The Fire Baby - By Jim Kelly Page 0,15
ear. It was evening time but the heat of the day still made the cab stink. Hot plastic, socks, and sump oil merged in an odour that Humph liked to call ‘Home’. The promise Dryden had made to Maggie Beck weighed heavily on him, but he felt he had done everything he could, short of touring the north Norfolk coast himself on the off-chance he could spot her missing daughter. In the meantime he had a job to do, which meant he had to find a decent story for the next edition of the Ely Express, The Crow’s downmarket tabloid sister paper.
Dryden had spent many hours that summer scanning the national papers for stories to follow up in the Fens. The so-called ‘silly season’ had struck early that year. Nobody could be bothered to make news in the heat, or even make it up. Last week The Crow had splashed on the drought for the sixth time in a row. From ‘It’s a scorcher!’ to ‘Mains water to be cut’ the soaring temperatures had dominated everything.
The Crow’s meagre editorial budget did not stretch to a full set of national papers each day so Dryden spent an hour in the library every afternoon. He’d begun to spot the pattern in the first days of May. The odd paragraph here and there but, essentially, always the same story. Police raids on lorry parks on the motorways. Illegal immigrants in small, bedraggled groups. Mainly sub-Saharan West African in origin, all Francophone. They probably crossed the Med from the North African coast to the ports of the South of France. Then north to the Channel and via container ship to Felixstowe where they could be shipped across country by lorry. Some had got out en route for the West Midlands. At night, in roadside lay-bys, welcomed by silence and fear.
And the same promise. Jobs. Pickers in the fields. An idyllic picture, laughably misplaced. Dryden scanned the horizon. Miles of empty dry peat. Thousands of acres and not a single living thing on two or four legs except the wheeling birds and a single conspicuous black cat picking its way across the ridges of a vast field. No pickers. Even at harvest time you couldn’t see them in the fields. They shuffled along in the shade of the picking machines. An ambling production line. Then they disappeared inside the sheds for the rest of the summer. Sorting, cleaning, and packing, but always hidden.
He knew that several police forces were tracking the illegal trade. ‘Operation Sardine’, as it was called, had been coordinated by East Cambridgeshire and the East and West Midlands forces with help from Norfolk and Suffolk. He’d been given a briefing in Coventry at the regional crime squad’s HQ by the detective leading the operation. Dryden had been on several raids but little of substance had been found so far. So he’d started to made his own enquiries, which was why he was going to try his luck at Wilkinson’s celery plant.
‘Appointment’s at six o’clock,’ said Dryden, checking his watch.
Humph grunted and pressed the tape button on the dashboard. All the cabbie’s copious spare time was devoted to taped language courses. Each Christmas he would take a holiday in the country of choice, neatly avoiding the necessity to endure the festive season alone. Greek this year, Polish last year. Only France was taboo. He and his ex-wife had gone there for their honeymoon. That was before she’d run off with the postman. Humph had seen him once, loitering outside the divorce courts in London. He’d been balding, with sloping shoulders and a paunch and Humph’s daughters had held his hands with, he judged, obvious distaste. So not France.
On the tape Andreas, his imaginary friend from Thessa-loniki, asked him the time. Humph repeated the question and gave an answer in what he understood to be elegant Greek.
Then he asked Dryden a question, a rare enough occurrence in itself. ‘Why Wilkinson’s?’
It was a processing and packaging plant for celery, one of several small-time businesses which had sprung up on the Black Fen. They employed a silent workforce several thousand strong. The big operators, like Shropshire’s outside Ely, had multi-million pound premises and a workforce recruited from agricultural colleges across Europe. To compete, places like Wilkinson’s had to cut corners. That meant cheap labour and safety regulations stretched to breaking point.
‘Illegal immigrants,’ said Dryden, reaching into his pocket and extracting two-thirds of a miniature pork pie gently dusted with fluff. Humph was steering using his elbows