“Where’s Bob?”
“Back in the car with Pete. They should be along in a minute, just securing the last container.”
“I’ll have to check the stock you’ve taken.”
Oh shit! I felt like I’d been punched in the guts. We walked towards the coach with its closed curtains, Carlos grimly eyeing our approach from behind the wheel. The guard stood in front of the door and beckoned for Carlos to open it. I wondered if we could make a run for it – just gun the coach at the barrier and we’d be free. The panic mounted in my throat. The door hissed open and he climbed the stairs. I followed behind.
“Forty cases, as you can see,” I said brightly, waving at the wall of Asti, trying to keep the dread out of my voice. There wasn’t a hope in hell that we’d get away with this. As soon as he dislodged a box, or got close enough to squint through the cracks, he’d see forty-two terrified Somali faces staring back at him and all hell would break loose.
“What’s that sound?” he asked.
I froze, and my heart sank. There was the unmistakable sound of someone in distress. A low, repetitive moaning and laboured breathing. Must be one of the women, overcome with relief or fear. Or in bloody labour, more like it. Fuck! Of course this was never going to work!
I wondered, wildly, whether I could persuade Carlos to lend me Wodin’s wad of cash to bribe the guard. Then I spotted another guard watching from the door of the office, and a pair of CCTV cameras mounted on posts flanking the barrier. The game was up!
“Oh ja. Das ist so gut!” said a female voice, between moans. The sound came from above my head. We all looked up slowly and fixed our eyes on the coach’s TV screen, where a voluptuous, panting black lady slowly thrust a huge, pink strap-on dildo between the legs of a gigantic-breasted, groaning blonde. The guard looked back at me in disbelief.
“Interracial Lesbian Sex Fest,” stated Carlos matter-of-factly, reading the title from a video cassette case. “Apologies. Drove a rugby team back from Tring yesterday. Must have started automatically.”
The guard’s look of disbelief turned, slowly, to absolute horror. “And what is that disgusting fucking smell, man?”
I didn’t understand what he meant for a moment – we’d become used to the stench.
“Ah, er, the toilet’s facked mate,” said Carlos. “Did a tour for some old age pensioners earlier today and a few of them got runny tummies. Completely fackin overran the chemical toilet. It’s like the fackin black hole of Calcutta down there mate. Not pretty.”
The guard turned back to me, incredulous. I wrinkled my nose and mumbled, “I’m sorry, it’s not very pleasant is it?”
“Get me off this fucking bus, man.” He descended the stairs at pace and walked round to Carlos’s window, holding up his clip-board. “Sign here, and get this fucking vehicle out the yard.”
Carlos signed and the guard raised the barrier. The engine revved to life and we drove past the guardhouse and onto the public road beyond.
We were free!
***
As Carlos’s coach descended the slip road and eased onto the quiet motorway, my heart rate slowed from panic to mere high distress.
“Where’re we taking them, Felix?” he asked.
We hadn’t really developed the next stage of the plan, given the astonishing improbability of escaping the depot. “Just pull into South Mimms Services and drop them off.”
“Are you having a fackin’ laugh mate? I ain’t doing that. Place is full of cameras and Old Bill. Even if we get them off without being spotted, they’ll have my licence plates on film and my guts for garters. Why don’t you ask them where they’re going?”
I edged my way down the aisle to the wall of Asti Spumante and pulled a couple of cases aside. “Galad!”
“Hello?” Galad’s wide eyes and toothy face suddenly popped into view.
“Where shall we drop you off then?”
Galad’s face remained blank.
“Where do you want to go?” I pressed.
“We go to… London?” he asked cautiously.
His eyes looked past me, down the aisle and through the coach’s huge windscreen to the wide, glistening road and the blackness of the farmland either side. I spotted a couple of his fellow passengers peeping through the curtains, faces illuminated by the yellow streetlights flashing by.
“For Christ’s sake, no looking!” I shouted, panic rising. “If we’re spotted we’ll be bloody murdered!”
I had visions of a pair of bored traffic policemen parked on the hard shoulder, their chewing of donuts suddenly interrupted as a coach full of blanket-wrapped black faces on a three a.m. Sunshine Tour from Harlow cruised past. I suspected it would take more than an interracial lesbian sex fest and a robust smell of faeces to discourage Her Majesty’s Constabulary from asking some very awkward questions.
Galad turned round and barked urgently at his colleagues. “Qarin ama aan dhiman!” It did the trick and the curtains were hastily pulled back into place, fearful eyes all back on me.
“Where are you going? Do you have an address?” I asked slowly.
Galad looked confused. “We work for you. You take us to work.”
“Ah. Right.” I returned to my seat.
“Looks like they’re staying at your place then, matey!” chewed Carlos as he popped in another stick of gum.
Christ, I thought. What will the neighbours say? At least we can get them all in under the cover of darkness.
I looked back at the wall of Asti Spumante. The boxes were white with a large blue crest stating ‘Consorzio Asti Spumante DOCG’, the governing body of the wine region. There was a picture of a castle and, along the bottom of the case, the words ‘Export to the United Kingdom’ in English. I gazed idly at the wording for a minute or so before turning back to the front. Strange, this was supposed to be stock destined for sale in Italy – why would it already be labelled for export?
An hour later we pulled off the motorway and travelled the few remaining miles along dark country lanes into Little Chalfont. Carlos pulled up in the car park behind our parade of shops. I had dismantled the wall of wine cases across the central aisle, and briefed Galad to disembark his fellow travellers at speed and usher them up to the apartment.
I dashed up the iron stairs ahead of the group and let myself in. A warm, herbal fug of hashish-laden air washed around me as I barrelled through the hall and into the lounge. Mercedes lay curled and dozing on a sofa. Fistule looked up from a game of PGA Tour Golf, Sega controller in hand, whisky bong smoking gently on the table in front of him.
“Where did you guys get to?”
“Fistule, listen,” I said urgently. “We’re putting up a coach-load of Somali refugees for a couple of nights. I need you to help clear the bedrooms.”
“Right.”
“Now! They are entering the house right now. I need you to get up and help.”
“Wow.”
I turned and jogged back to the front door as Galad stepped inside, warily. A long queue of Africans snaked down the stairs and into the car park, shivering under their damp, foetid blankets in the chilly winter night air.
“Go! Go! Go!” I whispered loudly, gesturing violently up the stairs to Galad.
Fistule padded up behind me. “Shit. We really are putting up a coach-load of Somali refugees.”
“Yes we are. Go up and distribute them evenly among the bedrooms. Separate the women from the men.”
The migrants tramped up the stairs. It was the first time I’d had a close look at them. Apart from looking exhausted and terrified, some had nasty cuts and bruises to their faces. All were very dark skinned and most quite tall and slim. There was one absolute giant, must have been seven foot tall, with huge shoulders and an unsettlingly piercing stare. Wouldn’t like to get in a scrap with that one, I thought.
“I see we’ve become the United Nations High Commission for Refugees,” Mercedes drawled, leaning on the lounge door-frame, a few ribbon-festooned dreadlocks hanging in front of he
r face. A couple of the migrants widened their eyes at the sight of her and the line snaking up the stairs picked up its pace.
After five minutes they were all in. I shut the door quietly and rested my forehead against it, eyes closed. Carlos had long since steered his bus out of the car park and into the night, no doubt planning a holiday to Ibiza with Wodin’s two grand. We let him keep the Asti.
What in pity’s name were we going to do with forty-two destitute, soiled Somalis? How would we feed them and wash their clothes? The main thing was to get rid of them as soon as possible, of course. Where did London’s Somalis live? In the East End I guessed. Maybe we could take them there in small batches and set them free, once they’d been cleaned up. Like a team of animal lovers rescuing stricken sea birds from an oil slick, we would wash them and release them into the wild. Yes, we were humanitarians! For a moment, I felt quite virtuous.
“They’re all in the bedrooms. Smelling a bit, to be honest,” reported Fistule as he trotted back down the stairs. “There’s already a bit of a queue for the bathroom and I need a pee,” he added unhappily.
Oh Jesus, I thought. We’ve only got one toilet. How the hell am I going to have a piss in the morning? We’ll need a rota. Fuck, I really hadn’t thought this one through at all. I jumped at the sound of a key in the front door. Wodin pushed it open and swung two bulky black canvas bags into the hall.
“There’s two more of these,” he said breathlessly, disappearing for a minute then returning even more out of breath, his arms straining under the weight of another two bags. He dropped them and closed the door behind him. We stared at the bags for a moment. They looked like the luggage of a gang of burglars.
“What are these?” I asked.
“They were in one of the containers. Our friend Galad pointed them out. They appear to be part of the consignment.”
“What’s in them?” I asked quietly. My stomach had started to knot in that familiar, unpleasant way.
“Something very interesting!” declared Wodin brightly. “I’ve only taken a quick look. Let’s get them into the lounge.”
Wodin lifted a bag in each of his broad arms and Fistule and I took one each. We filed past Mercedes into the lounge and Wodin crouched next to one and unzipped the top. He reached in and brought out a dark shape, somewhat larger than a house brick, completely sealed in a smooth, transparent plastic envelope. He placed it on the low wooden table with a dull thud.
He looked at me happily. “That, my friends, is a kilo of hashish. This bag contains twenty of them. And we have four bags.”
Numbers ran through my head. An eighth of an ounce of hash cost around ten pounds at retail price to the ordinary consumer. Thirty-five ounces in a kilo and we had eighty of them. Not far off a quarter of a million pounds. Very nice. But not really, because it wasn’t ours. And whoever owned it probably wanted it back.
“Guys. Look at this.” Fistule brought out another object wrapped loosely in a plastic zip-lock bag and placed it on the table. Instead of a dull thud, this made a sharper sound as it knocked against the wood. It wasn’t a block of hashish at all – it was flatter and had a clear right angle to it. It was, unmistakeably, a pistol. A Beretta 92, to be exact.
It felt like reality was slipping away from me, but then I had another thought. “When did you discover the bags were full of hash, Wodin?”
“I checked them out while you were fetching the coach.”
Wodin’s generosity with Carlos suddenly made perfect sense. “So you’ve brought a quarter of a million pounds’ worth of hashish and a gun home with you?”
“Two guns actually,” said Fistule, placing another bag on the table with a clunk. “And some ammo, I assume.” He stacked a number of smaller boxes next to the guns.
“And forty-two Somali refugees,” said Mercedes. “Don’t forget them.”
I had forgotten. I leapt up and dashed up the stairs. There was a queue of a dozen people waiting patiently, if awkwardly, next to the bathroom door. I poked my head around the first bedroom door and a group of eight men were huddled together sleeping, with a couple of our spare blankets between them. The other bedrooms were a similar picture. My own room contained the women, sleeping peacefully under a collection of blankets and duvets, my bed pushed on its side against the wall to make room.
Fabulous, I thought. I’ve got a house full of refugees, drugs and guns, and no bed for what was left of the night. I sloped back down the stairs and into the lounge. Wodin and Fistule had unpacked all four bags and built a pile of hashish bricks on the table. I was pleased to see there were no more firearms. And quite relived there were no rhino horns, pickled foetuses or lumps of Semtex, for that matter.
Mercedes had slit open one of the bricks with her pocket knife and sliced off a small corner of hashish, which she had heated and crumbled onto the gauze of Fistule’s water pipe. The sweet, herbal aroma of high quality cannabis permeated the room. Not an unattractive aroma at all and I felt myself relax slightly for the first time in a while.
“Looks like we’re sleeping in here then,” I said to nobody in particular. “All the bedrooms are full of destitute East Africans and there are no blankets left. Better get that fire going.”
Fistule shuffled over on his knees, tossing three logs onto the embers, while Mercedes scooped her long dreadlocks out of her face, held a lighter to the small pile of crumbled hashish and inhaled on the water pipe. The gentle bubbling coincided with a crackle as the logs burst into flame and a pop as Wodin uncorked the vintage Bollinger we’d packed so many hours earlier.
I sank onto the sofa next to Mercedes and gave a long sigh as a wave of exhaustion hit me.
Wodin held out a flute of Champagne to each of us and raised his. “To a superb piece of procurement!” he said. We clinked glasses.
“Cheers Wodin. For one night only, ok? We get them – and all that,” I gestured at the foot-high pyramid of hashish bricks and the pistols in their wrappers, “out of the house tomorrow. Throw the guns in the bloody river or something.”
Wodin nodded vigorously.
I took a deep draught of the Bollinger – by God it tasted good. I made a mental note to drive straight to Reims when this was all over and to stock up on a few cases, all negotiated with a tasty Felix Hart discount of course.
I finished the glass and Mercedes passed me the smouldering water pipe. It took just one short puff of the musky, water-cooled smoke for the sweet embrace of sleep to take hold. I lay back on the sofa and drifted off, the warmth of the fire playing on my face.
***
When I woke, all was silent in the room. I could see the faint outlines of Wodin and Fistule on two other sofas, and a muted red glow from the fireplace. I guessed it was around five in the morning. I saw that Mercedes had curled up next to me, her head in my lap. As the fug of sleep cleared and my hearing became more acute, I heard Wodin’s deep breathing and a light fizz of drizzle against the window. My thoughts turned back to our goods-yard escapade.
There was something bothering me about those containers and those stacks of wine. A little seed of concern. If it hadn’t been for the late-night Bollinger and hashish it would have nagged at me earlier. The cases were already printed, ready for export to the United Kingdom. They didn’t need re-labelling at all! And the pallets were all perfectly stacked and shrink-wrapped by a production-line robot, they hadn’t been thrown around haphazardly.
This wasn’t some dodgy night watchman unlocking the winery gate and letting migrants dash into unsecured containers under cover of darkness. It wasn’t even an organised gang intercepting containers at the docks and shoving a few cases around to make room for illicit passengers. It was the winery itself. They weren’t the unwitting victims of this racket. They were the racket.
Oh shit!
And the price I’d so cleverly negotiated? The real cargo was forty-two smuggled immigrants, a large consignment of recreational drugs and a pair of pistols. The wine was quite incidental, although no doubt it would provide a
convenient way to launder their profits.
Then the final piece of the puzzle slid into place. Of course, those containers were never intended to pass through dismal old Braintree depot! That was a mistake! They were supposed to go to the supplier’s own UK warehouse in Coventry, where the illicit cargo would have been offloaded before the wine was sent on to Gatesave. The cock-and-bull story about the need to re-label the bottles was simply an excuse to re-route the shipping containers.
Gatesave had placed the order and organised the shipment. And, with our respected name on the manifest, the containers would be considered a very low risk by Customs and Excise – a search was extremely unlikely. But Flaky Fiona had gobbled the wrong chocolate bar, gone home sick, and her replacement, not knowing the supplier’s special instructions, sent the load to Braintree.
Right now, in a rain-swept depot on the outskirts of Coventry, I was sure a number of unsmiling gentlemen with thick necks were waiting for their containers of Asti Spumante, plus a few cheeky extras, to arrive. I knew it wouldn’t take them long to find where the load was sent – just a phone call to Flaky Fiona in a few hours’ time. I prayed to the good Lord that, in her blurry-eyed morning confusion, allergy-averse Fiona might confuse her goat’s milk yoghurt for a toxic bowl of crunchy nut cornflakes.
5.3
Young Entrepreneurs Club
As the pieces of puzzle fell into place, the sky outside lightened and I felt wide awake. I rose from the sofa, gently lifting Mercedes’s sleeping head from my lap and replacing it on a cushion. My bladder was fit to burst and I padded out of the lounge and climbed the stairs. Four Somalis stood in a line in front of the closed bathroom door.
“Sorry chaps, I’m desperate and I’m going to have to cut in here. House rules.” I walked up to the door and knocked smartly. “Hurry up, there’s a queue out here.”
“He sick,” offered the man at the front of the queue.
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