the kneeling group, casually offering the occasional blow, seemingly as engaged as a man pruning his roses.
It was another fifteen minutes or so before the detainees were formally handed over to the ship’s commander. Even at times like this, we Chileans like our ceremony, Pettigrew mused. He was almost surprised that they didn’t have a brass band on hand to provide a musical accompaniment. They were pushed up the gangplank under a hail of kicks, blows and curses.
On the deck of the ship, his hands were untied and he was told to crouch with his hands behind the back of his neck. As the final prisoners shuffled on board, he counted twenty-six men and twenty-two women. He guessed that their ages ranged from something like fifteen to sixty-five. They were arranged in eight rows of half a dozen each, facing away from the pier. Wandering between the rows came a dozen or so guards carrying lances, sticks with steel points. Overseeing the group, perched on a raised deck-hatch to Pettigrew’s left, were two teenagers manning a machine-gun that looked as if it had come from the First World War. If they had opened up, they could have taken everyone out in about ten seconds.
Once everyone was on board, the order was given for the prisoners to strip. A few bemused glances were exchanged, but again no one complained. Not wishing to be hit again, Pettigrew quickly dropped his trousers and wriggled out of his underpants. Pulling his paint-covered shirt over his head, he folded his clothes neatly, out of habit, and placed the pile at his feet. A cadet quickly scuttled over and took his clothes away. Standing as straight as he could manage, with his arms folded, he tried not to watch the others get undressed. The near silence was occasionally broken by a burst of gunfire from somewhere in the city. At one point, he heard another truck on the jetty. It stopped near to the ship but no one else came on board the White Lady.
Finally, everyone was done. Naked and standing grimly to attention, people tried to make themselves seem as small as possible, almost trying to will themselves somewhere else.
All except for one woman: standing in the row in front of Pettigrew, she stood defiant, back arched, legs planted apart, hands on hips, staring down any sailor who cared to take her on.
She was an amazing sight, hairy, with a backside you could eat your lunch off, large breasts and nipples like bullets. He was ashamed of himself, but it was impossible not to stare.
Forgive me, Father, he thought, for I have sinned in my head.
Pettigrew willed himself to look at his feet and think about… Montrose, about football, Jesus, the Church, agrarian reform… anything to keep his mind off his groin. Others clearly had the same problem. There was some mumbling among the ranks, and he turned to see that a youth standing next to the warrior woman was struggling with an enormous erection. The poor soul went beetroot red in the face as he tried — and failed — to hide it between his legs. The guards roared with laughter and took turns at trying to hit his penis with their sticks; one threatened to shoot it off. But they quickly grew bored with the game and, thanks to God, the errant member eventually subsided.
As dawn began to break, a new group of sailors appeared, carrying hoses. Someone shouted, ‘It’s time for a wash you dirty bastards!’ With a flourish, they turned high-pressure jets of seawater on the prisoners. The ranks broke as everyone tried to get out of the line of fire, while the guards stabbed them with their sticks to keep them under the jets. Water immediately went up Pettigrew’s nose and in his mouth, and he was constantly gagging, on the brink of drowning. A jet of water hit him directly on the head and the pain was terrible. His eyes and ears felt as if they were being stabbed.
After about twenty minutes, they finally turned off the hoses. That’s when he really felt the cold. His hands and feet were numb and he could see one poor woman beginning to turn blue. Everyone was hopping from foot to foot to try and stay warm. He imagined they looked like lunatics dancing on a trip to Hell.
Some time later, they were taken down below and herded into a space maybe forty feet long and twenty feet wide, lit by three bare light bulbs. There were no portholes. At each end was a sliding metal door, with an armed guard stationed immediately outside. Each person was told to take one thin blanket. There were enough hammocks for maybe half of them, with a canvas dividing off the quarters for the women. Beside the doors were four large buckets to serve as their toilet. The lodgings had clearly been used before. The floor was still sticky with fluids that Pettigrew did not want to inspect too closely. There had been some attempt to clean the place up for the new arrivals but, at best, it had been half-hearted. The smell of disinfectant only partially covered the smell of piss, shit and body odour. No one wanted to think about what had happened to the previous guests.
EIGHT
The city hummed around him. Reassuringly familiar, it soothed his agitation. Too impatient to wait for a break in the traffic, Carlyle jumped in front of a small, red delivery van, studiously ignoring the exaggerated hand gestures of the driver as he skipped down Long Acre. Reaching Seven Dials, a mini-roundabout, with a pillar at its centre bearing six sundials (the seventh being the pillar itself, casting its shadow on the ground), he headed towards the north end of Mercer Street, close to Shaftesbury Avenue.
On the west side of the street was a small block of council flats known as Phoenix House. Built in the 1950s with the cheapest concrete available, the building would probably have been more robust if it had been constructed out of cardboard. Still, it looked clean and, from the outside at least, didn’t smell too badly. Carlyle buzzed, waited for a few seconds, heard the door unlock, and went inside.
On the top floor of Phoenix House was Flat 8. For more than a year now, it had been used as a knocking shop by a young Birmingham girl called Sam Laidlaw. The place was tiny, no more than 500 square feet all told, but it had a small roof terrace which allowed Laidlaw’s clients an al fresco option in the summer.
Laidlaw’s maid, Amelia Jacobs, was a retired prostitute who had known Carlyle for more than twenty years. She was a reliable contact, who had built up a healthy balance in his favours book over the years. A few weeks earlier, when she had asked to make a rare withdrawal, Carlyle knew that he would have to go and pay her a visit. Having already put it off a couple of times, he now felt obliged to put in an appearance.
If not exactly the stereotypical hooker with a heart of gold, Jacobs was an impressive figure. She was a plain-looking black woman in her mid-to-late thirties, about 5 feet 4 inches with a no-nonsense short back and sides haircut and hard eyes that never focused on you. If you passed her on the street, you might imagine that Amelia was a teacher, or maybe even a lawyer. The reality was rather different, but Carlyle knew that Amelia was nonetheless worthy of considerable respect. Above all, she was a survivor. Local legend had it that she had once tried, with some success, to bite off the penis of an obnoxious punter. Carlyle knew a nurse working at UCLH on Gower Street who claimed to have been on duty when the unfortunate bloke arrived in A amp;E. He had asked Amelia about the incident once — she had just smiled and said matter-of-factly: ‘Another few seconds and he would never have seen his thing again.’
Happily for visiting punters, and middle-aged policemen, reaching the top floor only meant three flights of stairs. There was a lift, but it rarely worked. Even when it did, Carlyle would rather take the stairs than risk getting stuck inside.
Jogging up the stairs, he felt only slightly winded.
Amelia met him at the door. ‘Thanks for coming, Inspector,’ she smiled.
‘No problem,’ Carlyle replied, trying to control his wheezing. ‘Sorry it’s taken me so long to get here.’
She made a non-committal gesture. ‘Come inside.’
A couple of minutes later he was sitting on an orange sofa in a drab sitting room that surely would be depressing enough to dampen anyone’s lust. He was nursing a dangerous-looking mug of coffee with a slick of what looked like washing-up liquid glistening on the top. Sam Laidlaw sat in a chair opposite him, staring at the floor like the naughty schoolgirl that she basically was. She was twenty-two or twenty-three going on fifteen. Her platinum- blond hair matched her sickly skin. It had grown out at the roots and badly needed redoing. In a grubby white T- shirt, grey jogging pants and no make-up, she looked a total mess. It would be like fucking a corpse, Carlyle thought. On the other hand, trying to be generous, it was relatively early. For her, the working week had yet to start.
Amelia explained the situation to Carlyle. The problem was a familiar one. His name was Michael Hagger, a local mini-gangster-turned-entrepreneur, occasional pimp and father to Sam Laidlaw’s four-year-old son, Jake. Hagger, according to Jacobs, was threatening to take the boy away from his mother as part of a long-running dispute about money.
