Bootlegged Angel (11 page)

‘And you must be early,’ I said as I turned my head.

He was about my height but chunkier, with light brown hair cropped very short. Under an open reversible storm coat he wore a light blue suit, a four-button Italian cut with high lapels, neither
of which he had bought in an Oxfam shop. I guessed he was about forty but you can never be sure these days.

‘Nick Lawrence,’ he said to me, then, to the bearded barman: ‘Usual, Bob.’

The barman took the top off a bottle of Coke and placed it on the bar. Lawrence picked it up without waiting for a glass, making no effort to pay. He tipped it towards me then took a swig.

He seemed to be settled where he was, leaning against the bar next to me, but I thought he might prefer a seat so I asked; ‘Are you OK to talk here?’

Lawrence chose to misunderstand.

‘We’re fine here, aren’t we, Bob?’ he said loudly and the barman bobbed his beard twice. ‘This is a runner-free zone, this pub is, just about the only place in
Dover where you pay full whack for everything. Right, Bob?’

There was a grunt from somewhere inside the beard.

‘Bob’s had his car vandalised and his windows smashed but he still chucks ’em out if they come round touting for orders.’

‘Orders?’

‘Oh yeah, they take your order and do your shopping for you, whether you want them to or not.’ He saw me looking at my pint of beer. ‘Not beer, though, not in a pub. A publican
would have to be really stupid to sell French beer across the bar. The beer goes to the corner shop, ’specially the ones run by Asians who take it rather than risk a petrol-bombing. But a pub
could be tempted by some duty-free spirits or cigarettes at Belgian prices.’

He produced a packet of Benson & Hedges and offered me one but I declined.

‘No, look,’ he said.

On the corner of the flip-top of the pack was a paper seal which carried a price in francs – F118,00 –and the description ‘20 Sigaretten’.

‘I bought these last night out of a ciggy machine in a pub in Folkestone. The landlord of the pub knew nothing about them. Genuine. He wasn’t on the fiddle, the guy who filled the
cigarette machine was though. Buys his own stock at £2 a packet and retails them through a pub machine for £4, pockets the difference. Nice work if you can get it.’

He lit one of the cigarettes with a disposable lighter and exhaled blue-grey smoke in my face, keeping eye contact, almost willing me to complain.

‘I’m told you’re the man to ask about beer-running,’ I said, not allowing my eyes to water just to show him I was tough too.

He waited a beat before answering.

‘Ah yes, Murdo. I try and help him when I can. Feel sorry for him in many ways, but he should have seen all this coming. If I’d’ve been him, I’d’ve sold up and gone
to live in Switzerland five years ago. There’s so much smuggled beer in Kent now I don’t know how he keeps his pubs open. He won’t beat the runners.’

‘Can’t you?’

‘You mean the full might of Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise?’

‘I suppose so.’

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘Other priorities, I’m afraid. It all comes down to money, to budgets. We get more officers, we have to justify them by increasing our results, increasing our productivity. We have
targets now, comparisons with industry, all that fucking bullshit.’

I tried to look sympathetic for the plight of a tax-collector. It was a first.

‘And beer-running doesn’t count for many Brownie points, is that it?’

‘Our number one priority: drugs. Has to be. Big problem, big villains, big result every time we score, lots of good press and public approval. Priority number three: guns. Not as sexy a
story as you might think but the politicians love us for it. Good for law and order and keeps the Police Federation quiet.’

He was on a roll so I didn’t interrupt.

‘Four: tobacco. Easy to smuggle, dead easy, and mega-profits. Mega tax-loss for the government too, and nobody’s going to stick up for smokers these days, are they? So we’ve
got to be seen to be hot on the ciggy-runners and sometimes you can score heavily. We did a lorry two weeks ago, supposed to be carrying rolls of newsprint. One of them was hollow. Contained one
and a half million cigs. Whammo! One pull and that’s £4,000,000 to the good on the revenue accounts, or at least it looks that way.

‘And then, number five, you’ve got beer and essentially two crimes. You’ve got the carousel operation, which is big time. For that, you need capital and a warehouse and you buy
your booze in England, pretend you’re exporting it so you get the duty back. We bust a carousel operation and it’s worth a coupla million and somebody goes down for six or eight years.
But your average beer-runner is small time. A vanload of beer is worth what – five hundred quid in lost revenue?’

‘But it’s worth more than that to the smuggler,’ I said.

‘Sure, but we have to catch them reselling it, or the police do. Frankly, there’s more chance of doing them for overloading a van, a traffic offence, than nicking them red-handed
when they sell it on.’

‘And number two?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘You never said what your priority number two was.’

‘Oh, yeah, right. It’s pornography, mostly gay porn and paedophile shit and all Triple X rated, heavy stuff. And most of it is legal in Europe. Funny thing, really, if it
hadn’t been for the beer-runners we wouldn’t have got the extra officers and we wouldn’t have found half of what was coming in.’

He took another pull on his bottle of Coke.

‘Some people were really looking forward to us going into Europe, for the porn. They saw it as one of the benefits of the Single European Market.’

‘One of the benefits the government didn’t tell us about,’ I said.

‘That’s not for me to say, Mr Angel, I just nick ’em.’

‘If you can find them,’ I offered.

‘Oh, we know where they are, or most of them. Come on, I’ll show you where they live.’

The first thing that unnerved me was the obvious surprise on Nick Lawrence’s face when he saw where I had parked the BMW and the fact that it still had a wheel at each
corner. When I asked him if this was a bad area, he said, no, that was where we were going.

That was the second thing.

I followed Lawrence’s directions through town and out on the old Folkestone road to an area known as Clarendon, which turned out to be a rabbit warren of houses turned into bedsit
apartments. Lawrence told me to take a left, then a right and then slow down.

‘That one,’ he said, pointing to a terraced house with a faded green door.

I slowed to a halt ten feet beyond it. Lawrence was holding out a £10 note.

‘Take this and go down the alley to the back door and buy me a carton of cigarettes.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Just like that.’

I switched off the engine and climbed out of the Beamer, taking the keys with me.

The house Lawrence had pointed out didn’t look out of the ordinary unless you looked closely. The front door wasn’t really a door, well, not a normal door. There was no letter box,
no street number and no handle, though there was a concave dent in the wood where one should have been. The windows, downstairs and up, all had thick net curtains which made it impossible to see
inside. The only thing which distinguished it from the house next door was that there was a seagull perched on the roof.

I walked down the alley and round the back and spotted the seagull from the rear. For no particular reason he let out a loud ‘Caw!’ which scared the hell out of me and I realised
then what Hitchcock had seen in them.

The back door of the house was through a ten-foot square piece of dirt which had once been a garden but had been stomped flat so that not even the weeds could force their way up. The back door
itself was another solid piece of wood, almost certainly not the door the house came with originally, with a newish Yale lock. The bottom half of the kitchen window had been painted out white with
the same stuff people paint on greenhouses. Apart from the seagull, there was no sign of life.

I knocked on the door and nothing happened although I thought I saw something flash by the upper half of the window. I decided to count slowly to ten and then wander back to Lawrence but I only
got to four when the lock snapped open.

The young boy who stared at me was maybe eleven years old, thin and sunken-cheeked. He had greasy black hair and a sallow complexion which suggested jaundice or that he never left the house. He
stared at me with dark brown eyes and didn’t say a word.

Then I realised he wasn’t staring at me, but at the £10 note I was holding in my left hand. To be sure, I moved it from side to side and his eyes followed.

‘Cigarettes?’ I tried and his head moved up and down.

‘Zigaretten,’ he said, or something like it and moved over to the sink.

There was a chair there, which he had stood on to look out of the window at me. He pulled it aside and opened the cupboard under the sink and stuck his hand in, pulling out first one then
another pack of Benson & Hedges.

Suddenly they were in my hands and the note was in the pocket of his jeans.

‘Beer?’ he said and I tried to figure his accent. ‘Pilsner?’

While I hesitated he stepped to a pantry door and pulled on the plastic handle. The cupboard was far from bare, it was crammed floor to ceiling with bottles of French beer, twenty-four to a
case.

‘Just these,’ I said holding up the cigarettes, ‘for the moment, thanks.’

He didn’t seem to understand, but didn’t seem worried about the fact either, he just held the back door for me until I stepped out and then he clicked the lock.

Before I got to the end of the alley the hairs on the back of my neck told me something was wrong. The thought flashed through my brain that Lawrence had somehow set me up to buy smuggled
cigarettes, but that was crazy as it was only four hundred and he had given me the money to do it.

I stuffed the smokes under my jacket as I turned on to the street.

Lawrence was out of the BMW, leaning on it, his arms folded. Three houses down the street two middle-aged men wearing leather jackets were standing in the doorway, hands in pockets staring at
Lawrence. Something made me look behind me and at the other end of the street, on the corner, were three more men under a lamp post, all of them giving Lawrence – and now me – the evil
eye.

‘Done deal?’ Lawrence asked me, dead calm.

‘Yeah, no problem.’

‘Let’s go, then.’

But instead of getting in the car, he pushed himself away from it and stood in the middle of the pavement. He held both hands out in front of him, clenching them into fists, his arms straight.
Then he moved both arms to his right and swung them across his body as if he was holding a battering ram to thump something.

Which was exactly what the pantomime was all about.

Back in the car I fumbled the key into the ignition. Lawrence got in and slammed his door. The five guys watching us hadn’t moved but I found I was sweating.

‘Just leaving them a message,’ he said. ‘Telling them the next time I’m round here, I’ll be bringing the old masterkey with me.’

I realised what the dents in the front door were, the result of a Customs raid or ‘knock’ with one of the hand-held rams they had bought in from America after watching one too many
episodes of
NYPD Blue
.

I pulled the BMW away from the kerb and headed down the street, passing the two guys in the doorway who watched us without blinking.

‘Get the fags?’ Lawrence asked, lighting up one of his own.

‘Yeah.’ I dug into my jacket and flipped the packs to him. ‘There wasn’t any change.’

‘Can’t argue at those prices. See any beer in there?’

‘Some. About enough for an Irish wake.’

‘Welcome to Dover. Take a right here. Let’s get something to eat.’

I turned as he instructed and we headed back towards the town centre.

‘You shop there regularly?’

‘No, but I go calling on them from time to time.’ He made the battering-ram movement he had out on the street. ‘Knock, knock? I’ve got the masterkey! Who served
you?’

‘A kid. Probably should have been at school.’

‘Somebody has to keep an eye on the stock while Dad’s at the office.’

‘The office?’

‘Well, in his case, the twelve o’clock ferry coming in from Calais. It’ll probably be the fourth run he’s made today since he clocked on about 2 a.m. One of those other
oiks on the street will take over from him this afternoon. They like to offer a twenty-four-hour service.’

‘The kid is Czech, isn’t he?’ I said, without really knowing why I thought it might be important.

‘Very good, Roy, very observant,’ said Lawrence, looking at me as if genuinely impressed. ‘Yeah, he’s Czech. So’s his dad. So is everybody who lives on that street.
Interesting that, isn’t it?’

Yes it was, and worrying.

But not half as worrying as the realisation that Lawrence was setting me up.

‘It’s not local, you know,’ said Lawrence, his hand negotiating an octopus of chips towards his mouth. ‘The fish. Oh, it’s probably caught just up
the coast but then it goes up to London and gets filleted and frozen before being sent back here.’

‘Mmmm,’ I said through a mouthful, trying to give the impression that he was talking to someone who gave a toss.

His idea of taking me to lunch was that I drove as he directed to a fish and chip shop he knew, I handed over a £10 note and he hopped out of the Beamer to ‘get them in’ and,
incidentally, keep the change. Then he had me drive on to the Marine Parade and he selected a bench seat with a sea view in what appeared to be the municipal gardens. It gave you a great incentive
to eat your fish and chips quickly, before they congealed into a single lump.

‘So what’s with the Czech connection?’ I asked, if only to get him off the topic of fish. I half expected a lecture on the historical significance of the Dover sole.

‘They’re a gang, that’s all,’ he said, spraying flecks of batter over his chin. ‘Flavour of the month, sure, but next year it’ll be somebody else, Bulgarians,
Croats, who knows?’