your emergency?’
‘Police. Don’t have time for all the crap. Find my location using these words Buttercup, Red, Triangle. There’s something weird going on in the vehicle in front of me. I suspect an abduction.’
‘Could I take your name …?’
But the van had sped up and was turning off. Felicity threw her phone on the passenger seat and raised her voice so the despatcher could still hear her. ‘I’m following it. A white van. Don’t know what the road’s called but get someone here ASAP. I’ll keep my phone open. I’m a police officer. Get someone here pronto.’
Letting herself lag a little behind the vehicle, whilst still keeping it in her sights, Felicity followed. The hand was still waving about from the rear light. Then it disappeared. A moment later it was back, throwing stuff out the opening, waving. Frantic. The van sped up, and Felicity suspected the driver was aware of what their captive was doing and that they were being followed.
Nausea filled Felicity’s throat, but she swallowed it back. The road was now a track … a bumpy track and it wasn’t helping the sickly feeling. The snow was getting ever heavier, big flakes masking her vision, and Felicity was scared she was going to skid. Who knew if that stupid app worked or if anyone would be able to triangulate her phone data to secure her whereabouts from here? Maybe this had been a bad decision. Pulling herself forward, she peered through the windscreen and, as a darting shadow dived in front of her, she slammed her foot on the brakes. Her phone skittered across the seat and into the footwell as the car careered to the right. The shadow – what looked like a baby deer – disappeared into the foliage to the left. Felicity, heart hammering, wrenched the steering wheel and eased her foot off the brake. With the car in front gaining distance, her car slowly righted itself. She raised her voice, hoping her phone was still connected and would still pick up her voice. ‘We’re on a side road now. Terrain crap, road bumpy. Visibility is poor and the reg number is obscured. The vehicle is speeding up.’
She’d no idea if the responder on the other end of the phone could still hear her, but she kept up her chatter. ‘Just passed a farmhouse … Appletree Farm … series of wind turbines in a field to the right of it.’
The tinny voice from the phone told her the despatcher was speaking and she swallowed, blinking away the tears that sprung to her eyes when she realized that she wasn’t completely alone. Even though the phone was on loudspeaker, the despatcher’s words were distant. The van she was following was about fifty feet ahead of her. She took her eye off it for a second … and reached down, her fingers scrabbling across the carpeted floor. She glanced up, righted the wheel, eased off the accelerator and stretched a little deeper. If she could just find the damn phone, she’d be sure the phone operative could hear her.
Crash!
The judder and bang as she rear-ended the van, propelled her forward and, just as quickly, back when the airbag deployed.
Pinned back against her seat by the weight of the airbag, vision obscured, she blinked. What the hell? She began to push the airbag down, ignoring her breathlessness, just wanting to get out of the vehicle but before she had the chance to move, the door was yanked open and a figure in a balaclava thrust a gun into her car. Felicity looked up at the man, her eyes wide in terror. ‘Please … don’t …’
Bang!
‘Hello … hello? Are you still there …?’ The despatcher’s voice faded.
Headlights pierced the early morning dark, as the van pulled up outside Bradford Halal Chicken Factory. The men who were bundled on the floor in the back, got to their feet before the doors were yanked open and they were berated by the big hulking bloke the other men called Bullet. Their eyes adjusting to the dawn light and shivering, they stumbled out onto the frosty ground. After being locked up in the dark for the duration of the journey, it was a relief for Stefan Marcovici when the doors opened. The smell of unwashed bodies combined with their cramped positions always panicked him a bit. What if they crashed and the van exploded? What if one day their captors just parked up and didn’t bother to open the doors for them?
The factory lights were on, but they were the first workers to arrive and the car park was empty bar their transport and another car that probably belonged to the night watchman. It was parked next to the huge waste containers that stood next to the roll-down warehouse doors attached to the factory. As they passed Bullet, he pushed each of them, a stupid grin on his face. They trudged on to the next man. Huddled in a huge coat, woollen beanie on his head and a fed-up weed-glazed look on his face, he handed them their lunch: a single paper-thin sandwich with a disgusting paste filling, that clagged up your mouth.
Each day, he arrived at the halal chicken factory, put on white overalls, a plastic apron, hairnet, mask, gloves and wellies and for hour after interminable hour he stood, freezing his balls off, by whatever machine they directed him to, dealing with the cold chicken corpses that moved past him on a conveyor-belt of death. All around him, the machines clanked and jolted, the men chatted and the radio played songs about love and sex, none of which held any importance for him in his current situation.
Over the months Stefan had grown immune to the putrid stench of blood clogging up his nostrils. It had become routine, just part of his day. A huge part of it. A necessary part of it. The section between getting up and going back home to bed. The bit he could measure. The squish of innards and entrails between his gloved fingers, the sound of cartilage and bone cracking beneath his cleaver and the persistent buzz of the fly catcher that hung from the ceiling above him, as he worked, were all just scene setting. Part of the cadence of his daily life.
Some of the men worked shorter shifts than he and his fellow captives – coming in later and leaving earlier. About two hours before the end of his shift, Stefan watched, heavy-hearted and envious, as they left of their own accord with a friendly wave and banter, whilst he and the other faceless people slogged in silence. Sometimes he wondered if it was just one great long nightmare. Months earlier he’d been full of hope, making plans for a future where his entire family joined him and his daughter. A new start away from the threat of the gang he’d betrayed back in Romania. When they’d taken him and Maria to a bank and helped them sign up for an account, he’d been sure everything was legitimate, all above board. Sure, he’d be able to manage his money, pay off his debt to those who’d helped him escape and build a life, but the bastards had confiscated his card and insisted he still had a huge debt to pay off.
Throwing a pile of chicken guts into the plastic waste tubs behind him and wishing it was a brick hitting Bullet’s head, he went through his strategy. For days now he’d been thinking about this and now the day had come, he wanted to make sure everything went to plan. The trigger had been when he’d heard the advert on the radio. At first, he hadn’t understood it. Wondered what it was about. Then, he heard it again and it began to dawn on him. The advert was about people like him and the other men. People kept against their will, unable to escape. People like his daughter being forced to do God knows what.
His captors had told them that nobody cared about the likes of them, but that wasn’t true. The police were advertising it on the radio. They were asking people to contact them. They would help. So, Stefan memorized the number. All he had to do was tell someone what was happening. At first, he’d thought he’d tell one of the other men – the ones who were free to come and go, but he decided against that. They must know what was going on. They just turned a blind eye. Probably glad it wasn’t them. So that wouldn’t work. The more time that passed, the weaker he got, the more poorly some of the other men became, and this fuelled his
