The Fire Baby - By Jim Kelly Page 0,17

almost constant mood characterized by either irrational exuberance or mutual indifference.

‘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,