A Darker Shade of Blue

ASYLUM

The van had picked them up a little after six, the driver cursing the engine which had stubbornly refused to start; fourteen of them cramped into the back of an ailing Ford as it rattled and lurched along narrow roads, zip-up jackets, boots, jeans, the interior thick with cigarette smoke. Outside, light leaked across the Fens. Jolted against one another, the men sat, mostly silent, heads down, a few staring out absently across the fields. Field after field the same. When anyone did speak it was in heavily accented English, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Albanian. There were lights in the isolated farms, the small villages they passed through, children turning in their beds and waking slowly to the half-remembered lines they would sing at Harvest Festival. Thanks for plenty. Hymns of praise. The air was cold.

Some ten miles short of Ely, the van turned off along a rough track and bumped to a halt behind a mud-spattered tractor and several other vans. On trestle tables beneath a makeshift canopy, men and women were already working, sorting and wrapping cauliflowers in cellophane. Towards the far side of the field, indistinct in the havering mist, others moved slowly in the wake of an ancient harvester, straightening and bending, straightening and bending, loading cabbages into the low trailer that rattled behind.

A man in a dark fleece, gloves on his fists, stepped towards the van. ‘What sort of fuckin’ time d’you call this?’

The driver shrugged and grinned.

‘Laugh the other side of your fuckin’ face, one o’ these fine days.’

The driver laughed nervously and, taking the makings from his pocket, started to roll a cigarette. Most of the men had climbed down from the van and were standing in a rough circle, facing inwards, hands jammed down into their pockets as they stamped their feet. The others, two or three, sat close against the open door, staring out.

‘You,’ the foreman said, waving his fist. ‘You. Yes, you. What d’you think this is? Fuckin’ holiday? Get the fuck out of there and get to fuckin’ work.’

Across the slow spread of fields to the west, the blunt outline of Ely Cathedral pushed up from the plane of earth and bulked against the sky.

A hundred or so miles away, in North London, the purlieu of Highbury Fields, Jack Kiley woke in a bed that was not his own. From the radio at the other side of the room came the sounds of the Today programme, John Humphrys at full bite, castigating some hapless politician for something he or she had done or failed to do. Kiley pushed back the quilt and rolled towards the edge of the bed, feet quick to the floor. In the bathroom he relieved himself and washed his hands, splashed cold water in his face. At least now Kate was allowing him to leave a toothbrush there, a razor too, and he used both before descending.

Kate sat at the breakfast table, head over her laptop, fingers precise and quick across the keys. Kiley knew better than to interrupt. There was coffee in the cafetiere and he poured some into Kate’s almost empty mug before helping himself. His selflessness was acknowledged by a grunt and a dismissive wave of the hand.

A mound of the day’s papers, including the Independent, for whom Kate wrote a weekly column, was on a chair near the door, and Kiley carried them across to the padded seat in the window bay. Through the glass he could see the usual dog walkers in the park, joggers skirting the edge, more than one of them pushing those three-wheeler buggies that cost the price of a small second-hand car.

Automatically, he looked at the sports pages first to check the results and saw, with no satisfaction, that one of the teams he used to played for had now gone five matches without scoring a goal. Below the fold on the front page, the second lead was about the wife of a Home Office minister being attacked and robbed not so very far from where he was now.

‘In the early hours of yesterday morning, Helen Forester, wife of …’

What in God’s name was she doing, Kiley thought, wandering around the nether end of Stoke Newington at two in the morning? He checked the other papers. Only the disintegrating marriage of a B-celebrity soap star prevented the story from making a full sweep of the tabloids, ‘Minister’s Wife Mugged’ and similar dominating the rest in one-inch type. A library photograph of Helen Forester accompanying her husband to the last party conference was the most popular, her narrow, rather angular face strained beneath a round, flat-brimmed hat of the kind worn by Spanish bullfighters, her husband mostly cropped out.

‘Mrs Forester was found in a dazed state by passers-by and taken to Homerton hospital, where she was treated for minor injuries and shock.’

‘I know her,’ Kate said, looking up from her work. ‘Interviewed her for a piece on politicians’ wives. After all that fuss about Betsy what’s-her-name. I liked her. Intelligent. Mind of her own.’

‘Must have been switched off when this happened.’

‘Maybe.’

‘You think there’s more to it than meets the eye?’

‘Isn’t there always?’

‘You’re the journalist, you tell me.’

Kate shot him a sour glance and went back to the piece she was writing — ‘No More Faking It: the rehabilitation of Meg Ryan in In the Cut.’

‘At least it makes a change,’ Kiley said, ‘from MPs caught out cottaging on Clapham Common.’

But Kate had already switched him off.

By midday the Minister concerned had issued a brief statement. ‘My wife and I are grateful for all of the flowers and messages of support…’

The Shadow Home Secretary materialised long enough to fire the usual tired salvos about the unsafe streets of our cities and the need for more police officers on the beat. Nothing yet about what the unfortunate Mrs Forester had been doing out alone when she might more properly have been tucked up alongside her husband in the safety of their Islington flat or at their constituency home. That, Kiley was sure, would come.

Cafe tables were spread along the broad pavement north of Belsize Park underground station, and Kiley was sitting in the early autumn sunshine nursing a cappuccino and wondering what to do with the rest of the day.

Almost directly opposite, above the bookshop, his small two-room office held little attraction: the message light on the answerphone was, as far as he knew, not flickering, no urgent faxes lay waiting, any bills he was concerned with paying had been dealt with and his appointment book, had he possessed one, would have been blank. He could walk up the hill on to Hampstead Heath and enjoy the splendours of the turning leaves or stroll across to the Screen on the Hill and sit through the matinee of something exotic and life-affirming.

Then again, he could order another cappuccino, while he considered the possibility of lunch. Irena, the young Romanian waitress who moonlighted two mornings a week as his bookkeeper and secretary, was not on duty, and he caught the eye of a waiter, who by his accent was Spanish and most probably from Latin America. At one of the nearby tables, a May-November couple were holding hands and staring into one another’s eyes; at another, a man in a ‘Fight Global Capitalism’ T-shirt was listening contentedly to his iPod, and just within his line of vision, a young woman of twenty-two or — three, wearing dark glasses and a seriously abbreviated cerise top, was poring over The Complete Guide to Yoga. In small convoys, au pairs propelled their charges along the pavement opposite. The sun continued to shine. What was a seemingly intelligent, middle-aged middle-class woman doing, apparently alone, at the wrong end of Stoke Newington High Street at that hour of the morning? Like a hangnail, it nagged at him and wouldn’t let him rest.

Dusk prevailed. Lights showed pale under the canopy as the last supermarket loads were packed and readied. The workers, most of them, stood huddled around the vans, the faint glow of their cigarettes pink and red. Mud on their boots and the backs of their legs, along their arms and caked beneath their fingernails. The low line of trees at the far field edge was dark and, beyond it, the cathedral was black against the delicate pink of the sky.

The foreman had counted his men once and now was counting them again.

One short.

He’d had a shouting match with one of them earlier, some barrack-room lawyer from Dubrovnik or some other Godforsaken place, there was always one of them, mouthing off about rest periods and meal breaks.

‘You,’ he said, poking the nearest with a gloved finger. ‘That mate of yours, where is he?’

The man shook his head and looked away. The others stared hard at the ground.

‘Where the fuck is he, that fucking Croat cunt?’

Nobody answered, nobody knew.

‘Okay,’ the foreman said finally, the driver with his engine already idling. ‘Get ’em out of here. And tomorrow, be on fuckin’ time, right?’

It was later that evening, after a warming dinner of lamb shanks with aubergine and cinnamon and the best part of a bottle of Cotes du Ventoux, the moon plump in the sky, that Audrey Herbert left her husband to load the dishwasher, donned her Wellingtons and waterproof jacket and took the Labrador for its final walk. Halfway along the track that ran beside the second field, the dog started barking loudly at something in the drainage ditch and Audrey thought at first he had unearthed a rat. It was only when she shone the torch and saw the body, half-submerged, that she realised it was something more.

Kate stood Kiley up that evening to have dinner with Jonathan Sayer. Sayer, until a rather public falling-out and resignation, had been press officer to the Prime Minister and still had close connections with the inner sanctum of government.

‘Seems the PM went ape shit,’ Sayer confided. They were in an Indian restaurant in Kentish Town, a table well away from the door. ‘Tore a strip off the Home Secretary right outside the Cabinet room. Told him if he couldn’t keep his underlings and their bloody wives in order, he’d replace him with someone who could.’

‘Bit of an overreaction?’

Sayer shrugged. ‘You know how he is, scared about weevils coming out of the woodwork. Or wherever it is they come from.’

Kate thought it was flour.

‘His ratings, this past six months, last thing he needs now is a juicy bit of scandal.’

‘Is that what this is?’

‘I shouldn’t think so.’ Sayer smiled winsomely. ‘How’s the tarka dhal, by the way?’

‘A little too runny, actually.’

‘Shame.’

‘So. When’s it going to hit the fan?’

Sayer looked at her appraisingly. ‘First editions tomorrow, most likely.’

‘Are you going to make me wait till then?’

‘You could always phone your editor.’

‘I’m having dinner with you.’

Sayer sighed. ‘It seems Helen Forester has not been averse, shall we say, to seeking a little solace on the side. When her husband’s work has made him less than attentive.’

‘She screws around.’

‘Not compulsively.’

‘Anyone notable?’

Sayer named a junior MP and a writer whose dissections of political life under the Tories had come close to earning him a CBE. ‘That’s over a period of ten or twelve years, of course. Restrained by some standards.’

‘And Forester knows?’

Sayer nodded. ‘There was some talk of divorce, I believe, but all the usual factors came into play. Children. Careers. Forgive and forget.’

‘So the tabs are going to dish the dirt, encourage their readers to join the dotted lines. What else was she doing in the wee small hours if she wasn’t on her way home from some love nest or other?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Any names being bandied about?’

‘Ah…’ Sayer leaned back in his chair. ‘I was rather hoping you might help me there.’

‘Me?’

‘You interviewed her recently, got on famously by all accounts.’

‘And you think she might have been a little indiscreet?’

‘Two women chatting together, relaxed. It’s not impossible she’d have mentioned a name or two, purely in passing. Besides, it’s what you’re good at. Getting people to say things they’d rather keep to themselves.’

Kate smiled and let a piece of well-spiced lady’s finger slide down her throat. ‘It’s you, actually, Jonathan. Fancies the balls off you, she really does. Maybe I’ll give my editor a call as you suggest.’

There were times and recently a goodly number of them, when Kate despaired of her profession. The following morning, when the press spewed up a mess of private folly and unsubstantiated rumour, was one of them. In the cause of public interest, the tabloids took their usual lead, while the broadsheets, keen to maintain their superiority, merely reported their assertions in words of more than two syllables.

After a decent interval, Kate phoned the number she had for Helen Forester but there was no answer. By the time she tried again later, mid-morning, the line had been disengaged. Jonathan Sayer’s mobile was permanently switched off. Kiley, she remembered, had promised to do a little background checking on the client of a solicitor friend. She wondered if a visit to the Olafur Eliasson sun installation at Tate Modern might lift her into a better frame of mind.

It was late afternoon before Kiley reported to the offices of Hamblin, Laker and Clarke, a summary of his findings inside a DL manilla envelope, along with a bill for his services. Margaret Hamblin, quietly resplendent in something from Donna Karan, came out into the reception area to thank him.

‘I would suggest a glass of wine, Jack. There’s a quite nice white from Alsace I’m giving a try. Only there’s someone here who wants to see you. Special Branch. You can use my office.’

Someone was plural. One brusque and unsmiling, slight hints of a Scottish accent still lingering, the other, bespectacled, mostly silent and inscrutable.

‘Masters,’ the first man said, showing identification. ‘Detective Superintendent.’ He didn’t introduce his companion.

‘Jack Kiley.’

‘You’re a private investigator.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And you can make a living doing that?’

‘Some days, yes.’

In the parlance of Kiley’s recent profession, Masters was a skilful midfielder, not especially tall, wiry, difficult to shake off the ball. He nodded and reached into his pocket. The by-play was over. Inside a small plastic envelope was one of Kiley’s business cards, dog-eared and far from pristine.

‘Yours?’

‘Cheaper by the thousand.’

‘There’s a phone number, just above your name.’ He held it up for Kiley to see. It was Margaret Hamblin’s number. ‘Is that your writing?’

‘Seems to be.’

A Polaroid photograph next, head and shoulders, a deep gash to one side of the temple, lifeless eyes.

‘Anyone you know?’

‘No.’

‘He was found dead in a field last night. Village outside Ely.’

Kiley shook his head.

‘Here,’ Masters said, handing Kiley the envelope containing the card. ‘Turn it round.’

On the back, smudged but still readable was the name ‘Adina’. Just that.

‘Ring any bells?’

It rang a few. Adina was a friend of Irena’s from Costanza on the Black Sea coast of Romania. Smuggled into the country, she had worked as an exotic dancer, paying off the exorbitant fee for transportation. She had got into a little trouble and Kiley had helped her out. That had been a year ago. Somewhere in that time she had sent Irena a postcard from Bucharest.

‘You rode to the rescue,’ Masters said. ‘Knight in shining armour.’

‘Dark armour,’ the second man corrected, as if to prove he’d been listening. “A knight in dark armour rescuing a lady”.’

‘Harry Potter?’ asked Kiley guilelessly.

‘Philip Marlowe. The Big Sleep.’

‘You know where she is now, this Adina?’ Masters asked.

‘Romania?’

‘I don’t think so. And Alen Markovic…’

‘Who’s that?’

‘The man in the photo.’

‘The dead man.’

‘Exactly. You’ve no idea how or why he might end up in a drainage ditch with your card on his person? Complete with the name of an illegal immigrant you befriended and the telephone number of a solicitor with a reputation for handling appeals against deportation. And let’s discount, shall we, pure chance and coincidence.’

‘If I had to guess,’ Kiley said, ‘I’d say he got it from Adina.’

‘You gave it to her, she gave it to him.’

‘Something like that.’

‘In case of trouble, someone to contact, someone to ring.’

‘It’s plausible.’

‘He didn’t call you?’

‘No.’

Kiley wondered if they were merely following up stray leads; he wondered if the one blow with a thick-edged implement to Alen Markovic’s head had been enough to kill him. On balance, he thought both less than likely.

‘We could always try asking this Adina,’ Masters said softly, as if the suggestion had just that second occurred to him.

‘If we could find her,’ Kiley said.

‘If she isn’t still tied to a tree,’ said the second man. He really did know his Chandler backwards.

A light rain was beginning to fall. Most of the outside tables had been cleared. Kiley intercepted Irena on her way up from the Tube. Masters stood a little way off, coat collar up. Through the pale strobe of headlights climbing the hill, Kiley could see Masters’ colleague in the bookstore opposite, innocently browsing through this and that.

‘What is it?’ Irena said. ‘What’s happened?’

Kiley moved her close against one of the plane trees that lined the street. Her features were small and precise and the rain that clung to her short, spiky hair made it shine.

‘Adina,’ Kiley said. ‘Is she back in England?’

‘No, of course not.’

Kiley waited, fingers not quite touching the sleeve of her coat. Her eyes avoiding his. ‘I shall be late. For work.’ Absurdly, he wanted to run his hand across the cap of dark, wet hair.

‘Why? Why do you want to know?’

‘It’s complicated.’

‘Is she in trouble?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘She made me promise not to tell you. She thought, after everything you did, she thought you would be angry. Upset.’ There were tears on her face or maybe it was only the rain, which had started to fall more heavily. ‘She is working at a club. I think near Leicester Square. I don’t know the name.’

‘You know where she’s living?’

Irena took a set of keys from her pocket and put them in his hand.

‘She is living with me.’

Kiley watched her walk away, head down, and then waited for Masters to join him. The dark blue Vauxhall was parked in a side road opposite.

Masters’ bibliophile friend was standing by the car, a plastic bag containing several paperbacks clutched against his coat. ‘You’re lucky,’ he said to Kiley. ‘More than decent bookshop, that close to where you work.’ The glow from the overhead light turned his skin an unhealthy shade of orange.

‘You’ve got a name?’ Kiley asked.

‘Several.’ He took off his glasses, shook them free from rain, blinked, and put them back on again.

‘How about one that matches some ID?’ Kiley said.

‘Jenkins?’

‘And you’re Special Branch too?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Let’s get in,’ Masters said. ‘We’re wasting time.’

At the lights by Chalk Farm station, Masters said, ‘All we want from your friend is a little information, clarification. We’ve no interest in her immigration status at this stage.’

Kiley trusted him like he trusted the weather.

Irena lived in two rooms off Inverness Street; actually a single room let into the roof and divided by a rickety partition. A small Velux window gave views towards the market and the canal. Kiley had been there once before, a party for Irena’s friends, enough of the Romanian diaspora to cover every available inch of floor and spread back down the stairs.

He had hardly let himself in when Adina came bounding after him, scarf tied round her raven hair, cursing. She was wearing a bustier beneath a flimsy cotton top, skin-tight emerald green trousers and what, after several visits to Cinderella at an early age, would, to Kiley, forever be Dandini boots, folded back high above the knee.

‘Oh, my God!’ she exclaimed, seeing him. ‘Oh, my God, what are you doing here?’

‘It’s all right,’ Kiley said. ‘Irena gave me a key.’

‘I am just here,’ Adina said breathlessly, ‘for visit. Holiday.’

‘Irena said you were working.’

Adina dumped her things on the floor and threw herself into a chair. ‘Work, holiday, what does it matter?’

The headline on the evening paper read ‘MINISTER’S WIFE’S MIDNIGHT ASSIGNATION’. What was an hour or so up against some nice alliteration?

‘Adina, there are some people who want to see you.’

‘I have visa,’ she said. Probably a lie.

‘It’s not about that.’ He paused, the rain persistent on the window. ‘You know someone named Alen Markovic?’

Adina jerked forward. ‘What’s happened to him?’

‘You do know him then?’

‘Something has happened.’

‘Yes.’

‘They have killed him.’

‘Who?’

She shook her head. Her hair bounced against the tops of her breasts. He thought she might be about to scream or cry, but instead she brought her forearm to her mouth and bit down hard.

‘Don’t,’ he said.

‘These people,’ Adina said, ‘they are police?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course they are police.’ She stood up and studied the bite mark on her arm. ‘You trust them?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Okay, for Alen’s sake I will talk to them. But you must be there with me.’

Kiley nodded. ‘The cafe across the street.’

‘Portuguese or Italian?’

‘Portuguese.’

‘You go. Five minutes, I come.’

‘Don’t duck out on me.’

‘Duck out?’

‘Never mind.’

Jenkins sat reading A Short History of Europeans and the Rest of the World from Antiquity to the Present. Masters held a small espresso cup in his hand and stared at a lithograph of Lisbon on the wall. Kiley ordered coffee for himself and, believing one of those intense little Portuguese custard tarts was never quite enough, bought two; he didn’t offer to share them round.

‘When you were helping your friend out of her little difficulty,’ Masters said, ‘you ran across Sali Mejdani. Aldo Fusco, he sometimes likes to call himself.’

‘We had a conversation.’

Jenkins chuckled softly, possibly at something he’d just read.

‘He brought her into the country, your Adina?’

‘Not directly.’

‘Of course. From Romania to Albania and then to Italy, Italy to France, Belgium or Holland. Into Britain from somewhere like Zeebrugge. Fifteen or twenty people a day, seven days a week, three hundred-plus days of the year. Approximately five thousand sterling per head. Even after expenses — drivers, escorts, safe houses, backhanders…’

‘Plenty of those,’ Jenkins said, without looking up.

‘… it all adds up to a tidy sum. And the punters, what they don’t pay in advance, they pay with interest. For women and boys it’s the sex trade, for the rest it’s hard labour.’

‘Mejdani,’ Kiley said, ‘why can’t you arrest him, close him down?’

‘Ah,’ said Jenkins.

‘For the last couple of years,’ Masters said, ‘we’ve been building a case against him. Ourselves, Immigration, Customs and Excise, the National Crime Squad.’ He set down his cup at last. ‘You know when you were a kid, building sandcastles on the beach, Broadstairs or somewhere, you and your dad. You’re putting the finishing touches to this giant, intricate thing, all turrets and towers and windows and doors, and just as you turn over the bucket and tap the last piece into place, one of the bits lower down slides away, and then another, and before you know it you’re having to start all over again.’

‘Accident?’ Kiley said. ‘Over-ambition?’

Masters sat back. ‘I prefer to think the fault lies in the design.’

‘Not the workmanship?’

‘Get what you pay for, some might say.’

Jenkins laid aside his book. ‘Mejdani certainly would.’

‘He’s bribing people,’ Kiley said, ‘to look the other way.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

Kiley looked across at Masters. Masters shrugged.

‘’Tis but the way of the world, my masters,’ Jenkins said.

‘Not Chandler again?’

‘A little earlier.’

They all looked round as Adina stepped through the door. She had changed into black jeans and a black roll-neck sweater, an unbuttoned beige topcoat round her shoulders. Some but not all of the make-up had been wiped from her face. She asked at the counter for a Coke with lemon and ice.

Kiley made the introductions while she lit a cigarette.

‘Alen,’ she said, ‘what happened to him?’

Masters showed her the photograph.

For a long moment, she closed her eyes.

‘You’re not really surprised,’ Masters said.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You thought he might get into difficulties,’ Kiley said. ‘You gave him my card.’

‘Yes, I thought… Alen, he was someone important in my country, high up in trade union…’

‘We used to have those,’ Jenkins said, as much to himself as anyone.

‘… there was disagreement, he had to leave. Rights of workers, something. And here, I don’t know, I think it was the same. Already, he told me, the people he work for, they warn him, shut your mouth. Keep your mouth shut. I think he had made threat to go to authorities. The police.’

‘You think that’s why he was killed.’

‘Of course.’

Masters glanced at Jenkins, who gave a barely discernible nod. ‘We have a number of names,’ he said, ‘names and places. We’d like to run them past you and for you to tell us any that you recognise.’

Adina held smoke down in her lungs. What was she, Kiley wondered? All of twenty? Twenty-one? She’d paid to risk her life travelling to England not once, but twice. Paid dearly. And why? Because the strip clubs and massage parlours of London and Wolverhampton were better than the autoroutes in and out of Bucharest? As an official asylum seeker, she could claim thirty quid a week, ten in cash, the rest in vouchers. But she was not official. She did what she could.

She said, ‘Okay. If I can.’

‘Wait,’ Kiley said. ‘If she helps you, you have to help her. Make it possible for her to stay, officially.’

‘I don’t know if we can do that,’ Masters said.

‘Of course we fucking can,’ Jenkins said.

Adina lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the first and asked for another Coke.

Kiley caught the overground to Highbury and Islington. In an Upper Street window a face he recognised stared out from a dozen TVs; the same face was in close-up on the small Sony Kate kept at the foot of the bed.

‘Kramer seems to be getting a lot of exposure,’ Kiley said.

‘The wrong kind.’

Dogmatic, didactic, distinguished by a full beard and sweep of jet black hair, Martin Kramer was an investigative journalist with strong anti-capitalist, anti-American left-wing leanings and a surprisingly high profile. Kiley had always found him too self-righteous by half, even if, much of the time, what he said made some kind of sense.

Kate turned up the volume as the Newsnight cameras switched to Jeremy Paxman behind an impressive-looking desk. ‘… if it really is such a small and insignificant point, Mr Kramer, then why not answer my question and move on?’

She flicked the sound back down.

‘What was the question?’ Kiley asked.

‘Was he entertaining Helen Forester in his flat on the night she was attacked?’

‘And was he?’

‘He won’t say.’

‘Which means he was.’

‘Probably.’

Sitting, propped up against pillows, Kate was wearing the faded Silver Moon T-shirt she sometimes used as night-wear and nothing else. Kiley rested his hand above her knee.

‘They were at Cambridge together,’ Kate said. ‘Maybe they had a thing back then and maybe they didn’t.’

‘Twenty-five years ago,’ Kiley said. ‘More.’

Kate turned in a little against his hand. ‘Kramer’s been making this programme for Channel 4. Illegal workers, gangmasters, people trafficking. Pretty explosive by all accounts.’

‘Not the best of times for the wife of a Home Office minister to be sharing his bed.’

‘Needs must,’ Kate said. ‘From time to time.’

Helen Forester denied and denied and finally admitted that she had, indeed, had dinner with Martin Kramer on the night in question, had enjoyed possibly a glass of wine too many, and gone for a stroll to clear her head before returning home.

Kramer’s programme was moved to a prime-time slot, where it attracted close on seven million viewers, not bad for a polemical documentary on a minority channel. Standing amidst the potato fields of East Anglia, Kramer pontificated about the farming industry’s increasing dependence on illegal foreign labour, comparing it to the slave trade of earlier centuries, with gangmasters as the new overseers and Eastern Europeans the new Negroes; from the lobby of a hotel in Bays water he talked about the dependence of the hotel and catering trades on migrants from Somalia and South-East Asia; and at the port of Dover he made allegations of corruption and bribery running through Customs and Immigration and penetrating right up to the highest levels of the police.

‘That’s the thing about Kramer,’ Masters said, watching a video of the programme in Jenkins’ office high above the Thames. ‘He always has to go that little bit too far.’

Two days earlier, with the assistance of officers from the Cambridgeshire force, they had arrested two of Alen Markovic’s fellow field workers for his murder. The foreman, they claimed, had given them no choice: get rid of him or get sent back. They had clubbed him to death with a spade and a hoe.

In one of his last actions as a minister before being shuffled on to the back benches, Hugo Forester announced a further toughening of the laws governing entry into the country and the employment of those who have gained access without proper documentation. ‘The present system,’ he told the House, ‘in its efforts to provide refuge and succour to those in genuine need, is unfortunately still too open to exploitation by unscrupulous individuals and criminal gangs. But the House should be assured that the introduction of identity cards to be announced in the Queen’s speech will render it virtually impossible for the employment of illegal workers to continue.’

Coordinated raids by the police on safe houses and farms in Kings Lynn and Wisbech resulted in twenty-seven arrests. Two middle-ranking officers in the Immigration Service tendered their resignations and a detective chief inspector stationed at Folkestone retired from duty on medical grounds. A warrant was issued for Sali Mejdani’s arrest on twenty-seven separate charges of smuggling illegal immigrants into Britain. Mejdani, travelling under the name of Aldo Fusco, had flown from Heathrow to Amsterdam on the previous morning, and from there to Tirana where he seemed, temporarily, to have disappeared.

Adina was duly given a student visa and enrolled in a course in leisure and travel at the University of North London.

Hugo and Helen Forester announced a trial separation.

Kiley, feeling pleased with himself and for very little reason, volunteered to treat Kate to one hundred and thirty-eight minutes of Mystic River with supper afterwards at Cafe Pasta. Kate thought she could skip the movie.

When she arrived, Kiley was already seated at a side table, Irena bending slightly towards him, the pair in conversation.

‘Ordered the wine yet, Jack?’ Kate said, slipping off her coat and handing it to Irena. Irena blushed and backed away. ‘Oh, and bring us a bottle of the Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, will you? Thanks very much.’

‘She was telling me about Adina,’ Kiley said.

‘How was the film?’ Kate asked.

‘Good. Pretty good.’

Irena brought the wine and asked Kate if she would like to taste it, which she did.

‘She’s lovely, isn’t she?’ Kate said as Irena walked away.

‘Who?’

‘Irena.’

‘Is she?’