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.'
Tughan took over. 'The smugglers have a range of options. They change the routes to keep the immigration services on their toes, but there are a few key places Moscow, Budapest, Sarajevo are all major nexus points.'
Thorne smiled. Nexus points! Nick Tughan was not a man to let himself be outdone. Thorne half expected him to march across like a teacher and write it on the white board
'But Istanbul is the big one. It's smack on the most direct route to the West from most of the major source countries.'
'Right,' Brigstocke said. 'And where the Zarif brothers have got plenty of friends and contacts.'
Holland rubbed his eyes. 'What about getting in here?'
'I already told you,' Tughan said, 'the smugglers aren't stupid.' Neither am I, Thorne thought. 'They've got a few choices at this end as well,' he said. 'They can risk a major port or try a back-door route like the one through Ireland. There's another way in that's becoming quite popular via Holland and Denmark, then over to the Faroe Islands, the Shetlands and across into mainland Scotland.' Thorne wasn't sure whether the short silence that followed was considered or simply astonished.
It was Yvonne Kitson who eventually spoke up. 'All right,' she said, turning to him, mock-aggressive. 'What planet are you from, and what have you done with Tom Thorne?'
DC Richards the tedious Welshman who had so enjoyed making his 'concentric circles' speech cut off the laughter before it had really begun. 'What are we actually going to do, sir? About the Zarifs and Billy Ryan?'
Tughan gave a thin smile, grateful to one of his own for passing the baton back to him. Back where it belonged. 'It's tricky, because both sides have got good reason to lie low for a while. The Zarifs know we're looking at their smuggling operation, and Ryan's got any number of immigrants to dispose of.'
'I can't see Memet Zarif and his brothers lying low for very long,' Thorne said. 'They'll want to hit back at Ryan for this. Close to home, maybe.'
Tughan considered this for a second. 'Maybe, but I think we've got a bit of time to play with. I want a full-on policy of disruption. Let's make it hard for them to do any business; let's fuck them both around.' He pointed at Holland, reminding him of what he'd said earlier. 'Make their lives difficult.'
Thorne knew that 'disruption' essentially meant arresting, or, at the very least, hassling a variety of low-rank workers in the two organisations: drug dealers, debt collectors those in DC Richards' outer circles. It was time- consuming, heavy on manpower and, worst of all, as far as Thorne was concerned, it had little effect on the people they should be really going after. It was a policy that could produce results in the right circumstances, but there were just too many bodies around this time. It made him feel like a glorified VAT-man, and he resented it. He wanted to hurt Billy Ryan and the Zarif boys in more than just their wallets.
'Not convinced, Tom?' Tughan asked. Obviously, Thorne's face was giving away as much as it usually did.
Thorne hated the eyes on him, the barely suppressed sighs from those without the bollocks or the brain power to speak up. 'It's like we're trying to catch a killer,' he said, 'and while we're waiting for him to do it again, we're busy cutting up his credit cards. Nicking a few quid out of his wage packet.'
Tughan's response was remarkably calm, gentle even. 'We're not dealing with everyday criminals, Tom. These men are not ordinary killers.' Thorne traded small shrugs with Brigstocke, exchanged a 'what the hell' look with Dave Holland. He knew that Tughan was right, but it didn't make him feel any happier, or any less lost.
Thorne had never thought the day would come, but he was starting to yearn for a decent, honest-to- goodness psychopath. There was a message from Phil Hendricks on Thorne's mobile: he'd be spending the night at Brendan's. Thorne texted him back: he was sorry for being a miserable sod the night before, and hoped that wasn't the reason Hendricks was staying away.
'What's Ryan going to do with them?' Kitson asked. The pair of them were back in their own office, working their way through paperwork, while, up the corridor, Tughan and Brigstocke were still hammering out a plan for 'disruption'. Thorne put his phone down and glanced at his watch before he looked up. Another fifteen minutes and he'd head home.
'Probably exactly the same as the Zarifs would have done,' he said.
'He'll exploit them. The poor sods hand over every penny they've got, and when they arrive here they find that they owe these 'businessmen' a lot more. In the time it takes them to get people smuggled into the UK they might be working with criminal organisations in half a dozen different countries. It might take months, even years, and the smugglers are incurring extra costs on the way. Palms need to be greased all along the route, and the cost of that gets passed on to the people in the backs of the lorries.'
Kitson shook her head. 'So, even if they get here in one piece, they're up to their eyeballs in debt.'
'Right. But, luckily, people like that nice Mr. Zarif have lots of jobs they can do to work their debts off. At one pound fifty an hour it should only take them a couple of years.'
'And they can't do anything about it. They can't kick up a fuss.'
'Not unless they want to get reminded, forcibly, of just who they're dealing with. I mean, there're so many of these buggers over here, aren't there? Nicking our jobs or claiming our dole money. Who's going to notice if a couple of them disappear?' Thorne's voice dropped, lost its ironic swagger. 'Or there's worse. Don't forget, back where these people have come from, the smugglers have plenty of friends who know exactly where their families are.' Kitson sighed, a slow hiss of resignation. 'It's a great new life.'
Thorne thought about all the cliches. It was hard to think of hope as something that sprang eternal, but easy to see it being crushed and dashed. Hope died violently. It was bludgeoned and it was burned. Hope was something that bled.
He dropped some papers he hadn't bothered looking at into a drawer, and slammed it shut. The action distracted him from the face of the woman on the tube train. The sound drowned out the noise of nothing rattling in the bottom of her chewed polystyrene cup.
Thorne had read plenty the night before about trafficking. He knew about women being kidnapped, forced into heroin addiction and the vice trade. He guessed that the Zarifs were involved in that particularly lucrative area of human trading.
He knew that there were worse things than begging. At the sound of raised voices outside the door, Thorne looked up. Holland knocked and stuck his head in. 'They've found the lorry driver,' he said. He pushed the door further open and stepped into the office. 'In some woods behind a lay-by on the A7.'
'How?' Thorne asked.
