The Inspector Walter Darriteau Murder Mysteries - Books 1-4 by David Carter (best finance books of all time .txt) 📕

the odd cop car, the odd articulated wagon, the occasional cab, and a few revellers on their way home after a night out, most with a non drinking nominated driver at the wheel, most, but not all, so be aware. 1.26am, streets still well lit, economy cuts or not, orange sodium everywhere.

The dark green people carrier chugged on, heading for the Liverpool Freeport. Lots of docks on the left hand side, lots of ships too. 95% of Britain’s trade still came and went by sea. Britain had been a trading nation since the land had severed itself from the Continent eight thousand years before, and it still is now, and Liverpool is still a major player, maybe the second biggest, depending on whose figures you believed.

The people carrier motored on past Gladstone Dock and took a left fork into the Liverpool Freeport, Britain’s largest and most successful Free Zone, where a plethora of companies large and small, were located to utilise the business-friendly Customs duties regimes, and take advantage of the high security offered within the sprawling 383 hectare Free Zone site.

The driver pulled the people carrier to a standstill at the red and white barrier. Buzzed down the window. The glass hatch in the nearby brick-built hut opened, manned twenty-four hours, and the driver handed over documentation. Delivery and collection notes, authorisation dockets, and two new fifty pound notes. The red-faced guy yawned and stamped the dockets, handed back the paperwork, most of it, and said, ‘Same papers on the way out?’

‘That’s the arrangement,’ said the driver.

The barrier rose and the carrier slid through and did a big left swerve past containers all neatly laid out in a row, then a hundred yard straight run, and another left turn heading for the arc-lit State of Heavenly Peace, one of the newer Chinese built tubs of the China Changjiang National Shipping Corporation.

The people carrier pulled up at the quayside adjacent to the large vessel that had recently finished disgorging its containers. There was a narrow gangplank there, running flush against the side of the ship. A red sign flapped around at the base. It was in English and Chinese and said: Private: Crew and official visitors only. The tub did not cater for paying passengers.

Man Two got out of the people carrier and slid back the offside middle door. Glanced up at the gangplank. High up on the ship someone looked over the side and Man Two saw a shadowy figure trotting down the gangplank, and as he did so the mobile stairway was rattling and bouncing and creaking up and down. Then he was at the foot, standing on the quayside, but he wasn’t alone. One man, Oriental, holding a dirty half-inch rope that fed out behind him to another Oriental, a woman. The rope went around her wrist and was knotted and on again, to the next, and so forth. Five women all told; in line astern, skinny and world weary and tired and hungry and confused and happy to get off that vast hunk of metal that in a previous life, had once been thousands of rusting western European cars.

The man at the front of the chain produced a piece of paper. ‘You sign,’ he said. ‘You take responsible.’

Man Two signed the paper, M Mouse, and took the offered line.

‘You fuck offey,’ said the Oriental. ‘Go!’ and he pointed at the people carrier and turned and scampered back up the gangplank, happy to be away, happy to be rid of his charges and trouble and the risk and angst.

‘Come on ladies, into the van,’ said Man Two, and he tugged them toward the people carrier door and beckoned them inside. They all climbed aboard, happy to be away from that ship, happy to be off the sea. Anything and anywhere had to be better than being locked up in that windowless metal room, ten by ten, no furniture, cold metal floor, no bedding, no facilities, no fresh air, five people, one bucket, emptied once a day, one bowl of rice per human unit, one small bottle of water, per unit, per day. Damn all else. The people carrier door slammed closed.

Man One glanced round and saw them all aboard. Spoke on his mobile.

‘Five units collected. Leaving now. Out.’

It was thought the women couldn’t speak English, not that it mattered one bit.

Man One started the engine and headed back toward the Freeport exit point. Same procedure, same documentation, same payday, same lighter papers coming back into the cab, and then they were out, onto the public highway, heading south, heading for the Mersey Tunnel and the Wirral peninsula beyond.

Man Two rubbed his hands together and winked at Man One. Job done. Very nearly. Think of the money. Easy peasy. Best employment he had ever had. Life was sweet.

Twenty-Nine

It was a quarter past two in the morning when the people carrier popped out of the Mersey Tunnel, Wirral side. Stopped at the automatic barrier. Man One buzzed down the window and tossed the necessary coins into the plastic basket.

Behind him, five units slept on, sitting back in the comfortable padded seats, still tethered together. After four weeks on a rutted metal floor it must have felt like heaven. Man Two yawned and told Man One to get a move on. Cruising down the M53, very light traffic, past the Moreton Spur, then the Woody, the giant council housing estate built after the Second World War to house bombed out Birkenhead residents, that, and the baby boomers that were about to burst on the nation, past the Clatterbridge turnoff for the hospital where Man Two had had his hand fixed the previous year after a ruck in a Bromborough pub. Past the A41 interchange, and not long after that they pulled off the motorway to sample the delights of the industrial complex of Ellesmere Port.

In the distance the vast chemical and petroleum works at Stanlow lit up the night sky, arc lights everywhere, excess gas being burnt off.