Long Way Home (35 page)

‘Xin Gao.’

She nodded. ‘Are you up to it?’

He threw back the covers and swung his legs over the side of the bed, stood in front of her with his striped pyjama bottoms hanging on his hips, arms out to his sides like he’d just performed an elaborate tumbling trick.

The gunshot on his shoulder was well bandaged but the bruising had begun to come out and it spread beyond the tight binding and the gauze, blooming purple and red halfway across his sunken chest.

‘I’d better go and find you some clothes.’

‘Marco has brought me clothes,’ he said, pointing to a plastic bag on the chair in the corner of the room.

‘I’ll give you some privacy.’

THE ROADS ALL
looked the same, flat black tarmac unravelling into the distance, fields on either side which he had never seen in daylight before. They drove out before dawn, came home after dark, and Paolo realised how little attention he’d paid to his surroundings on those journeys. Looking without seeing.

It seemed unimportant at the time.

How was he to know it would come to this?

He thought he would never escape that place, suspected he might die there.

It still felt unreal to him, being free. It felt like the man who ran across the fields, pursued by dogs and men with guns, was a completely different person. Then he would move and the hole in his shoulder would throb and he knew this wasn’t just another dream.

Next to him Sergeant Ferreira drove with her eyes dead ahead, hands tight around the steering wheel. She was getting impatient. They’d been down this road before, turned around and double-backed.

He looked at her profile, the colour of her skin and the line of her nose so similar to Maria’s that if he squinted he could convince himself he was with her. For a few seconds at least. She smelled different, wore a stronger perfume and a wreath of cigarette smoke, and when she turned her head he caught a hint of sickly sweet product on her long black hair.

Maria smelled of soap and vanilla and when he pressed his face into her skin there were spices and pepper. He wanted to phone her but he found he couldn’t remember her number any more. He’d dialled it a thousand times, his thumb skipping over the keypad automatically. How was it possible to forget so quickly?

He’d been locked away in that place for ten months, he now knew. It shouldn’t be long enough to forget.

‘Does any of this look familiar?’ Sergeant Ferreira asked.

They were a few miles away from the site on Knarrs End Drove, back where they had started twenty minutes earlier.

‘We headed east.’

‘We are heading east,’ she said. ‘You must have noticed things when you went through? Place names? A pub? Anything, Paolo. You’ve got to give me something to work with or we’ll be out here all day.’

He trawled back through his memory as the car bounced over the uneven road, banging through potholes.

He remembered the small red cottages and bigger white ones with long gardens in front of them. Phone boxes and shops, paddocks full of horses and speed bumps on the road.

‘There was the wind farm.’

‘OK. A big one?’

‘Twenty or thirty turbines, I think. I didn’t count.’

She nodded to herself. ‘What else?’

‘A church. It was built from grey stone.’

‘Alright, we’re getting somewhere.’

She put her foot down and the car sped along the narrow road. She was a bad driver, erratic and dangerous, overtaking with the narrowest margin, like she didn’t care if they arrived or not, and Paolo gripped the door handle to stop himself being thrown every time she took a corner too sharply.

They passed through a hamlet with a few houses standing close to the road and a large yard full of buses with missing wheels and smashed windscreens, their carcasses busted and rotten, dumped so long ago that a bush was growing through one of them.

He told her none of it looked familiar.

‘It’s OK, I know where we’re going now. This is the quickest route.’

The sun was beginning to dip in the sky but it was clear and warm for a winter’s day and it made him think of home. Marco said he had enough money put aside to get him a plane ticket; as soon as the police were finished with him they would leave. Marco had had enough too. The man he was working for was a bully and a thief – he kept half of what they earned and often didn’t pay them at all, insisting he hadn’t been paid either. As if they were stupid enough to believe that.

Or maybe he knew they didn’t believe it but said it anyway, knowing they couldn’t do anything about it.

‘Being poor in the sun is better than being poor in the rain,’ Marco said.

In the middle of nowhere they passed a large field, bordered by waterlogged ditches fringed with reeds, a couple of dozen workers bent double over rows of celery, knives in their hands, crates by their feet.

‘How did you escape?’ Sergeant Ferreira asked.

He looked at her but her eyes were fixed on the road.

He didn’t want to talk about it, pretended he hadn’t heard.

‘The cabins were all locked from the outside,’ she said. ‘There were grilles over the windows. How did you manage to get out?’

His shoulder began to throb. The painkillers were wearing off already.

‘Paolo.’

‘They came for me,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember exactly . . . one minute I was asleep and I heard voices and then someone hit me in the face and I must have passed out.’ He ran his tongue across his broken molars and blood came into his mouth. ‘I woke up in a barn.’

‘The one near the site?’

‘Yes. With the pigs.’ He clenched his hands into tight fists to hide the tremble in his fingers. ‘They were going to kill me. I heard them arguing about it outside. They were going to kill me and feed me to those animals.’

‘So you ran.’

‘I thought if I could just reach the road . . .’

‘You were very lucky.’

At the edge of Spalding she pulled into a petrol station to fill up.

He stared out across the forecourt at the lorries lined up, waiting for their turn at the pumps, the names of supermarkets emblazoned across them, blown-up photographs of apples beaded with dew and carrots with lush green tops. He thought of the workers they had passed in the field and the ones in the packaging factories, an invisible army so far removed from society that they could go missing for months, years even, and nobody would come looking for them.

If he hadn’t escaped the Gavins would be going about their business as usual today. He would be dead and Xin Gao would be lost forever under a building.

Sergeant Ferreira replaced the nozzle and told him to come in with her and get something to eat.

The shop was brightly lit and he felt disconcerted by the music and the hum of the air conditioning which blasted his face as he walked in. He followed her to the refrigerators at the back, feeling a stupid delight at the sight of so much choice, everything fresh and perfect. He chose a BLT and a can of Pepsi, noticing that the design had changed since he’d last had one.

This must be how people felt when they were released from prison. Finding the world the same but different. Everything louder and sharper than they expected.

He waited in the queue next to her, looking at the cigarettes.

‘Do you want a pack?’ she asked.

The woman behind the counter scanned his food.

‘Marlboro Reds,’ he told her.

Back in the car he lit one before he ate and the first hit of nicotine sang through his lungs. Sergeant Ferreira was fiddling with a tin of loose tobacco.

‘You missed them, I bet.’

‘Yes.’ The second drag was duller and he took it deep, held onto it a long time, thinking of the rough cigarette Xin Gao had given him the morning he died. He was a kind man, too decent to have ended up where he was.

‘Will you find Xin Gao’s family?’

‘If he was over here legally we probably could but there are almost no legal Chinese workers so I don’t know. I doubt it.’

Her mobile phone rang as she was pulling out of the petrol station and she answered whoever was on the other end in brisk monosyllables, accelerating as she listened, like she wanted to get away from it.

‘Near Gray’s End Farm . . . It’s on the outskirts of Spalding . . . No, not exactly, but how many options can there be? . . . Look, get them on the road and I’ll call in when I’ve got a precise location.’

She threw her phone onto the dashboard and drove one-handed while she lit her cigarette, the car veering across the white lines. She pulled it back and put her foot down.

Paolo ate his sandwich, which didn’t taste as good as it looked, and drank his Pepsi in a couple of long mouthfuls, spilling some down his chin when she took a corner too sharply. He should have got painkillers from the petrol station he realised. The ache in his shoulder was biting deeper.

He lit another cigarette, hoping that might take the edge off.

Fields went past in a blur. She was driving too quickly for the badly maintained road. When he glanced at the speedometer he saw the needle flickering around ninety and decided not to look again.

Then she was slowing, a warning sign flashing as they entered a village with a lot of quaint red-brick cottages and a large old pub standing on the broad, tree-lined green, where a man was letting two greyhounds run off their leads.

‘I have been here before.’

‘Good, we’re on the right track then.’

A few minutes later they were back in open countryside and in the distance he saw wind turbines, their huge white blades standing still.

‘That is the wind farm.’

‘How close to it was the site?’

‘We’re almost there, I think.’

‘Which direction?’

‘It was on the right side of the van when we left in the morning.’

He scanned the landscape for something familiar, saw clumps of trees and an occasional farmhouse, miles away down dirt tracks.

They passed through another village.

‘I remember that church.’

More fields. Polytunnels in rows. A house with fresh eggs for sale at the mouth of the gate.

Minutes passed and he leaned forward in his seat, eyes straining for the horizon. Then he saw it, half hidden by a sparse copse.

‘There.’

The steels glinted under the midday sun, more of them than he remembered, sticking up high in the air.

‘How do we get to it?’

‘There is a turning along here,’ he said. ‘It is a long track, you can’t see the building from the road.’

His heart was hammering in his chest, blood pounding in his ears. Suddenly he realised they might not have all of them. What if there were more English? On another site somewhere, and they had turned up for work this morning with no idea what had happened?

She turned off the road and drove more slowly along the bumpy dirt track. Ahead of them the track curved around a small wooded area which was so dense he couldn’t see the site beyond it. He wanted to tell her to stop. Wait for more police. But his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth and he held his breath as she rounded the corner, only breathing again when he saw the broad metal gates still locked and the site deserted.

Sergeant Ferreira got out of the car and walked up to the gates, tugged at them two-handed, then when they didn’t budge, gave them a kick.

Paolo climbed out too, stood behind the open car door looking at the half-finished steel cage where Xin Gao’s body was sealed in concrete. Three days ago now and it would be set. They would have to break him out.

Sergeant Ferreira was on the phone, giving directions to the man on the other end, telling him to get a move on.

Neither of them spoke until the vehicles arrived fifteen minutes later, two red vans and a silver car with a black-haired policeman inside who Paolo hadn’t seen before. Not the one from the hospital. This one was younger, fresh-faced and expensively suited.

Another man, this one in scruffy clothes, worked quickly on the gate and then it was open and they were driving onto the site. Doors opened and slammed shut.

‘OK, Paolo, can you remember where they threw him in?’ Sergeant Ferreira asked.

They were all watching him now and he thought of how still and silent the other workers were as Xin Gao’s body hit the wet concrete. He walked over to the spot, seeing ridged footsteps standing out sharply in the mud, a patch of brownish red which could only be Xin Gao’s blood.

He pointed to the footing. ‘There.’

Sergeant Ferreira squeezed his arm. ‘You’ve done great, Paolo.’

Things happened quickly then and he stood near her car watching the other police pull blue plastic bodysuits on over their clothes, unloading equipment in silver cases. He didn’t want to watch this. Seeing Xin Gao die was bad enough, he didn’t think he could stand seeing the man’s body brought out again.

Sergeant Ferreira was standing talking to the black-haired policeman. When he smiled she moved in close to him, her posture stiff with contained violence. Then her phone rang and she moved away.

Paolo heard her tone soften, saw her whole face change.

‘What did they say? . . . Are they sure? . . . No, Bobby, I’ll deal with it . . .’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Twenty minutes . . . this time of day it’s twenty minutes . . . No, they don’t need me here . . .’ She grinned. ‘Love you too.’

She came over, slipping her phone into her jeans pocket.

‘Paolo, I’ve got to go back to the station.’ She pushed her hair off her face. ‘There’s been a development in another case. I’ve got to deal with that.’

‘I want to leave.’

‘Get in then.’

ZIGIC’S WIFE ANSWERED
the door, the picture of domesticity with a floral apron over her clothes and full make-up on. Ferreira had met her briefly at one of the Christmas parties but she was drunk by then and had only the vaguest recollection of the woman, remembered a simple black dress and an air of carefully measured affability.

‘It’s Mel, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, hi. Can I come in?’

‘Dushan’s resting.’

‘It’ll only take a minute.’

She stepped back and let Ferreira into a hallway decorated in five shades of cream with blown-up sepia photographs of their kids framed on the walls and a console table carefully staged with a vase of stargazer lilies and a lot of white pillar candles which had never been lit. The door to the kitchen was open and baking smells wafted out, a warm fug of sugar and butter and cinnamon.