for himself and, believing one of those intense little Portuguese custard tarts was never quite enough, bought two; he didn’t offer to share them round.
‘When you were helping your friend out of her little difficulty,’ Masters said, ‘you ran across Sali Mejdani. Aldo Fusco, he sometimes likes to call himself.’
‘We had a conversation.’
Jenkins chuckled softly, possibly at something he’d just read.
‘He brought her into the country, your Adina?’
‘Not directly.’
‘Of course. From Romania to Albania and then to Italy, Italy to France, Belgium or Holland. Into Britain from somewhere like Zeebrugge. Fifteen or twenty people a day, seven days a week, three hundred-plus days of the year. Approximately five thousand sterling per head. Even after expenses — drivers, escorts, safe houses, backhanders…’
‘Plenty of those,’ Jenkins said, without looking up.
‘… it all adds up to a tidy sum. And the punters, what they don’t pay in advance, they pay with interest. For women and boys it’s the sex trade, for the rest it’s hard labour.’
‘Mejdani,’ Kiley said, ‘why can’t you arrest him, close him down?’
‘Ah,’ said Jenkins.
‘For the last couple of years,’ Masters said, ‘we’ve been building a case against him. Ourselves, Immigration, Customs and Excise, the National Crime Squad.’ He set down his cup at last. ‘You know when you were a kid, building sandcastles on the beach, Broadstairs or somewhere, you and your dad. You’re putting the finishing touches to this giant, intricate thing, all turrets and towers and windows and doors, and just as you turn over the bucket and tap the last piece into place, one of the bits lower down slides away, and then another, and before you know it you’re having to start all over again.’
‘Accident?’ Kiley said. ‘Over-ambition?’
Masters sat back. ‘I prefer to think the fault lies in the design.’
‘Not the workmanship?’
‘Get what you pay for, some might say.’
Jenkins laid aside his book. ‘Mejdani certainly would.’
‘He’s bribing people,’ Kiley said, ‘to look the other way.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
Kiley looked across at Masters. Masters shrugged.
‘’Tis but the way of the world, my masters,’ Jenkins said.
‘Not Chandler again?’
‘A little earlier.’
They all looked round as Adina stepped through the door. She had changed into black jeans and a black roll- neck sweater, an unbuttoned beige topcoat round her shoulders. Some but not all of the make-up had been wiped from her face. She asked at the counter for a Coke with lemon and ice.
Kiley made the introductions while she lit a cigarette.
‘Alen,’ she said, ‘what happened to him?’
Masters showed her the photograph.
For a long moment, she closed her eyes.
‘You’re not really surprised,’ Masters said.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You thought he might get into difficulties,’ Kiley said. ‘You gave him my card.’
‘Yes, I thought… Alen, he was someone important in my country, high up in trade union…’
‘We used to have those,’ Jenkins said, as much to himself as anyone.
‘… there was disagreement, he had to leave. Rights of workers, something. And here, I don’t know, I think it was the same. Already, he told me, the people he work for, they warn him, shut your mouth. Keep your mouth shut. I think he had made threat to go to authorities. The police.’
‘You think that’s why he was killed.’
‘Of course.’
Masters glanced at Jenkins, who gave a barely discernible nod. ‘We have a number of names,’ he said, ‘names and places. We’d like to run them past you and for you to tell us any that you recognise.’
Adina held smoke down in her lungs. What was she, Kiley wondered? All of twenty? Twenty-one? She’d paid to risk her life travelling to England not once, but twice. Paid dearly. And why? Because the strip clubs and massage parlours of London and Wolverhampton were better than the autoroutes in and out of Bucharest? As an official asylum seeker, she could claim thirty quid a week, ten in cash, the rest in vouchers. But she was not official. She did what she could.
She said, ‘Okay. If I can.’
‘Wait,’ Kiley said. ‘If she helps you, you have to help her. Make it possible for her to stay, officially.’
‘I don’t know if we can do that,’ Masters said.
‘Of course we fucking can,’ Jenkins said.
Adina lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the first and asked for another Coke.
Kiley caught the overground to Highbury and Islington. In an Upper Street window a face he recognised stared out from a dozen TVs; the same face was in close-up on the small Sony Kate kept at the foot of the bed.
‘Kramer seems to be getting a lot of exposure,’ Kiley said.
‘The wrong kind.’
Dogmatic, didactic, distinguished by a full beard and sweep of jet black hair, Martin Kramer was an investigative journalist with strong anti-capitalist, anti-American left-wing leanings and a surprisingly high profile. Kiley had always found him too self-righteous by half, even if, much of the time, what he said made some kind of sense.
Kate turned up the volume as the Newsnight cameras switched to Jeremy Paxman behind an impressive- looking desk. ‘… if it really is such a small and insignificant point, Mr Kramer, then why not answer my question and move on?’
She flicked the sound back down.
‘What was the question?’ Kiley asked.
‘Was he entertaining Helen Forester in his flat on the night she was attacked?’
‘And was he?’
‘He won’t say.’
‘Which means he was.’
‘Probably.’
Sitting, propped up against pillows, Kate was wearing the faded Silver Moon T-shirt she sometimes used as night-wear and nothing else. Kiley rested his hand above her knee.
‘They were at Cambridge together,’ Kate said. ‘Maybe they had a thing back then and maybe they didn’t.’
‘Twenty-five years ago,’ Kiley said. ‘More.’
Kate turned in a little against his hand. ‘Kramer’s been making this programme for Channel 4. Illegal workers, gangmasters, people trafficking. Pretty explosive by all accounts.’
‘Not the best of times for the wife of a Home Office minister to be sharing his bed.’
‘Needs must,’ Kate said. ‘From time to time.’
Helen Forester denied and denied and finally admitted that she had, indeed, had dinner with Martin Kramer on the night in question, had enjoyed possibly a glass of wine too many, and gone for a stroll to clear her head before returning home.
Kramer’s programme was moved to a prime-time slot, where it attracted close on seven million viewers, not bad for a polemical documentary on a minority channel. Standing amidst the potato fields of East Anglia, Kramer pontificated about the farming industry’s increasing dependence on illegal foreign labour, comparing it to the slave trade of earlier centuries, with gangmasters as the new overseers and Eastern Europeans the new Negroes; from
