During their long journey, Mei had told Ning that she came from a poor peasant family in Western China. A criminal gang had paid for her to be smuggled from China to Britain and now she’d have to work for the gang until her debt was paid off. If she ran away, or her work wasn’t satisfactory, the gangsters would punish her family back in China.
Ning felt awkward because she clearly didn’t belong with either group. There were too many thugs around for her to try sneaking away, so her strategy was to stick close to Mei and hope for the best.
The woman with the clipboard dealt with the young girls next. The Chinese all got ticked off and sent over to stand by a pair of nasty-looking thugs. But one of the Russian woman had been moaning ever since Ning boarded the truck. She started ranting at clipboard lady, rambling in bad English about being lied to, and bad food and the smell of the bucket making her feel sick.
The Russian got to run her mouth off for almost a minute, but when she gave clipboard lady a shove, one of the thugs swooped. An extendible baton came from his trouser pocket, sprang out to a half-metre length and was smashed brutally against the back of her legs.
Women gasped as the Russian crashed to the floor. The thug then dragged her several metres by her hair, before dropping her and standing with his heel pressed against her throat.
‘I’m the complaints department,’ he shouted. ‘What’s your complaint?’
The Russian woman couldn’t breathe, let alone complain.
‘Anyone else?’ the thug shouted, as he turned towards the shocked Chinese teenagers. ‘Any of you bitches speaks unless I ask you something and you’ll be well sorry.’
The Russian sobbed as she stood up and limped across to join the Chinese. When the second Russian was ticked off clipboard lady’s list, the four thugs marched eight frightened-looking women out of the doorway towards a waiting van.
Ning was queasy from the ferry crossing and the shocking outburst of violence made her feel even worse, but at least all the heavyweights had departed with the young girls. Their only chaperones now were clipboard lady and a beady-eyed Chinese driver, who squatted on a bale of old newspapers reading a fishing magazine. These workers didn’t need security, because their husbands and children back in China faced violent retribution if they ran.
‘And you?’ clipboard lady asked, when she got to Ning. ‘I have no information. Where did you board?’
Mei answered for Ning. ‘She joined with me at the Czech border.
‘You stowed away?’ clipboard lady asked angrily.
‘I paid a man called Kenny, he works for someone called Derek.’
‘You lie,’ the woman said, shaking her head. ‘Derek would e-mail me with any extra passenger details. And you are so young, how old are you?’
‘Thirteen,’ Ning said.
‘Do you have a passport, or Chinese identity card?’
Ning pulled the dodgy Kyrgyz passport from her jeans.
‘This says you are eleven. What am I supposed to do with you?’
‘I can just leave,’ Ning said.
Clipboard lady considered this, but the driver lowered his magazine. ‘What if she leaves and the cops pick her up?’ he shouted. ‘She knows this place. She can recognise the truck.’
‘I can lie,’ Ning said. ‘I’ll say I sneaked inside a truck in Dieppe.’
‘If you let her go and she belongs to someone, there’ll be hell to pay,’ the driver warned.
‘Then what am I supposed to do with her, know-all?’ clipboard lady asked the driver furiously.
‘Take her with the others,’ the driver said. ‘Then the boss will have to decide.’
Neither clipboard lady nor the driver looked particularly large or fast. Ning reckoned she could run if she wanted to. But it was getting dark, she didn’t know where she was and she decided it would be best to stick with Mei until she’d put some more thought into what she was going to do next.
*
Ryan had passed through airport security, but still had over an hour until his flight from San Francisco to London. He was feverish as he wheeled his flight bag through shops selling sunglasses and golf accessories.
He found a newsagent and decided to kill a few minutes flicking through magazines, but he couldn’t find anything interesting and he was distracted by flashbacks to the moment when he’d shoved Dr D. It felt like someone had hacked into his brain and planted a fake memory from some other kid who was dumber and more impulsive.
And the more Ryan thought, the more he realised that as much as he felt sorry for Ethan, Dr D had only done what most – if not all – senior intelligence officers would have done. They were trying to bring down one of the world’s largest criminal organisations and that’s never a painless process.
As Ryan left the shop, he noticed a boxed chocolate shaped like the Golden Gate Bridge and decided to buy it as a present for his seven-year-old brother, Theo.
He was pocketing his change when the phone rang and he saw campus flashing on the display. It was Zara Asker, the chairwoman.
‘Ryan what happened?’ Zara said, sounding more exasperated than angry. ‘Dr D called me. She’s furious.’
‘I don’t know,’ Ryan said meekly. ‘I’m sorry. I was feeling really rough and this flash of anger came over me. Am I going to get kicked out of CHERUB?’
Zara laughed slightly. ‘Ryan, I called because Amy said you were in the airport on your own and I wanted to know if you were OK. You obviously can’t go round assaulting senior American intelligence officers. You can expect a serious punishment, but CHERUB is your home. We don’t kick kids out for one stupid lapse of judgement. Frankly, if we did we’d probably have about three agents left.’
A tear welled in Ryan’s eye as he leaned against a circular post. All he could manage to say without blubbing was, ‘OK.’
‘There’ll be a car waiting to pick you up when you arrive in London,’ Zara said. ‘I’ll text you the driver’s details once we’ve booked it. When you get home and you’re feeling better I’ll sit down with you and your handler. OK?’
‘Right,’ Ryan said. ‘Thanks for calling. I now feel slightly less like stabbing myself through the heart with an airline fork.’
‘You relax and have a good flight,’ Zara said. ‘You’re going to be punished, but you’re a good kid and this isn’t the end of the world.’
*
Clipboard lady let Ning, Mei and the other five Chinese ladies into a grim shower block at the back of the warehouse before setting off on the next leg of the journey. Ning hoped to see some of Britain, but they travelled on wooden benches in the windowless rear compartment of a white van.
After three hours they arrived at a dilapidated brick-built factory. Ning had studied Britain on a map when she’d been in Dan’s apartment in Bishkek, and while she had no idea where she’d ended up, she estimated that three hours would have taken her from the south coast to somewhere in the middle of the country.
The building might have been old, but everything inside sparkled. Despite it being the early hours of the morning, there were more than a hundred Bangladeshi and Chinese women crammed into a noisy but well-ordered factory space.
They all wore identical hairnets, face masks and white overalls, and worked at stainless steel tables in groups of three. At one end, a woman frantically spread mayonnaise over bread, the next person laid on a filling and topped it with salad leaves or tomato, while the third person cut the sandwich in half and dropped it into a triangular plastic box.
A ginger-bearded supervisor rushed across to greet the new arrivals, then turned angrily to clipboard lady. ‘Only seven? I was told twelve to fifteen.’
‘Maybe more tomorrow.’
‘I’m short-staffed,’ the supervisor said sourly. ‘I’m working on the line myself, that’s how bad it’s got.’ He then turned towards the new arrivals and spoke in bad Chinese. ‘Ladies, follow me please.’
‘Not you,’ clipboard lady told Ning, as Mei and the others were led into a cloakroom wh
ere they’d receive nets, masks and overalls. ‘I’m taking you up to the boss.’
Ning was shown upstairs to a shabbier floor, set out with sewing machines that hadn’t turned a stitch in decades. Clipboard lady led Ning across cracked tiles to an office fitted out with a wooden executive desk and mahogany shelving.
The man behind it was in his thirties. Chinese, dressed in a polo shirt and checked slacks, with a gold Rolex and diamond-studded bracelet. Ning thought he was like a younger version of her stepfather.
‘Who is this?’ the boss asked furiously, as Ning stepped in. Her eye caught a large globe and a picture of two boys of around her own age on the wall.
‘I left a message on your mobile,’ clipboard lady explained. ‘Her name is Ning. Says she’s thirteen, but her passport says eleven. Stowed away in the truck in the Czech Republic. I didn’t let her go in case she got picked up and led the cops back to the meat warehouse.’
The boss shook his head. ‘So you brought her here and showed her this place as well? How bright is that?’
‘We use the white van so people don’t see them coming and going,’ clipboard lady said. ‘I left you a message. I’m sorry, but I didn’t know what else to do.’
The boss glanced at Ning, then back at clipboard lady. ‘I’ve been awake since seven yesterday morning,’ he shouted. ‘We’re eighteen people short down there and I can’t make full orders. So right now, I want anything with two eyes and two hands downstairs putting shit between slices of bread.’
‘A girl that age might raise eyebrows among the other women.’
‘It’ll raise more if I lose the supermarket contract and have to sack the bastard lot of them. In the morning call around and ask who she belongs to, but tonight she works with everyone else.’
32. CUT
Ning was tall for her age. With a face mask and hairnet she didn’t look much different to the older women. She’d worked on the production line for six days straight and nobody had questioned her role since the boss put her to work on the night she’d arrived. The factory was short-staffed and the only thing anyone in authority cared about was getting sandwiches out the door.
Each shift began at 3 p.m. It was supposed to last twelve hours, with two fifteen-minute breaks, but in reality nobody was allowed to leave the factory until the production quota was met, so thirteen or fourteen hours was common. The shifts were divided into prep, where vegetables were chopped, meat sliced and dressings mixed, then assembly where the women made the sandwiches.
The factory was kept cool so that food stayed fresh, but the pace kept workers sweating. The equipment was modern and everything had to meet the strict hygiene standards set by a supermarket chain.
The supervisors would gently tell workers to get a move on if they worked too slowly or spread an ingredient too generously, but only grew angry if someone breached a hygiene rule. One failed bacteria test, or a hair in a sandwich, could lose the supermarket contract and cost everyone their jobs.
The work was monotonous rather than hard, but long working hours wore everyone down. After each shift, the women were crammed into windowless vans and driven a few streets to the houses where they lived.
Because the sandwiches had to be delivered to the supermarket warehouse by four-thirty each morning, the women would eat dinner an hour before most people got up, then sleep through the early part of the day. By the time they woke it would be early afternoon, giving just a couple of hours to wash and eat before they were driven back to the factory.
Ning needed more sleep than the adult women and it always took a poke from Mei to get her up. Their room was in the basement, with six bunks and boards across the windows to help the women sleep through daylight.
‘If you don’t move soon you won’t even get to eat before work,’ Mei said.
Ning had never liked getting out of bed. She felt sour at the irony of it all: she’d started in a cramped, noisy dormitory in Dandong, risked her life travelling to the other side of the world and ended up in some unknown part of Britain, doing something even more futile than school and living in a cramped bedroom that was worse than the one she’d started off in.
‘You sleep like the dead,’ Mei said, as Ning rubbed her eyes.
Ning was fond of Mei and smiled a little. ‘I feel like the dead. All I see in my dreams is sliced bread and prawn mayonnaise.’
‘How’s your hand?’
Ning had forgotten that she’d gashed the back of her hand on a meat slicer. The wound stung a little, and blood had seeped through a luminous green sticking plaster, which was designed so that it would be easily spotted if it fell off into someone’s lunch.
‘Looks worse than it feels,’ Ning said, as she experimented, moving her thumb and fingers. ‘I’m going to try getting a shower.’
‘You’ll be lucky,’ Mei said.
The detached house had four bedrooms. There were four or six bunks in each one, plus eight in the living-room, giving the house a maximum total occupancy of twenty-eight workers, plus Leo the supervisor, who occupied what had originally been the dining-room.
Presently there were only twenty-two women in residence because of the labour shortage, but that was still too many for a dingy basement toilet and a small bathroom with shower on the first floor.
Ning padded upstairs in a nightshirt, with her towel thrown over her shoulder. There was no lock on the bathroom door because women were expected to use the toilet while someone was showering, and vice versa.
Steam and smoke hit Ning as she pushed the door open. The quartet who lived in the most spacious upstairs bedroom formed a mean clique who acted like they were better than everyone else. Especially in front of recent arrivals slumming it in the basement.
‘Out,’ one shouted in Chinese, as Ning looked around.
One of the quartet was showering, one was towelling off, one sat on the toilet with her jeans around her ankles and the last was propped against the sink smoking a cigarette.
‘How long are you going to be?’ Ning asked.
The girl by the sink flicked cigarette ash at Ning. ‘We’ll be as long as we want,’ she said. ‘You want this stubbed out on your arm?’
‘Beat it,’ the one towelling off shouted, as she pushed Ning towards the door with her foot. ‘Can’t you take a hint?’
Ning felt humiliated as she backed into the hallway while the four women laughed inside.
‘How old is that girl?’ one asked bitchily. ‘She hasn’t even got tits.’
‘Nor have you,’ another woman said, before howling with laughter again.
Ning needed to pee and was tempted to cross the hall into the quartet’s empty room and do it on their carpet. But she didn’t need four new enemies, so she went back to the basement like a good girl and joined the line for the grubby toilet.
After another scrum in the kitchen to get breakfast, Ning spoke to Mei as she put on the clothes she’d worn the day before.
‘When do you think we’ll get paid?’ Ning asked.
Mei laughed. ‘In a month if we’re lucky. They always promise, then stretch it out. It’s a way of keeping you here, even after you’ve paid off debts. When I was deported, I lost five weeks’ pay. When I first came to Britain I spent three weeks fruit picking. There were about sixty of us and nobody saw a penny.’
‘Didn’t you complain?’
‘To who?’
‘Won’t the gangsters who paid for your journey get angry?’
‘Here’s how it works,’ Mei said. ‘The boss at the sandwich factory pays the local gangsters for however many women he wants.’
‘Who are the local gangsters?’ Ning asked.
‘The guys who drive us back and forth for our shifts, set up houses like this one, employ Leo to keep us in line.’
‘I thought those guys worked for the factory boss,’ Ning said.
Mei shook her head. ‘The factory boss is just a businessman who wants cheap labour. So he pays the local gangsters, and must pay on time unless he wants a beatin
g. The gangsters here in Britain pay seventy-five per cent of what I earn to the gangsters in China who paid for my trip. The traffickers in China get paid because they’d cut the supply of new arrivals if they didn’t. And guess who gets paid last?’
Ning sighed. ‘Us?’
Mei nodded. ‘We get paid when the local gangsters feel like it, and if you ask too often they’ll smack you about for your trouble.’
‘I was thinking in the night,’ Ning explained, lowering her voice so that the woman across the room couldn’t hear. ‘I’ve got no reason to stay here, but I thought if I worked until payday, I’d have some English money to travel around with.’
‘What would you do?’ Mei asked.
‘I thought I’d go to Bootle and try to find Ingrid’s sister. I’ll tell her what’s happened and hopefully she’ll help me. If that doesn’t work, I’ll hand myself in. I was legally adopted by Ingrid, so I should be able to claim British citizenship.’
‘Are you certain of that?’ Mei asked.
Ning nodded. ‘Ingrid and my stepdad used to say that they were planning to work for a few more years, and then retire to England and live in a big country house.’
‘Now there’s a dream,’ Mei said, as she glanced at her plastic watch. ‘Looks like time to head upstairs.’
The twenty women queued in the upstairs hallway as a white panel van reversed up the front drive. As the van driver walked around and undid the back doors, Leo, the brutish Chinese man who ran the house, took a chain off the front door and turned a mortise lock.
The instant the front door opened, the women piled into the van. Ning was near the front and got a seat on one of the two planks that made benches along the sides. But out of respect, she stood up and let Mei sit.
This left Ning squashed up on the bare metal floor as the van took its familiar six-minute drive. They’d almost arrived when the van braked suddenly. Bodies slammed and limbs tangled in the darkness, Ning thumped her head against the metal divider separating them from the driver’s compartment and there were high-pitched screams.