by Ripley, Mike
‘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 o
n 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.
7
‘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?’
‘What are they doing here?’
‘We didn’t even know they were here until a couple of months ago when the Social Security people did a swoop. There are four or five extended families, a coupla hundred of them, all living in the same street or bedsits within sight of each other. Only about three of them speak English. You going to eat that cod?’
‘Help yourself.’ I offered him my paper parcel and waved the chips away as well. ‘What brought them?’
‘What brings anybody to a port? Boats or contraband. Europe has stuff we want but can’t have or can’t afford. Beer from France, drugs from Holland, ciggies from Belgium or Spain. How does it get here? On a boat through a port. Just needs somebody to bring it in. Every lowlife on the Continent knows they can make a fast buck on the Channel run. They come, they sign on at the Benefits Agency, they work the beer runs for a month, they go.’
I wiped my fingers on a tissue, Lawrence used the bottom corner of his storm coat and continued to eat chips.
‘How do they manage if only three of them speak English?’
‘The kids pick it up first, usually from the television or films. It’s the kids who take dad down to the signing-on office –’
‘No, I meant how do they sell the beer and the tobacco?’
Lawrence shrugged.
‘Not round here, that’s for sure. Oh sure, they’ll sell you the odd carton of fags or a coupla cases of lager round the back door like you saw, but the bulk quantities end up in London or up north, Manchester, Sheffield, Huddersfield, places like that. The West Midlands police did a road check on the motorway just before Christmas and pulled enough smuggled booze to fill two warehouses in Coventry. They called off the operation after three days because they’d run out of storage space.’
‘Were your Czechs involved?’
‘They’re not my Czechs. And no, they weren’t. They rarely leave Dover.’
‘So there’s a middle man somewhere, buying the stuff off the beer-runners and distributing it.’
‘Seems to be. It’s the best way if you think about it. Let somebody else run the risk of crossing the Channel and getting clocked. If our boys don’t spot them, we at least get their vehicles on closed-circuit TV and the brewers have their own people on the other side, in Calais, logging the overloaded vans, spotting the frequent flyers. That’s what we call the guys who do four or five crossings a day, usually with a different vehicle every trip.’
‘Then there must be a base or a distribution centre somewhere nearby,’ I reasoned. ‘You can’t get up to Sheffield and back four or five times a day.’
‘Exactly.’ He scrunched up his fish and chip papers and for a moment I thought he was considering throwing them out to sea.
‘But you haven’t found it?’
‘Nope.’
‘Are you looking for it?’
‘Nope.’
‘Other priorities?’
‘Yep.’
Nick Lawrence didn’t have much more he could – or would – tell me, so he walked me back to Amy’s car, dumping his chip paper in a litter bin on the way. A lone seagull landed on the rim of the bin, sniffed once then flew off. Lawrence hadn’t left any pickings.
I gave him the cartons of cigarettes I had bought with his money and he stuck them under one arm, shook my hand and said, ‘Good luck with – whatever’ and he wandered off along the sea front.
I estimated that I still had several hours to kill before anything interesting happened at the Rising Sun, so I decided to head north out of Dover on the A2 and then swing down into Whit-comb from the other side of the Downs. As you do that, you drive down Marine Parade, heading straight for the cavernous entrance to the Ferry Terminal at the Eastern Docks. At night, lit up, it really can look like the gateway to hell or at least the overspill car-park for hell if they’ve got a busy night on.
At the last minute, though, you realise there is a roundabout in the road and by following round to the right you are suddenly on the Jubilee Way and the A2 itself and you are, literally, up and away as the road goes up on stilts and sweeps around the cliff to bring you out on the other side of Dover Castle. It is a spectacular piece of road and gives you great views of the harbour if you are coming down it into the port. If you are leaving the town, well then you get a different angle on the castle and a cheap laugh at the expense of the foreign tourist as by the time they see the first sign saying ‘Remember to Drive on the Left’ they have already travelled nearly a mile and are well confused.
I had driven this way before and it was a quiet time of the afternoon with little traffic, not even a confused Belgian to watch out for. That was probably why I noticed the two figures hunched in brightly coloured rainproof ponchos sitting in an otherwise deserted picnic area to the right of the road, on the edge of those famous White Cliffs. They were obviously watching for something, perched on camp stools with what I guessed were binoculars on tripods in front of them. I didn’t peg them for birdwatchers as not only was there no sign of a bluebird, there wasn’t even a seagull in sight. And anyway, their binoculars were pointing downwards into the Ferry Terminal, not up into the sky.
Just for the sheer devilment of it, I pulled off the main road and followed the signs which said ‘Picnic site’, parking the BMW in a crunch of gravel about twenty feet behind the pair of them. They didn’t seem to have a vehicle anywhere in sight but they had several bags and two metal suitcases, the sort photographers carry their cameras in. They didn’t seem worried that a car had parked close to them when it had an entire empty car-park to choose from, and neither of them even turned to look in my direction. Or at least not until I had got out of the car and zipped up my jacket against the wind and walked up behind them and said:
‘Hi there. On the look-out for beer-runners?’
The figure on the right, dressed in a red waterproof with matching sou’wester, turned her head and looked up at me.
‘I beg your pardon? Can we help you?’ she said in an accent which would have cut glass, at range, in any of the Home Counties.
; Her partner, in a green plastic poncho and hat, didn’t move from her bent position. Her eyes glued to a pair of tripod-mounted binoculars which could have graced the conning tower of a U-boat, she said:
‘Is he from the National Farmers Union, Daphne?’
‘Are you?’ asked Red Hat or Daphne as it seemed she was called.
The question had thrown me, I admit, but not as much as what I was seeing now I was up close if not personal.
The one called Daphne had a folded tartan rug at her feet. Laid out on it in the way a surgeon lays out his scalpels and clamps, were a Nikon with the longest telephoto lens I had ever seen, a short wave radio which looked suspiciously like police issue and a digital camera of the sort which doesn’t come cheap (£1400) even when fenced (£900). In her right hand she held a mobile phone with a wire running up the sleeve of her waterproof to a neck mike and then an ear-piece, a state-of-the-art hands-free version. Her thumb was poised over the Send button. I guessed she had an armed response team on speed dial.
‘Er . . . no . . . I’m not from anybody,’ I said. ‘I was just curious when I saw you spy . . . er . . . watching the ferries down there. I’m interested in beer-runners, you see. Smugglers, boozecruisers, that sort of thing.’
Daphne smiled at me, but then I think she smiled at everyone and that made it just that little bit more difficult to lie to her face but I thought she would go along with the story that I was a prize-winning investigative journalist for one of the respectable papers.
‘I hope he’s not a journalist,’ said Green Hat, still using the binoculars like she was tracking a convoy.
‘Of course I’m not,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m working for a local brewery doing a survey of smuggled beer. Seton’s Brewery at Seagrave, you may have heard of them.’