Chapter 3

Just around the corner, Susanna immediately found herself at the back of yet another queue, this time moving slowly toward the hand luggage, X-ray machine. Screened bags were building up in piles beyond the machine. Several passengers triggered the alarm as they shuffled through the security screen and had to be laboriously hand searched before sheepishly producing a huge handful of loose change, the accumulated product of two weeks’ transactions with unfamiliar, high-denomination notes, or slipping off a massive wristwatch or heavy gold or silver chains and other chunky jewellery, bargains from local tourist shops. George would have hated this, she thought and would have been asking under his breath why people could not think to take all the metal from around their necks or out of their pockets before walking through the detector.

Susanna was just behind the four anxious looking girls and their male escorts. The girls and the first man passed through the machine without incident but the second man triggered the alarm. Probably the heavy zip in his leather jacket, thought Susanna. Shame he did not have the sense to take it off and put it on the conveyor through the X-ray machine. The bored security officer stepped forward patiently and signalled to the man to raise his arms so he could run his hand over his pockets, but the man just stood with his arms at his sides. The official signalled again more insistently and reached forward with both hands to raise the man’s arms and feel his clothing. The man stepped back with his hands outstretched in a defensive gesture and spoke loudly in a language Susanna did not understand or recognise, apparently refusing to be searched. He spoke quickly and volubly, offering some explanation as to why he could not or would not be searched and waving his hands in emphasis. His attention drawn by the raised voice, a young policeman strolled towards the group, his machine gun still slung casually across his chest. The leather-jacketed man shouted, swung round and punched the policeman in the stomach. As he turned away, Susanna saw the blood on the policeman’s tunic as he crumpled to the floor and realised in horror that he had been stabbed. She stood, transfixed, while other passengers scattered, some scurrying silently, some shouting warnings, some screaming. The first man shouted something at the girls and pushed back past them to snatch the policeman’s machine gun from around his neck. Leather Jacket yanked open the holster and dragged the heavy pistol from the writhing policeman’s holster and, slicing through the white lanyard with his knife, stuffed the gun in his jacket and grabbing Susanna’s wrist, dragged her unresisting behind him. Herding the four girls in front, he and his companion dashed into the nearby security office and slammed the door. The metal desk was tipped on its back with a crash and pushed, screeching over the terrazzo, against the closed door. The older man shouted something at the girls and Susanna and emphasised his orders with a wave of the machine gun and the five women scuttled into a corner and crouched between and against a row of battered and chipped, grey filing cabinets. He shouted at Leather Jacket, clearly berating him for his stupidity than signalled him and the women to say nothing. The sudden silence was broken by the sound of heavy breathing. Christ Almighty, thought Susanna. I’m a hostage. She discovered that her heart was pounding and her breath was coming in gasps. Must get control, she thought. ‘I’m not scared. I’m not scared.’ She repeated it silently in her head until she found she could take several deep breaths and the mist clouding her vision seemed to lift. ‘Okay’, she said to herself. ‘I’m just going to miss this one flight. There are plenty more. It’s okay.’ Then she thought, ‘bloody hell! My bags will go on the first flight and bloody hell again, Mum will be worried sick if I’m not on the plane. And I forgot to remind George to defrost the freezer while I’m away.’ It dawned how ridiculously unimportant this was to a hostage held by armed men and she found herself beginning to giggle and coughed, more a choke, to hide it. I’m not scared; I’m not scared.

“You English?” The whispered question came from the girl next to her sitting with her arms around her drawn up knees and her face lowered to hide her mouth. Susanna nodded dumbly and glanced sideways at her. She was the tallest of the group, with high-cheekbones, a classic profile and long, mousy hair drawn back into a ponytail. Leather Jacket, squatting beside the door, caught the movement from the corner of his eye and swivelled to point the pistol straight at Susanna. He mouthed what was obviously a threat and Susanna froze. The older man nudged him and indicated impatiently that he should keep watching through the bottom of the blinds of the half-glazed office.

“Yes, English,” whispered Susanna. “You?”

“From Albania: Tirana. My name is Natasha. Her, she is my sister, Irma.”

“The others?”

“Marianna is from Pogradec in the East, also Albania. Anna is from Macedonia, a village near Skopje, I think.”

Under her breath Susanna asked, “What is all this about? Who are these men?”

“That one says his name is Gregor,” she pointed with her eyes to the older man. “He works for a man called Michael. The other is Stanislav. Take care for him. He is stupid and bad. He hurt Anna very much. They are from Russia. I don’t know where.”

“But why are you here?”

“You don’t understand? We are going to England. I studied in England for one year and it is very beautiful. You know Princeton Language College, in Tottenham? I think it is quite famous. The others don’t care where they go, maybe Germany, maybe Holland but I want England. We paid to be taken to England but we don’t have all the money so we pay some when we get there. We have jobs as waitresses in nightclubs. We can get more than a hundred pounds every day. We will soon pay what we must. That is why Gregor and Stanislav are with us. They say they are to help us but they are guards to make sure we don’t run away before we pay.”

“How much must you pay?”

“Three thousand dollars each, and now our fares and the costs of travelling and waiting. But when we have paid we will have money to send to our families. My mother is ill and we have not enough money for doctors and hospital.”

“Did you try to go on your own, without paying these men?”

“Of course. I told you. I was in London as a student. I should have stayed but I left because my mother was ill and then I cannot get a new visa. This is the best way because we have jobs also.”

“My mother is ill, too. That is why I am going to England.”

For several minutes a silence united them. The two men continued their watch and exchanged occasional whispers in what Susanna now assumed to be Russian. Everyone jumped and one of the girls gasped when the telephone suddenly shrilled. Gregor rolled across the floor to pick it up. He listened. Susanna could hear a faint voice with a calm, reasonable tone but none of the words, even if she had understood. There was a change of language, and another, She thought she heard the words ‘speak English’. Clearly the authorities were trying to open communications with the men. Gregor said something and put the telephone down before crawling back to the door. He started explaining something to Stanislav.

“Why are you here, Natasha? There must be easier ways to get to England or Germany or wherever.”

“Sure. We plan to go by boat, fast boat to Italy then by train and lorry. Three times, at night, we try to go to Italy but the Italian police have boats in the sea and we cannot go. One time we very lucky. Very nearly they catch us. And there was storm, very powerful wind, big, big waves. I think I will go down with this boat. So after nearly one month waiting and trying, Gregor said, ‘Okay. Not Italy. We go to Greece,’ and two days ago the boat came here and we find taxi and came to the airport. Greece is Europe, yes? So we are in Europe and can go where we want. We have papers with Gregor. Only a flight and we are in England. That stupid Stanislav. His fault. Now maybe he will shoot us. If not they send us back. All the fault of Stanislav. Just another pointless, stupid man; none of them are any good. Maybe my mother will die. I would kill him for this.” The look of malice in her eyes convinced Susanna that Natasha was speaking the truth.

“Natasha, I have read about this. I don’t think you will just work as waitresses. I think you will be forced to have sex with men who will pay.”

Natasha shrugged. “We know. We think so too. Then the money is better, but now nothing. We need money very much so we take the risk. What else should we do?” There did not seem to be much point in arguing or telling Natasha that they would see little if any of the money they earned, would never be allowed out without an escort and would be threatened with exposure as illegal immigrants or beaten up if they refused to work. One way or another, they would not be going anywhere now. Gregor turned and hissed at them to be silent. Perhaps he had seen some movement outside.

George heard the sirens as he was about to drive out of the airport car park and stopped to watch the escorting police cars and the Mercedes with tinted windows sweep past. ‘I bet he doesn’t have to stand in a bloody queue,’ he thought, assuming that some politician or celebrity was arriving at the airport. The memory of queuing rekindled his school day reminiscence. For Mr. Crabtree’s carpentry lessons, standard kit had been a thick, white, cotton apron worn to protect the compulsory grey sweaters, grey shirt, grey socks and grey shorts from sawdust, glue and, occasionally, blood. He remembered a term spent making a twelve inch ruler that was, as specified, exactly twelve inches long and scored to mark the one inch, half inch and quarter inch divisions, but was three quarters of an inch thick and so useless for any practical application. The next term’s artefact had been a pipe rack. To his embarrassment he was expected to take it home when it was finished; that would have surprised him less if he had known that his parents had had to pay for the wood but what amazed him more was his father’s enthusiasm for the pipe rack that, for weeks, was proudly displayed, pipe-less, on the dining room sideboard. His surprise at his father’s enthusiasm arose because his father had always rolled his own cigarettes using liquorice papers and tobacco from whatever plastic pouch offered that week’s best bargain, rolling a day’s supply each morning before setting out in the Vauxhall to sell fire and flood insurance to the businesses of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. One pupil made an electric guitar; that seemed an altogether more worthwhile project. George had disliked carpentry lessons but they must have done him some good as he could still identify a tenon-saw with confidence and safely handle the various grades of sandpaper. Approved tools then had included saws and hand-drills and chisels and planes but, as pieces of wood were never nailed together but were dovetailed, drilled, screwed and glued using foul smelling animal glue heated to glutinous melting in a pot over a gas ring, the hammer was frowned upon as a woodworking implement. Each bench had a full set of other tools to be shared between two boys but there was only one hammer between every two benches. Good housekeeping was emphasised in the woodworking shop and time was allocated at the end of each lesson when tools were returned to their allocated places in the racks and cupboards and wood shavings, sawdust, illicit sweet wrappings and failed projects were swept up with a hand brush. The final act of each lesson had been a sort of tool roll-call. Everyone swapped places to check their neighbour’s inventory. ‘Each bench must have…’, Crabtree had chanted’. Items such as screwdrivers, saws, hand-drills, and planes were enumerated. The list always closed with ‘…and either a hammer or a brush.’

The captain greeted George as he drove on to the inter-island ferry.

“Your young lady get her flight okay?”

“Yes, yes, fine”, George nodded. “Thank you.”

“They say there is something happening at the airport.”

“Yes, I saw,” said George. “It’s very busy.” He drove to the space indicated by a seaman wearing shorts and a vest and waving his grubby baseball cap and parked as close as he dared to the battered pick up truck in front of him, hoping that its driver had left it in gear with its brake hard on, before climbing the companionway to watch the practiced ritual of casting off and getting under weigh. He liked boats and water. One of his favourite lunchtime pastimes in the City had been to lean on the riverside railings and watch tugs, barges and police boats chugging up and down river towing their ripple-spreading wakes through the muddy-brown water. Water and boats somehow implied continuity for him and he always found them soothing.

By the time George drove off the ferry and on to the island it was almost dark. He already felt forlorn and alone and did not want to sit on his own in the silent house. He already missed Susanna’s cheerful company, pottering around in the kitchen, filling, and emptying, glasses and singing along, sometimes tunefully, with the music. He felt depressed and the spectre of his anxiety about his growing feeling of persecution was waiting in the wings of his mind, ready to appear when he was quiet and alone. To postpone the solitude he pulled up at the local taverna, parking, like all the other customers, on the pavement and settled himself in a white, plastic chair at a table near the road, well away from the flickering and faintly buzzing, neon ‘Koktails’ sign and blue-white tubes over the covered veranda.

“Please?” The female voice behind him made him start and he twisted awkwardly in his chair to find himself face to face with the barely tee-shirted bosom of a young, dark-haired waitress. He was aware of a musky scent. “Yes please?” she repeated, still addressing him in English.

“Er.., Oh, Yes. A large beer, please. And some olives or nuts or something.” He turned to watch the young woman’s back as she walked away, back into the bar. “She’s new. I wonder where Andreas found her?”