Those Who Feel Nothing (24 page)

You see that they are going to block the woman's way so you make towards the drawer in the filing cabinet before she can enter the aisle. A bald-headed man with a goatee beard bumps into you.

‘Sorry,' he mutters in Russian but without getting out of the way.

You glance to your left. The woman has started moving, her boots tap-tapping on the parquet floor. The man with the goatee beard is still in your way – he seems to have a problem with his shoulder bag. You try to move past him and somehow he is in your way again.

She passes behind the man and does not look your way.

You retreat down the aisle between the desks and cut into the next one. The man with the goatee is still fumbling with his bag. He may be mumbling another apology.

The woman opens the drawer, retrieves the book, closes the drawer and heads for the door by which you entered. You follow her and suddenly the bald-headed man with the goatee is in front of you again. This time his back is to you but he's still blocking your way. Intentionally?

In your line of work, there's no such thing as coincidence. Of course he is blocking your way intentionally.

You glance at the nearest surveillance camera. You turn into the next aisle and head for the other door. You zip through a couple of rooms, trying to keep the geography of this floor in your head. You push through an emergency exit door and take the stairs, three at a long stretch of the legs a time.

You're thinking: if I lose her I'll go after the goatee.

On the ground floor you come out near the entrance. You're astounded to see that snow has begun falling and sticking. You dash into the street, run to the corner. No sign of either of them. You decide – hope – they are still in the building. You walk back in more cautiously, wafting your ticket and nodding at the security man.

You can't think why the woman would still be in the museum. But if she is – where is she? You head for the basement.

You've been here before and you don't relish seeing it again. It's a bit too close to home. In the basement are the cells and the torture rooms, although the two are indistinguishable. Old stagers have told you about lying in a cell full of sewer water; of half standing, half sitting in a cell so narrow and short you couldn't easily do either.

Women have spoken quietly of implements used to hurt and dehumanise them. Basic instruments, crude instruments, laid out here in rooms where water drips from the walls and thin gunnels, crudely carved in the concrete floors some sixty years ago, aided the slow draining of innocent blood.

The corridors between the cells are narrow. They are cramped both with that narrowness and the cram of people. You zig rather than zag, hoping to come face to face with the woman. But you go from room to room, past these terrible cells, without seeing her.

Your plan for the man with the goatee beard is vague. ‘Decommission' is the word that floats around in your head. It has a nice tang of guiltlessness.

Guiltlessness. What a horribly unwieldy word, you think. Like one of those German portmanteau words that go on for far too many syllables.

Kill him, then.

Not so vague after all.

You don't see her. You don't see him.

Now you're seriously pissed. And a bit scared. You're fucking up your job.

In the street the snow is falling even more heavily. There is already two inches on the pavement and the road. It's hard to see anything, never mind your two new quarries.

You lean back against the wall, against photos of the tortured and the dead. You put the hat back on. You feel the gun in your jacket pocket, the spare clip in the other. You feel the soles of your cheap shoes turning to cardboard in the snow.

You can't see anybody you're supposed to be following. You're fucked.

Gilchrist and Heap were sitting in the office of the harbourmaster of Shoreham port. Gilchrist's head was buzzing with all that was happening.

When they were driving over Heap had said to Gilchrist: ‘Do you think the dead man is Youk, ma'am?'

‘Don't you?'

‘And are we hypothesising that Youk's disappearance is linked to these artefacts in the Pavilion?'

‘That's a reasonable assumption, Bellamy. One minute we don't know where Cambodia is, the next, two cases linked to there come up.' She glanced at him. ‘Although I can't believe for a moment you didn't already know all about Cambodia.'

‘I knew a little, ma'am.'

‘Bodysnatching, though – that does seem to be your area of weakness.'

‘I'm trying to redress that,' he said.

Now Gilchrist said to the harbourmaster: ‘I've never really understood what happens here.'

‘A lot,' the harbourmaster replied. She was not what Gilchrist had expected. The title had led her to expect a man, not this young, lean, clear-eyed woman. There didn't seem to be an ounce of fat on her, which made Gilchrist feel like an elephant. But she wasn't anorexic or anything. She looked supremely fit. It turned out later she ran forty miles a week. Ran, that was, not jogged. Her name was Kathleen Harrison.

‘We're investigating the disappearance of a young Cambodian boy,' Heap said. ‘We think he worked here.'

‘Youk Chang.'

‘You know him,' Gilchrist said.

‘I know of him,' Harrison said.

Gilchrist glanced out of the window at a huge chute coming from a tall, grey warehouse. ‘Do you export concrete?'

Harrison laughed. ‘Aggregate. But not us. We have a number of private terminals here for companies that deal in aggregate. We have scrap exporters too. Our own operations division handles a range of imports and exports. Scandinavian timber and nitrates from France, for instance.'

‘Goods from Cambodia?'

Harrison frowned. ‘Not that I'm aware of. Not directly from Cambodia, at any rate. You think Youk's disappearance had something to do with his work here? I thought he'd got into some trouble in Brighton.'

‘What kind of trouble?' Heap said.

Harrison scraped her bobbed hair back behind her ears. ‘Well, I've no idea – or if he did. I meant that was my assumption.'

‘We're exploring all possibilities,' Gilchrist said, resisting the urge to mirror Harrison's hair fiddling. ‘It happens we have an inquiry running parallel that involves Cambodia.'

‘And you assumed a connection,' Harrison said, though not negatively. ‘Well, our ships all come from Europe – Tallin and Riga is about as far east as we go. And that's north-east, in the Baltic. But it's possible that a mixed cargo could contain Cambodian goods, loaded in a European port.' Harrison looked wary. ‘What kind of goods are we talking about?'

‘Antiques,' Heap said.

Harrison sat back and messed with her hair again. ‘Illegally imported?'

‘Probably. Mainly we're trying to figure out how they got here.'

‘And you think Youk's disappearance had something to do with these illegal imports?'

Gilchrist spread her hands. ‘To be honest, we have no idea but a connection might help us with both cases.'

‘Excuse me.' Harrison picked up her phone. ‘Jack? Email me the human resources files on Youk Chang, will you?' She listened for a moment. ‘OK – well, whatever we have.'

She hung up and looked from Gilchrist to Heap. ‘Goods leaving Cambodia would almost certainly go via China. Cambodia is in hock to its neighbour. China is lending Cambodia a couple of hundred million pounds to pay for various projects, including a huge new port just completed about thirty kilometres east of Phnom Penh.'

‘The capital,' Heap murmured to Gilchrist. She gave him a look.

‘Phnom Penh has been jammed up for years,' Harrison went on. ‘It handled ninety-five thousand containers in 2012 – double the number it was handling five years earlier. The new port can handle a third more – and eventually three hundred thousand.'

‘You're remarkably well informed,' Gilchrist said.

Harrison put her palms together. ‘How else am I going to end up running the company?'

Gilchrist smiled. ‘How easy is it to smuggle something in a container?'

Harrison glanced at her computer screen. She tapped at her keyboard with bright blue-nailed fingers. ‘How big is this something?' she said as a printer whirred in the corner of her office.

‘Not huge,' Gilchrist said.

Harrison laughed. ‘Could you be more specific?'

‘The boxes we found the goods in are about sixty cubic metres in total,' Heap said.

Harrison slid from behind her desk and went over to collect the printout from her computer. As she brought the thin sheaf of papers back to her desk she said:

‘The China trade is now using the new Triple E cargo boat. It carries 18,000 containers, each twenty feet long. The boat is almost a quarter of a mile long and taller than a twenty-storey office block. It usually leaves China full and goes back empty – you know China prides itself on being an exporter, not an importer?'

‘That's a big boat,' Gilchrist said, watching as Harrison made three piles from the pages she'd printed off.

‘Someone has done the maths. To carry the containers on a railway it would need a train sixty-eight miles long. These ships are so big there are hardly any ports capable of taking them. Shoreham can't get anywhere near, though Southampton and Felixstowe can manage them. There are no ports the right size in the whole of North or South America. They won't fit through the locks of the Panama Canal though they can just about squeeze through the Suez. Antwerp is digging a bloody great hole for them. London Gateway is being built as a dock especially for them.'

‘So we're way beyond the needle in the haystack,' Gilchrist said.

Harrison handed each of them a couple of sheets of paper. ‘Youk's personal file. A bit skimpy, I'm afraid, but he wasn't with us that long and at his level we don't require much information.'

Gilchrist glanced at it. ‘Just staying with the smuggling for a moment.'

Harrison gave her a sharp look. ‘Now you're saying for certain this stuff was smuggled?'

‘I understand these are objects that are not supposed to leave their country of origin,' Gilchrist said. ‘So my assumption is that they were smuggled in.'

Harrison smiled. ‘China does kind of quasi-legal smuggling in that it breaks tariff limits and export quotas all the time. It simply ships goods to a third country or one of its independent territories – most notably Hong Kong or Macao – before re-exporting. What kind of antiques are we talking about?'

‘Big ones.'

‘How big?'

‘Bits of temples.'

Harrison laughed again. ‘That's very big. You're kidding, right?'

‘Exaggerating, maybe,' Gilchrist said. ‘As I understand it, they're stripping statues and wall art from Cambodian temples and palaces.'

‘If such goods came through here they would be on a standard container ship – five thousand containers. If they were exported billed as something else – in among containers of tourist goods, for instance – we wouldn't have a hope of spotting them, regardless of the size.'

Harrison looked at the sheaf of papers on her desk. ‘The last ship Youk helped unload was bringing a mixed cargo from Lisbon.' She tapped at her keyboard, watching her computer screen, for a moment. ‘Interesting. It had come to Lisbon from Sharjah.'

Heap and Gilchrist both looked blank.

‘United Arab Emirates – south of Dubai. Nice place.' She tapped again. ‘And that's where the ship is now.'

She pressed a key and her printer whirred once more.

As she started to get up from her desk, Heap stood. ‘May I?'

He brought the sheet from the printer and handed it across the desk. Harrison demurred.

‘It's for you,' she said.

Heap looked at it. ‘The SS
Yangste
. Registered in Hong Kong.'

Gilchrist was looking at the other papers Harrison had passed her. ‘Youk didn't live at home,' she said. Thinking: why had Youk's mother lied?

There's a fall-back. Some weird set of catacombs up on the hill near the castle. Your contact is there. You're thinking these people have been watching too many
Mission Impossible
films.

You slip and slide through the snow down to the river. The wide Danube looks beautiful, the snow falling on the row of lights either side of it. Even you notice that much.

The Danube. You've been reading more about the Danube. It held back the Romans, for a little while. Then again it didn't stop Genghis Khan and the Huns or the Mongols or the Turks.

You cross the river and take the antique lift up the precipitous hill from Pest to the castle atop Buda. It moves slowly. You sit on the bench and watch the lower town reduce behind you. Lights glimmering for miles through the curtain of snow.

The catacombs, carved from the soft tufa centuries before, have been turned into an art installation. You pay a few euros and you make your way to a chamber where a fountain on the wall is spilling out red wine. There is a row of glasses on a table by one curved wall. You catch a glassful of wine and sit on a bench and wait. You refill the glass. You wait.

To get into this chamber you had to bend at the doorway. A man comes in now, almost bent double. When he stands you see the goatee beard and come up off the bench, glass in hand.

The man with the goatee touches his finger to his lips and smiles, his other hand up in a pacifying gesture.

You were taught in training you don't fall for that. You throw the glass at him. No warning. He shifts his head to the side and it sails past his ear. As you hear it break against the wall of the cavern goatee is pointing a gun at you. A bloody big gun, but that's irrelevant, since from this distance a small one would do the job just as well.

‘What the hell do you think you're playing at?' the man with the goatee says in unaccented English. ‘Are you deliberately trying to fuck up a highly sophisticated operation?'