Читать книгу Remain Silent - Susie Steiner - Страница 14

‘Who’s this fella we’re going to see then?’ she asks, while Davy pulls away from the kerb. They are going to Wisbech police station for the interview.

‘Edikas. He’s the fixer. He runs the migrants on behalf of Vasil the Barbarian, the gangmaster. Tells them what’s what when they get off the bus. Vasil gets the cash. Bridget says salaries are paid into the migrants’ bank accounts, so it looks like there’s a paper trail, but their bank cards are taken off them when they arrive, so they don’t have any access to the money. Vasil uses their accounts to launder his funds.’

‘And why hasn’t he been cleaned out by Op Pheasant?’

‘No one will testify against him. Biggest problem Pheasant has is that the minute the migrants get away, they want nothing more to do with it. They hotfoot it back to Klaipeda and that’s that. Wall of silence, Bridget says.’

‘Oh, Bridget says, does she?’ says Manon, gurning with Carry-On innuendo. Trying to nudge-nudge him, without causing an accident. ‘How is Bridget?’

‘She’s fine,’ he says, flushing.

‘And what about Edikas’s own situation. Wife? Kids?’

‘Back in Klaipeda. He sends money back to them each month.’

‘What’s Klaipeda like?’

‘Baltic sea port, Lithuania’s third city. Lots of Russians, lots of jobs on the docks.’

‘OK, so it looks to me like Edikas has the worst of all worlds. Doing all the dirty work for Vasil but not living in the lap of luxury like Vasil’s lot. Where does Edikas live?’

‘In a rental, but by himself.’

‘Do we need an interpreter for this?’

‘He says not. Says he speaks English just fine.’

‘Hmmm, I’ve had that before. No interpreter, then you find there’s lots of convenient misunderstanding when it comes to the detail. Lots of no comprendo, DS Walker.’

They drive in silence through the Fens for a time.

‘And anyway,’ she says, ‘there are lots of ways of making it look like it isn’t murder. Pills. Push ’em in a river, car accidents. Easy peasy. It’s got an old-fashioned quality, hanging – makes me think of medieval times, or highway men at roadsides, or lynchings, the American Civil War, y’know? They hung slaves from the trees.’

‘Yes, but this is Wisbech,’ says Davy.

‘Oh yes Davy,’ Manon says, clasping an imaginary handbag mid-air. ‘This is Wisbech, the last bastion of civilisation.’

She reaches out to turn on the radio. Immediately says, ‘Oh fuck no, not him again, I can’t stand him,’ as Shane Farquharson comes over the airwaves, his voice immediately recognisable – the everyman twang combined with stockbroker belt well-to-do. ‘How can you listen to this awful crap, Davy?’

Out from the radio comes Farquharson’s tell-it-like-it-is voice: ‘Any normal and fair-minded person would have a perfect right to be concerned if a group of Lithuanian people suddenly moved in next door.’

‘Not any normal people I know,’ says Manon. ‘What the fuck is he talking about? It’s not fair-minded to be worried about someone’s nationality! It’s the opposite of fair-minded. It’s Being a Big Bigot.’

‘He’s just a disrupter,’ Davy says. ‘None of it means anything.’

‘Think it’s worse than that,’ Manon says.

Farquharson, whose primary job is media rent-a-gob, is of above average intelligence and articulate – he can express what his angry troupe are feeling, making sense of their futile fury, making their impotence seem momentarily like purpose. And though he has never won a seat in parliament, he dominates radio airwaves, a favourite of talk show phone-ins like the one currently polluting Davy and Manon’s air. ‘Urgh, he’s invited onto Question Time every single week,’ Manon says. ‘Just gives him a platform so he can feed more crazy to the base.’

Manon is aware she has descended into one of her diatribes and suspects Davy may have switched off, thinking instead about Big-Bosomed Bridget, while she pontificates about anger and neglect in the air, meted out at polling stations. The misinformed holding sway. Anger in the pages of newspapers, anger on radio airwaves, anger that pushes to one side solid information. There are no facts any more. Instead, ‘all the feels’ and ‘we’ve had enough of experts telling us what to think’ and ‘the elite have always run things, it’s time for change’ and drain the swamp and make Wisbech great again.

‘Anyway,’ Manon says, turning off the radio. ‘How are the wedding preparations going?’