Spider Shepherd 11 - White Lies

Table of Contents

Also by Stephen Leather

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

White Lies

Pay Off

The Fireman

Hungry Ghost

The Chinaman

The Vets

The Long Shot

The Birthday Girl

The Double Tap

The Solitary Man

The Tunnel Rats

The Bombmaker

The Stretch

Tango One

The Eyewitness

Spider Shepherd Thrillers

Hard Landing

Soft Target

Cold Kill

Hot Blood

Dead Men

Live Fire

Rough Justice

Fair Game

False Friends

True Colours

Jack Nightingale Supernatural Thrillers

Nightfall

Midnight

Nightmare

Nightshade

Lastnight

To find out about these and future titles, visit
www.stephenleather.com
.

Stephen Leather is one of the UK’s most successful thriller writers, an eBook and
Sunday Times
bestseller and author of the critically acclaimed Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd series and the Jack Nightingale supernatural detective novels. Before becoming a novelist he was a journalist for more than ten years on newspapers such as
The Times
, the
Daily Mirror
, the
Glasgow Herald
, the
Daily Mail
and the
South China Morning Post
in Hong Kong. He is one of the country’s most successful eBook authors and his titles have topped the Amazon Kindle charts in the UK and the US. His bestsellers have been translated into fifteen languages and he has also written for television.

Visit Stephen’s website,
www.stephenleather.com
, find him on Facebook, and follow him on Twitter at
www.twitter.com/stephenleather
.

Stephen also has a website for his Spider Shepherd series,
www.danspidershepherd.com
, and for his Jack Nightingale series,
www.jacknightingale.com
.

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Stephen Leather 2014

The right of Stephen Leather to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 444 73660 1

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

For Marie

‘I
t’s the ultimate earner, mate, better than drugs, better than guns, better than anything.’ The speaker was a dark-haired man in a black pea-coat. Alistair Coatsworth, Ally to his friends. He was forty-nine years old but looked a decade older. ‘People pay thousands to get into the UK. Thousands.’ His nose and cheeks were flecked with broken blood vessels, the result of years at sea and a taste for strong liquor.

There were three men sitting at the table listening intently as they finished off their plates of steak and chips. They were on their second bottle of red wine and a third had already been opened. They were in a small restaurant in a coastal village between Calais and Dunkirk, close to the border with Belgium. They had a table by a roaring fire that had shadows flickering over the roughly plastered walls.

Coatsworth waved his knife in the air for emphasis. ‘It’s the Wild West over here, mate. You can make money hand over fist if you know what you doing. I’ve got a pal who smuggles them on to trucks for a grand a go. He pays the driver two hundred of that and keeps eight hundred for himself. Gets maybe five on a truck. He makes four grand and the driver gets one. They almost never get caught but, if they do, the driver just says they snuck on and he knows nothing.’

‘Sounds good,’ said the man sitting opposite him. His name was Andy Bell. He was a few years younger than Coatsworth, his face burned from exposure to the sun. He was wearing a heavy green polo-necked jumper, combat trousers and Timberland boots.

‘He’s got an even better deal with trucks that have been built with secret compartments. Usually when the driver owns his own rig. You can build a compartment that holds three or four and they’ll never be found. He can charge four grand a go for that and the driver takes half. So that’s two grand a person, six grand a run.’

‘Why the fifty-fifty split?’ asked Bell.

‘It’s obvious,’ said another of the men at the table. Bruno Mercier was an Algerian, short and stocky with a crew cut and a diamond stud in his left ear. ‘Because if they get caught in a secret compartment, the driver can’t say he didn’t know.’

‘But most trucks aren’t checked, right?’ asked Bell.

‘They don’t have time,’ said Coatsworth. ‘Dover would grind to a halt if they searched every vehicle. The only problem is finding the right driver. That’s not easy. At least doing what we’re doing, we’re not beholden to anyone. No one can let us down. And more importantly, no one can grass us up.’

Bell nodded and popped another piece of steak into his mouth. Coatsworth emptied his glass and refilled it. He tried to pour more into Bell’s glass but Bell put his hand over the top. ‘It’ll help keep out the cold,’ said Coatsworth. ‘The English Channel gets bitter at night.’

‘Go on, then,’ said Bell, taking away his hand.

Coatsworth topped up Bell’s glass. ‘I’ll have some of that,’ said the fourth man at the table. Frankie Rainey was in his late twenties. He’d hung his fleece jacket over the back of his chair and had rolled up the sleeves of his denim shirt to reveal a tattoo on each forearm: a galleon in full sail and a dagger with a snake wound around it. One of his front teeth had gone black and the rest were stained from coffee and cigarettes. Coatsworth filled his glass.

‘Business is good, yeah?’ said Bell.

‘That’s why we need you,’ said Coatsworth, putting the bottle back on the table. ‘I was getting backed up.’

‘Where are you getting them from?’ asked Bell. ‘It’s not as if you can advertise smuggling runs to the UK, is it?’

‘I pay some middlemen to cruise around Calais and the other jumping-off ports,’ said Coatsworth. ‘We need a particular sort of refugee. Ideally some government official or army guy from Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria who’s managed to grab a decent wad before running away with his family. We’re looking for the happy medium. We don’t want the ones with no money. And if the guy’s got megabucks he can just buy his way into the UK by paying for passports.’

‘What, real ones? Real passports?’

‘Depends,’ said Coatsworth. ‘The really rich ones get the red-carpet treatment; invest a million quid in the UK and you and your family can all get passports. But twenty grand or so will get you a genuine passport, probably from some UK-born Asian who’s never left the country. He applies for a passport then sells it and forgets about travelling for ten years. But passports aren’t easy to get and we offer a cheaper way in. The trick is to find the ones with cash. It’s just a matter of separating the wheat from the chaff.’

‘The chaff being what?’

Coatsworth laughed. ‘The chaff being the morons with nothing, the ones who climb into refrigerated vans and freeze to death. My middlemen make sure that the clients have the cash to pay.’

‘Always cash?’

‘Mostly,’ said Coatsworth. ‘Dollars, euros or pounds, no funny Arab money, though. So long as it adds up to three grand sterling, I’m happy. But I’ve taken gold in the past. And jewellery.’ He pushed the sleeve of his jacket up his arm and showed Bell the watch on his wrist. It was a gold Rolex. ‘Got this off an Iraqi doctor. It’s the real thing, it’d cost you twenty grand in a jeweller’s.’

‘It’s genuine, right?’

Coatsworth scowled and held the watch under Bell’s chin. ‘Of course it’s bloody genuine. I’m not stupid. You can tell by the way the second hand moves. If it’s jerky it’s a fake. If it moves smoothly, it’s real.’

Bell looked at the watch and pulled a face. ‘I thought it was the other way around,’ he said.

Coatsworth frowned and pulled back his arm. He stared at the second hand and his frown deepened.

Rainey and Mercier burst out laughing but stopped when Coatsworth glared at them. ‘I’m yanking your chain,’ said Bell. ‘It’s kosher. You can tell just by looking at it. Quality.’

‘Yeah,’ said Coatsworth. He tapped the watch. ‘We should be heading out soon,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to meet the van in ten minutes.’

Bell sipped his wine. ‘So you think this is good money, long-term?’ he asked.

‘Best you’ll ever see,’ said Coatsworth. He leaned across the table. ‘I’ve been doing this for eighteen months now. During the summer the weather’s good enough for maybe twenty-five days. Less during spring and autumn. I’ve not done a winter yet but even then there’ll be days when I can do a run. The summer months, I was doing two runs a day. Eight customers each trip, that’s sixteen a day. Sixteen a day is forty-eight grand. OK, I’ve got costs. I pay the middlemen in France and I pay a guy to handle transport in the UK, and there’s fuel and expenses, but I can still clear forty-five grand a day. A day, mate. In August alone I pulled in more than a million quid.’

‘So what do you do with all the money, that’s too much cash to hide under the bed.’

‘I’ve got a guy who does my laundry,’ said Coatsworth. ‘He lives on Jersey, I take a run out to see him every month and leave the cash with him. He gets it into the banking system for a fee of ten per cent.’ He nodded at Rainey. ‘Frankie uses the same guy.’

‘That’s a lot, ten per cent,’ said Bell. He put his knife and fork down and belched. ‘Better out than in,’ he said.

Coatsworth shook his head. ‘It’s cheap as chips, mate. If you ever do get done the first thing they do is to go looking for the money and take it off you. My money’s in shell companies and trusts all around the world, safe from their grubby little hands. It’s worth paying ten per cent for. Trust me.’ He frowned. ‘What do you do with your money, then?’

‘Spend it,’ said Bell. His face broke into a grin. ‘But then I haven’t been earning a million quid a month. Running tourists out to the Holy Island doesn’t bring in the big bucks.’

‘Yeah, well, now you’re with me that’ll change. And you need to start thinking about what you’re going to do with the money you earn. The reason I brought you in is because I’m getting more customers than I can handle myself. It’s a growing market, mate, and you’ll grow with it.’ He looked at his watch again, drained his glass and stood up. ‘Time to go,’ he said, dropping a fifty-euro note on to the table and waving at the waiter, a grey-haired man in his fifties who doubled as the restaurant’s barman.

‘I need the toilet,’ said Bell.

‘Bladder like a marble,’ said Rainey.

‘Be quick about it,’ said Coatsworth. ‘We’ll be in the car.’

Bell hurried off to the toilet while Coatsworth, Rainey and Mercier headed outside and climbed into a large Mercedes. Rainey got into the driving seat and Coatsworth sat next to him. ‘Your mate’s not in there throwing up I hope,’ said Coatsworth.

‘He’ll be fine,’ said Rainey. He lit a cigarette and then offered the pack to Coatsworth. Coatsworth took one and handed the pack back to Mercier. ‘He’s short of a bob or two,’ Rainey continued. ‘He borrowed from the bank to buy his boat and he’s having trouble with the payments. Did you see the look on his face when you asked him what he did with his money? He was thinking about selling his boat, things were that bad.’