. All information will be treated in the strictest confidence. Immunity from prosecution will be considered in exceptional circumstances.
Issued on behalf of the chief constables of the
East Cambridgeshire, East Midlands and
West Midlands Police Forces
An 0800 number and an e-mail address followed.
‘Tempted?’ said Dryden.
Kabazo tried a smile. ‘It’s not a joke.’
‘Sorry. You’re right. Any interest in the reward among the workers?’