The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (11 page)

       
‘No,’ I said, harshly enough to startle her and wake up the cat. ‘No. They might not have meant to kill my parents but they did. Maybe indirectly, but they were responsible. They were responsible.’

       
She stood up and held out her hand to me, and I took it and she pulled me up and took me into the bedroom still carrying my glass. The bedroom wasn’t white, it was blue, blue patterned wallpaper, a thick blue fur bedspread, blue velvet curtains half drawn, a wardrobe and dressing table of blue-stained wood. A picture above the double bed showed a sea scene, white-tipped waves whisked up by a strong wind.

       
She slipped the dress down over her shoulders, she was wearing nothing underneath, and she said nothing until she’d undressed me. ‘Tell me what you want me to do,’ she asked, so I made love to her under the waves and then I told her.

It was light when I left her flat, rubbing my chin because I needed a shave. McKinley was asleep in the car, head resting between the seat and the window, chest rising and falling as he snored loud enough to be heard a hundred yards away. I rapped on the window just behind his ear and he woke with a start.

       
‘OK boss?’ he asked.

       
‘Sure, Get-Up. Let’s go.’

       
‘To the flat?’

       
‘To the flat. And don’t spare the horses.’

       
He started the car on the fourth attempt, which was good going for him, though to be fair we’d only had the Granada a week. He pulled away from the kerb, gently scraping a yellow VW and grinning sheepishly.

       
‘Sorry, boss,’ he said and crashed into second gear.

       
‘Forget it. Just get me home.’

The courtship of McKinley had started the week after I’d seen him get knocked senseless in Kelly’s Bar. I’d gone back to the pub and bought him a bottle of whisky in sixth of a gill measures, matching him drink for drink. I’d eaten a full plate of pasta and lined my stomach with milk and twice in the Gents I’d forced my fingers down my throat and thrown up as much of the whisky as I could. My head was swimming by the end of the evening but I was still on my feet. McKinley was impressed. So was I.

       
I told him I was a dealer, motors, stolen goods, drugs, anything I could make money from. I told him I needed extra muscle, I told him I could do with a driver. What about me? he asked, giving me a friendly nudge in the ribs and shooting me three feet along the bar, I’ve got muscle and I can drive. Like a lamb to the slaughter.

       
I told him I’d pay him £300 a week and he took my hand in his giant paw, looked me in the bloodshot eyes and thanked me from the bottom of his heart. I’d never regret it, he said, and apart from a few near misses in the Granada he’d been right. I had installed him in a cheap hotel around the corner from my flat and paid his bill one month in advance. Now he was a constant companion, though the main problem was finding him enough to do.

       
To back up my cover story I got him to drive me to various hotels (business meetings), casinos (poker games) and restaurants (can’t tell you what’s going on, Get-Up, but it’s big), and more often than not I’d leave him outside in the car while I had a quiet drink or a meal alone.

       
Once I left him waiting outside the Hilton for four hours while I slipped out the back way and wandered around the shops in Oxford Street looking for a present for David. It was important for Get-Up to think that I was wheeling and dealing, though putting on an act was a hell of a lot more tiring than the real thing.

       
Gradually I spoke to him about his past, about the work he did for Laing, the people he’d met, the places he’d been to, teasing out the information I needed like a splinter from a septic thumb, careful not to arouse his suspicions, never pressing too hard, changing tack if it looked as if I was touching a sore place.

       
The information was obviously old, he’d been in prison for seven years after all. A few of the names he mentioned had passed on or gone inside, but most were still in business, one had recently been featured in one of the more sensational tabloids under the headline ‘Drugs King In Sex Bribe Shocker’.

       
I told Get-Up that one of my major interests was dealing in drugs, particularly hard drugs, north of the border, but that I’d run into problems with a supplier up in Glasgow and was lying low in London until tempers had cooled.

       
The probing usually took place late at night in pubs or clubs after a great deal of drinking and several self-induced Technicolor yawns. I was starting to get anorexic, but Laing’s involvement in the drugs world was falling into place. Background that I couldn’t get from McKinley I managed to dig up in the
Daily Express
cuttings library.

British customs officers seize more than a hundred million pounds’ worth of drugs each year – it breaks down into something like forty-six million pounds of cannabis, forty-eight million pounds of heroin and seven million pounds of cocaine, and that’s just the tip of a mind-blowing iceberg. There are less than three hundred Customs and Excise officers and about twelve hundred policemen working on drugs and their batting average is roughly one for one – one smuggler arrested for each officer per year. And that’s with the help of CEDRIC, a £1.2 million computer based on a couple of Honeywell DPS 8/20s which is even more sophisticated than the hardware used by MI5. It’s hidden away in a nondescript building in Shoeburyness, near Southend, and it replaced the old card index system which was scrapped in the spring of 1983.

       
Its top secret data base can cross-check all information collated by the various anti-drug agencies.

       
Suppose a one-eyed midget with a wooden leg gets caught trying to drive his Morris Minor off the Channel ferry with a boot full of cannabis. At the touch of a button CEDRIC will spill the beans on how many midgets are involved in smuggling, how many have only one eye, if any are dead ringers for Long John Silver and if any are to be found sitting on a pile of cushions at the wheel of a Morris Minor. You get the picture? But CEDRIC is a victim of the truism faced by all the miracles of silicon chip technology – garbage in, garbage out. The information that comes out is only as good as the facts that are fed into it. And nowhere within CEDRIC’s memory banks was the name Laing, Ronnie, and there was no mention of a blue Rolls-Royce Corniche with a white soft top and personalized number plates. Tap in a description of a tall, willowy, middle-aged man with blond hair, deep set blue eyes, green-rimmed glasses, a wide gold band on his wedding finger, maybe include his passion for young girls, and CEDRIC might give you a handful of near misses but the one thing he wouldn’t give you is Laing, Ronnie, because Laing, Ronnie, had never been caught with so much as an aspirin in his possession, in fact Laing, Ronnie, had never been caught period.

       
He arranged to bring drugs into the country, he financed drug deals, he sold drugs on to wholesalers, but he never came within sniffing distance of anything that would raise the eyebrows of a lab assistant in a police forensic laboratory. Most of the cash he made went straight into Channel Island banks and was then laundered through Kyle’s expanding business empire, so he didn’t even have to account for suitcasefuls of fifty-pound notes in his Hampstead home. Ronnie Laing was now way past the stage where he had to finance supermarket robberies to make a quick killing.

       
The chances of the long arm of the law grabbing Laing by the silk collar were slimmer than a turkey’s of surviving Christmas. He was insulated at two levels: a courier brought the drugs in and a middle-man, either trusted or scared witless, would handle the arrangements, never ringing Laing, only speaking when spoken to. On the few occasions a deal had gone sour it was only the couriers who ended up getting caught, and they knew it was more than their lives were worth to talk.

       
Getting drugs into Britain is a lot easier than most people think. From the simple trick of using false-bottomed suitcases to swallowing condoms full of heroin, much of it simply walks through the green ‘nothing to declare’ channel with throngs of sunburnt holidaymakers.

       
The customs can’t and don’t search everybody and a professional courier at work is harder to spot than a Herpes carrier. A sniffer dog is only good for fifteen minutes before getting bored, or stoned, or both. The West German police reckon they can train a wild boar to do the job all day long, but the British depend on the services of just twenty-nine dogs, which equals about seven hours concentrated sniffing a day. Not much of a deterrent.

       
Getting the drugs over on the Channel ferries is even easier, which is why undercover drugs police officers pose as passengers, hoping that couriers will relax their guard while in the ship’s bars and restaurants. No, they don’t catch many, which is hardly surprising. If your car’s sills were packed with heroin you’re hardly likely to offer the barman a few grams in exchange for a double vodka and tonic and a packet of pork scratchings.

       
There’s always the possibility that a zealous customs officer might take it into his head to drill a hole in the sills, just on the off chance, so a better way is to dissolve the drug, especially cocaine, in warm alcohol and soak it into the carpets of the car, maybe into the upholstery and the car blanket as well for good measure. Dry them out, drive through customs and then extract the drug with more warm alcohol. Filter, evaporate off the alcohol and you’re left with pretty pure cocaine. And for the non drivers, it works just as well soaking the clothes in your suitcase.

       
Some of the more inventive car couriers have come up with a nifty variation – before driving out of the country they take out an AA five star insurance policy. After picking up the drugs in Spain or Holland or wherever and packing them away in any one of a dozen hard to find places, they nobble the motor, call in the AA and fly home. A few days later the car, and the drugs, are delivered. And what customs officer is going to search a family car on an AA Relay truck? Well, they all do now, actually, after an undercover Customs officer overheard a husband and wife courier team discussing the scam while celebrating in advance on the ferry to Calais.

       
Ultra cautious smugglers can remove themselves even further from the dirty end of the business, by shipping drugs into the country in hollowed-out wooden elephants from India, inside drums from Africa, or even by impregnating postcards and airmail letters with LSD microdots.

       
But Ronnie Laing had progressed way beyond such ruses, and when he wanted a delivery he had heroin or cocaine or cannabis or any combination of the three shipped in from the Continent and collected at any of a thousand possible landing places scattered around Britain’s 7,000 miles of coastline and driven back to London.

       
Customs and Excise have seven coastal cutters to patrol those 7,000 miles of beaches, coves and cliffs so a smuggler has more chance of winning the pools than he has of bumping into the boys in blue, and chances are that the drugs ship can outperform the cutter and its volunteer crew without breaking into a sweat.

       
Any captures are usually the result of intelligence work rather than diligent patrolling, so a professional team has few problems in getting through. And if the smugglers are unlucky enough to meet a cutter they can’t run away from, then the consignment is simply pitched overboard and collected later. Ronnie Laing was sitting pretty, or at least he was until he was hit on two fronts, from North and South America.

       
The land of the brave and the home of the free has a drugs business worth some hundred billion dollars a year, about the same as the whole Federal budget. Cocaine is now a growth industry with twelve million men and women using it regularly and 5,000 new addicts created every day. Supplies were rushed into the country to meet the ever-increasing demand but, as usual, the free market system created a surplus.

       
If it were wheat, or oil, or Coke with a big ‘C’, then it would probably have been sold off cheaply to the Russians, but they wouldn’t touch capitalist drugs with a cattle prod. So with the North American market pretty well saturated, in fact stoned out of its twelve million tiny minds, and with street prices falling, it wasn’t too long before the drugs bosses looked towards Europe, and to Britain in particular.

       
In America drugs mean Mafia, and in Britain Mafia means trouble and Ronnie Laing was gradually squeezed out. And just to prove that it’s always darkest just before it goes pitch black, the villains who actually export the drug, the South American cocaine barons, mostly Colombians, decided they would deal directly with Britain and cut out the middle-men and they make the Mafia look like disorganized boy scouts. The Mafia might issue a contract for a killing, the Colombians don’t even bother to write a memo. They just get the job done and worry about the paperwork later.

       
They’re highly organized and, with the South American’s disregard for human life other than his own, frantically vicious. Laing found himself with a smaller and smaller share of the London drugs cake and eventually he was left with the crumbs, which is about the time he met up with Kyle and decided to put his not inconsiderable fortune to a more, but only slightly more, legitimate use.

The phone call from Tony was short and to the point, the conversation of a man used to speaking on lines which are bugged. He told me where and when he wanted to meet, but gave no hint as to the why. ‘Just be there,’ he’d said. ‘And come alone.’