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  ‘I have had a British passport for many years. But what’s that got to do—’

  Edie’s pale face did not look up from her notebook.

  ‘Just answer my questions, sir. Did you touch the lorry? Is there any reason why we might find your fingerprints on the vehicle?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I called 999 and the police came immediately. And they said it could be a bomb.’

  I lifted the POLICE DO NOT CROSS tape and held it up as a handler ducked under with her sniffer dog. The handler was a young uniformed officer, shockingly relaxed, and her dog was a brown-and-white Springer Spaniel that pulled on its lead, anxious to get cracking.

  ‘Good girl, Molly,’ the handler said, and we all watched the pair of them approach the lorry.

  The Canine Support Unit uses the kinds of dogs who struggle to get adopted at rescue centres – high energy, endlessly curious dogs that don’t know how to stop moving. The same qualities that are all wrong in a household pet are a huge plus in a sniffer dog looking for explosive devices.

  Molly sniffed the chassis of that abandoned lorry as if it was a long-stemmed rose.

  I held up the tape for them when they came back.

  ‘What does Molly think?’ I said.

  ‘Molly thinks it’s not a bomb,’ the handler told me.

  I scratched the dog behind the ears.

  ‘That’s good enough for me,’ I said.

  I looked over at a slight, bespectacled woman who was standing with an armed officer whose face was entirely covered by a ballistic helmet and a balaclava.

  She was holding a skinny latte from the Bar Italia – cops favour the Bar Italia because the coffee is so good and because it stays open for twenty-two hours a day – while he was holding a SIG Sauer SG 516 semi-automatic carbine assault rifle. The woman was my immediate boss, DCI Pat Whitestone, and the man must have been the commanding officer of CTU. I nodded and DCI Whitestone acknowledged the gesture with a salute of her coffee.

  This was our case now.

  ‘Let’s open it up,’ I shouted, ducking under the perimeter tape.

  A fireman from the station on Shaftesbury Avenue fell into step beside me. He grinned at me, bleary with exhaustion, and I guessed he must have been kept on after pulling the graveyard shift. Over one shoulder he carried bright red bolt cutters, four feet long, and as we reached the lorry, he swung them down and set the steel jaws against the rust-dappled lock that secured the back door.

  He looked at me, nodded briefly, and put his back into it.

  The cheap lock crumbled at first bite.

  We both grabbed one door and pulled it open.

  I stared into the darkness and the cold hit me first. The temperature in the street was in the low single digits. But in the back of that lorry, it was somewhere below freezing.

  I climbed inside just as my eyes cleared.

  And that is when I saw the women.

  Two lines of them, facing each other, their backs pressed against the sides of the lorry.

  All young, all silent, none of them moving, as though they had died where they sat. There was a thin coating of frost on their faces.

  Some of them had their eyes open. Some of them had ice hanging from their mouth, their nose and their eyelashes. The ice had stuck and clung and froze wherever there was moisture.

  I felt my breath catch in my throat.

  Some of them had their clothes ripped, as though they had been assaulted. There was no smell of death in the back of that freezing lorry, and yet death was everywhere.

  I felt myself sink forward, as if I had been punched in the stomach.

  And then I straightened up and turned back at the street.

  ‘We need help in here now!’

  Paramedics were already running towards the lorry.

  I stepped back to let them inside.

  I looked down at Edie Wren, her notebook still in her hand as she bent at the waist, her hand pressed up against the shuttered window of the dim sum place, waiting to retch. Nothing happened. She straightened up and stared at me, her freckled face even paler than usual.

  We nodded at each other.

  I turned back to the paramedics. They were at the far end of the lorry, working back to back, each crouching over the woman closest to the cab.

  DCI Whitestone stood at the open doors of the lorry, staring into the darkness. She shook her head as her eyes took in the unmoving women, her gaze settling on their torn clothes.

  ‘What the hell happened in here?’

  Then Edie was by her side.

  She had something in her hands.

  ‘I’ve found passports,’ she said. ‘From the cab. Under the dashboard. How many bodies you got in there, Max?’

  I did a quick count. There were six of them on either side.

  ‘Twelve,’ I said.

  Edie was flipping through the passports.

  ‘Are you sure there’s only twelve?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  Edie shook her head.

  ‘But I’ve got thirteen passports.’

  ‘Count again,’ Whitestone said. ‘Both of them. The bodies and the passports.’

  I counted the women in the lorry. Edie counted the passports in her hand. The passports were of blue and red and green. These women were from everywhere.

  ‘Turkish, Serbian, Nigerian,’ Edie said. ‘Syrian, Syrian, Syrian. Afghan, Iraqi, Iranian. Pakistani, Chinese, Somalian.’ She held them up to me. ‘And another Turkish,’ she said. ‘There are definitely thirteen passports.’

  ‘And there are twelve women in here,’ I said.

  ‘So who’s missing?’ Whitestone said.

  I shook my head, and turned towards the medics as they moved down the lorry.

  ‘Dead,’ one said, not looking round.

  ‘Dead,’ the other replied.

  They moved on.

  The two women closest to the back door were locked in an eternal embrace, like figures from the last hours of Pompeii. The way they clung to each made them look like sleeping siblings, although one of them was ebony black and the other had skin as white as milk.

  I touched the wrist of the young black woman. Then I touched the wrist of the young white woman. And I could feel nothing but the cold.

  ‘No pulse rate,’ I told the paramedics.

  One of them shook her head and cursed.

  ‘Leave it to us, will you?’ she said. ‘It’s different when they freeze, OK? Different to anything you’ve ever seen before. Their heart rate and breathing slow to next to nothing. Just because you can’t find a pulse doesn’t mean they’re dead.’

  ‘Can you wait on the street, Detective?’ the other one said.

  I looked at the women with the clothes torn from their body.

  ‘It looks like they were attacked before they died,’ I said.

  The paramedic who had told me to wait on the street did not look at me.

  ‘Chances are they did that to themselves,’ she said, more patiently now. ‘There’s an old saying about hypothermia – you’re not dead until you’re warm and dead. That’s what happens right at the end. They believe they’re burning up.’

  I turned back to the two women curled up beside me.

  The black woman’s eyes were open. But the white woman’s eyes were closed. I felt for her pulse again but I could feel nothing. Her skin was colder than the grave.

  How old was she? Nineteen? Twenty?

  I hung my head, feeling a wave of grief pass over me.

  And her fingers reached out and took my wrist.

  Then I had her in my arms and I was screaming for an ambulance and hands were reaching out to help me get her out of the back of that death truck and on to a stretcher that we loaded into an ambulance parked in the middle of Shaftesbury Avenue, the swirling blue lights piercing the frozen winter morning. We tore through the city, the sirens howling at the world, telling it to get out of our way.

  ‘You’re safe now,’ I said, trying to stay on my feet in the back of
the rocking ambulance, squeezing her hands, trying to get some warmth back into them. ‘We’re getting you help. Don’t give up. Stay with me.’

  She did not reply.

  ‘Don’t give up, OK?’ I said.

  And she did not reply.

  I had never felt anything colder than that young woman’s hands.

  ‘Will you tell me your name?’ I asked.

  ‘My name is Hana,’ she whispered.

  2

  If you have a cardiac arrest in London – or if your heart rate has fallen off a cliff because you are freezing to death – then paramedics and ambulance technicians have the authority to bypass the nearest Accident and Emergency department and take you directly to one of eight specialist heart attack centres, immediately doubling your chances of survival.

  And that’s what they did with Hana.

  The ambulance sped north and I stayed by her side until she was rushed into the Intensive Care Unit at the Royal Free in Hampstead. And then I waited. After I had downed two cups of scalding black coffee, a doctor came out to see me, a young man of around thirty who looked as though he hadn’t slept since leaving medical school. Dr Patel, it said on his name tag.

  He glanced at my warrant card and nodded.

  ‘Do we have a name for the victim, DC Wolfe?’ he said.

  ‘I only know her first name,’ I said. ‘Hana.’

  ‘Hana has severe hypothermia. Which is easy to diagnose and hard to treat. She’s suffering from what we call afterdrop – her core temperature is continuing to fall after removal from cold stress. And her core temperature is likely to drop for the next few hours. We are going to give her a heart-lung bypass where we withdraw blood from the body, warm it up and return it to the body. She’s on a CPB pump to maintain blood circulation and keep her oxygenated.’ He paused. ‘Do you know how long she was exposed to sub-zero temperatures? Anything at all about her medical history?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘When can I talk to her?’

  He looked at me as if I still didn’t quite get it.

  ‘Hypothermia is next door to death, Detective – it suppresses heart and brain function and the internal organs all stop working. Do you understand? Everything that keeps you alive suddenly stops.’ He ran a hand through his already thinning hair. ‘We’re not even allowed to declare someone dead until their body is warmed to a near normal body temperature.’

  And finally I understood.

  Hana was dying.

  When I arrived at West End Central, a stocky Chinese man in his sixties was standing under the big blue lamp that marks the entrance to 27 Savile Row.

  I recognised him as the man that Edie had been interviewing before we opened up the lorry, the man who had called it in. They must have taken him to the station for a longer interview and now they were done with him. He looked at me warily as I came up the steps.

  ‘Thank you for your help, sir,’ I said.

  He shook his head.

  ‘I’m not sure I was very much help.’ He glanced back at the entrance to West End Central. ‘I told your colleagues everything I saw but I don’t think they believe me.’

  I was struck once again by his formal, old-fashioned English and I could feel the gap between the courtly, well-mannered country he imagined when he first heard the language coming out of a radio in Hong Kong and the harsher reality he had found in London.

  And I believed him – he had not seen the driver and he didn’t have much more to tell us. I could see he felt ill used.

  I held out my hand and told him my name.

  He shook my hand although his grip was so soft I regretted the gesture.

  ‘Keith Li,’ he told me, one of the generation of Chinese who had automatically adopted an Anglo name, usually the kind of name that the British had stopped using two or three generations ago.

  ‘You speak very good English, sir.’

  ‘In China, I was a teacher.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘In England – nothing.’

  I went up to Major Incident Room One.

  Whitestone and Edie were wearing blue nitrile gloves and poring over the passports of assorted nationalities in red and blue and green they had spread out before them like a deck of cards.

  Trainee Detective Constable Billy Greene was at a workstation, his long, gangly body hunched up as he scrolled through still black-and-white images of vehicles, their number plates showing in yellow and black at the foot of the screen.

  And there was a tiny middle-aged man with milk-bottle glasses sitting between Whitestone and Edie who was also wearing gloves, and sliding what looked like a Syrian passport into some kind of clunky silver box. The machine resembled a computer printer from when the world was young. He looked a bit like a mole.

  ‘Did you talk to her, Max?’ Whitestone said.

  I shook my head.

  ‘The Royal Free are going to call me when she comes out of the ICU. How many more made it?’

  ‘None,’ Whitestone said. ‘The rest of them were pronounced dead at the scene. It took the Divisional Surgeon quite a while. Apparently it’s hard to tell when they freeze to death. Something to do with the heart rate slowing to next to nothing. So we have eleven dead.’ She tapped a burgundy passport with a golden coat of arms. ‘And Hana Novak fighting for her life at the Royal Free.’

  ‘So we still have that thirteenth passport,’ Edie said. She nodded at the man with the silver machine. ‘Ken here is from Visas and Immigration at Heathrow.’

  ‘I’m the Questioned Documents guy,’ Ken told me. ‘Running your passports through my VSC40 here to see how many of them are kosher.’

  ‘What does the machine do?’

  ‘It reads microchips, assesses paper quality and scans surface features such as visa stamps,’ he said. ‘It sniffs out fake watermarks, bogus metallic strips and home-made ink.’ He grinned shyly at me, warming to his theme. ‘Basically it’s a lie detector for travel documents.’

  His gloved hands danced lightly above the passports. The dark red of Iran. The deep blue of Syria. The green of Pakistan. The burgundy and gold of Serbia. And two Turkish passports – one in maroon and one in green.

  ‘There are a thousand ways for a passport to be forged,’ he said. ‘Passports that are genuine but have had the photograph changed on the ID page. Passports that are real but have had bogus stamps inserted. The VSC40 sees through them all.’

  Ken’s profession explained his mole-like appearance. I imagined that most of his working day would have been spent in a darkened room at Arrivals at Heathrow Airport. And I had no doubt that he would not have been brought to West End Central unless he was the best in the business.

  ‘How we doing so far?’ I said.

  ‘These passports are all as fake as a nine-euro note,’ Ken said, allowing himself a smile of professional pride. ‘We see the best forged passports in the world at Heathrow. But this bunch is not the best in the world. This is amateur hour. Apart from this one. This one is real.’

  It was the passport that Whitestone had tapped. Ken held up a burgundy-coloured passport with two inscriptions in gold Cyrillic script either side of a gold coat of arms. I pulled on a pair of blue nitrile gloves and took the Serbian passport. Hana Novak’s solemn young face stared out at me from the identity page.

  She had long, straight brown hair that looked as though it had been curled up at the end by some kind of heating tongs. It was a curiously moving attempt to look attractive from a young woman who was already beautiful, even if she did not know it yet.

  Ken ran his fingers over the stack of fakes.

  ‘I wouldn’t expect these passports to be decent forgeries,’ Ken said. ‘The back of a lorry is the budget option for sneaking into the UK. At Heathrow we see people – professionals from Damascus and Baghdad – who have paid fifteen grand and more for bogus travel docs that have been made by a master.’

  ‘These people smugglers,’ I said. ‘Are they more likely to fly someone in than put them in the back of a lorry?’

&
nbsp; ‘Depends how much money you’ve got,’ Ken said. ‘If you’re a big spender, you can get a speedboat from Dunkirk to Dover for twelve grand. But if money’s tight, you can buy a passage to England for as little as a hundred quid in Calais. They sell it as a guaranteed entry on social media – and these traffickers have hundreds of accounts online – but really that hundred quid just buys you one attempt to squat in the back of a lorry heading for Dover. Not that they confine themselves to the south coast these days. As security tightens up around Dover the smugglers’ speedboats are heading for Portsmouth, Whitstable, Tilbury, Hull – you name it. And if they make it, most of them can stay forever. Nobody gets shipped back to a war zone.’ He indicated the passports. ‘I’ll tell you something about these girls.’

  I stared at the solemn beauty of Hana Novak’s passport photo.

  ‘What’s that?’ I said.

  He sighed. ‘They were unlucky,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve found the lorry,’ Billy Greene said, excitedly swivelling in his chair. ‘Got it on ANPR.’

  Automatic Number Plate Recognition is the system we use for storing registration numbers, even for vehicles that we are not looking for at the time. Around eight thousand ANPR cameras photograph over thirty million numbers every day, and the details are stored for two years.

  ‘The lorry is a five-ton refrigerated Sinotruk that was bought for cash at an auction in Kent last summer,’ Billy said. ‘It’s a Chinese make, although the plates were Turkish. That’s what they do – the people smugglers – they pick the rides up for cash at auction. Makes it as hard to trace as a pay-as-you-go phone.’ He turned in his chair to peer at his screen. ‘It entered the UK yesterday on the last ferry from Dunkirk. Landed at Dover.’

  ‘Any CCTV of the driver?’ Whitestone asked.

  ‘I’m still looking, ma’am,’ Billy said.

  ‘So we’re assuming the owner of the thirteenth passport wasn’t driving?’ I said.

  ‘It’s unlikely,’ Whitestone said. ‘Because the owner of the thirteenth passport is a woman and the drivers who smuggle in illegals are all men. At least, that’s how it has been until now. It’s not an equal opportunities profession. Find the thirteenth woman and then you find the driver. Find the driver and you find the scumbags who run the whole stinking operation.’