Bootlegged Angel

by Ripley, Mike

  They carted Axeman off strapped to a stretcher just as they did Ivy and I had a twinge of sympathy for him in case he woke up in the bed next to her.

  The three girls and Dan made a fair fist of cleaning up the pub while I counted the night’s takings. If we stayed on here, Ivy was going to have to get a bigger safe.

  Then we had a nightcap together and then another one and finally, around half-past midnight, I insisted that Dan went home and I locked the front door after him though he was still protesting that I shouldn’t have to face a night in the pub with just the three girls (‘fashun modals’ as he called them) for company.

  Unfortunately, they had decided something along the same lines amongst themselves.

  Neemoy had disappeared upstairs and returned with an armful of cushions and a pair of what looked like army-issue blankets.

  ‘Sasha and I are taking the big bed upstairs,’ she said, all businesslike. ‘Max’ll sleep it off on the sofa in the living-room.’

  ‘And I . . . ?’

  She pointed to the bench seat under one of the windows near the dart board in the corner of the bar, then she dumped the cushions and blankets into my arms.

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘I’ve been here before.’

  In fact the arrangement suited me well, not because I didn’t trust myself with the three girls and thought I should suffer a monastic penance by sleeping on a hard wooden bench, but because I had one final bit of detecting to do that night.

  While the girls were settling in upstairs, I crept into the kitchen and removed a pair of yellow rubber washing-up gloves from under the sink. I pulled them on with a thwack, wishing I’d remembered to steal some talcum powder from Ivy’s bathroom.

  Armed with my torch, I locked the back door after me, pocketed the key and disturbed the chickens one last time as I sneaked round into the car-park.

  There was only one vehicle left there, a battered Ford Mondeo which had seen better days. The keys I had taken from Axeman’s pocket when I had insisted on being the first down the cellar to examine him fitted perfectly and the engine turned first time.

  I wasn’t too worried if the girls saw or heard me. Sasha was on another planet, Max would be out of it by now and Neemoy was probably organising a midnight snack. So I hit the lights and pulled out of the car-park, turning right into the village.

  At the five-bar gate next to Hop Cottage, I left the lights on full beam as I climbed out and opened it, driving the Ford over the fake grass then getting out and closing the gate after me. Then I sat behind the wheel again, took a deep breath and drove round the corner up to the front door of Scooter’s place of business.

  A face appeared at one of the windows as I parked and turned off the headlights. The single-storey building was lit up but most of the windows had blinds down. Further down the fields I could see a vertical line of light which could only be the doors of the aircraft hangar. Someone was busy loading up the Mothership again.

  I took another deep breath, peeled off the rubber gloves, got carefully out of the Ford, leaving the keys in just in case, and walked to the main doors, pushing them open and striding in.

  I recognised the ones called Combo and Painter before it dawned on them who I was. Both held Play Station joysticks and were staring at a monitor. A radio played softly somewhere, the only sound in the main room which was much bigger than I had imagined from my previous snooping through the windows.

  Scooter was sitting at one of the PC consoles scanning what looked to be spreadsheets and did not look up. Beyond him, half the room was in darkness and I could make out the shapes of camp beds, some of them occupied with figures in sleeping bags. The place stank of stale beer, cigarette smoke and old curries.

  ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ Scooter said without looking up.

  That was twice in one night; a record, even for me.

  I pulled my hand from my pocket and flipped a plastic-coated document on to the keyboard in front of him.

  It was a Heavy Goods Vehicle licence made out in the name of one Alex Steven Hayward.

  ‘You’re gonna need another driver,’ I said.

  15

  That got his attention.

  ‘What the fuck have you done with Alex?’

  He looked at the licence, not me, but he made no move to pick it up or touch it. The other two shuffled closer, but it was so they could see what I had thrown down, it wasn’t to threaten me. Unlike the missing Axeman, they didn’t really scare me at all.

  That was one of the things I had thought about and weighed up before I had come there. In fact I had been thinking about it since I had seen them in the pub the night before, when I’d had time to look them over one by one. Scooter was too intelligent to get violent, Axeman was too strung out not to. The rest had struck me as ordinary, middle-class students veering on the wrong side of nerdy. Mel had called them ‘boffins’ but not in the white-coated mad scientist sense. She had picked up on the current playground slang of ‘boffs’ or what a previous generation would have called school swots. She’d probably heard it while she was a mouse at EuroDisney, entertaining the kiddies.

  To the majority of Scooter’s gang, I must have looked ultra cool – the guy who could take over a pub, staff it with supermodels and get rid of Axeman all in the same day and then calmly walk into the middle of their bootlegging operation. At their age I would have thought I was God.

  ‘I haven’t done anything with Axeman,’ I said, perching one buttock on the edge of Scooter’s desk, ‘except help him into an ambulance. He had an accident down the pub, getting a bit too keen on one of my barmaids.’

  ‘The tall black one . . .’ Combo said under his breath before he could stop himself, then he blushed as Scooter glared at him.

  ‘She’s unlikely to press charges,’ I said with absolute conviction, knowing that the thought had never crossed her mind. ‘But Axeman’s going to need collecting from Folkestone hospital when he comes round and sobers up. I brought his wheels back. Could be there for a few days, though. It looked like he had things broken.’

  ‘What happened exactly?’ Scooter was trying to stay cool, still not looking at me.

  ‘He took the quick way down into the pub cellar. He bounced once.’

  ‘Who pushed him?’

  ‘Probably me. He was well out of order.’

  ‘That I can believe.’ Then he looked at me and for once he didn’t bother to flick the shock of blond hair in the irritating way he had perfected. ‘I suppose you want his job,’ he said and it wasn’t a question.

  ‘You got anyone else can drive a forty-one ton, tri-axle rig?’

  If that took him by surprise, he hid it. In fact, he was scoring quite well on the cool-ometer.

  ‘Nope,’ he said calmly, shaking his head slowly as if he’d had to give it some serious thought. ‘Can’t say I have.’

  ‘Thought not,’ I said with a smile.

  Axeman had always been the odd one out; the toughest nut among them but also the weakest link. The loner not in with the student crowd socially. The one who wasn’t worried about drinking orange juice or leaving the pub early because he wasn’t on a beer run to Calais. Once I had seen the Mothership in the hop farm hangar I had guessed that must be his job, the once-a-week big delivery somewhere, and the HGV licence in his wallet had confirmed it.

  The key question, of course, was where that delivery was made. If I could find that out I could present a report to Veronica which would knock her pop socks off, prove to Amy that I wasn’t a total waste of space, get me a medal from Nick Lawrence and the Customs and Excise boys and probably earn me free beer for life from Murdo Seton.

  That’s what I would call a result.

  I should have quit whilst I was ahead.

  ‘How much do you think you know?’ Scooter asked.

  It was a fair question and I would have asked it in his place.

  ‘Bits and pieces,’ I said, wishing I had a cigarette. That would have given me the edge in the cool stakes a
nd probably made me forget how much the edge of Scooter’s desk was cutting into my buttocks.

  ‘You’re running beer through Le Shuttle, putting small vans and pick-ups on the train rather than using the old Transit van on the ferry route which everybody knows about. You do it mostly at night, so I’d guess you get a good deal on the crossing rates.’

  ‘Cuts three ways,’ said Scooter as if answering a curious child. ‘Pick-ups and small vans get charged the same as private cars, not like Transits or small trucks. Then you get a fifty per cent discount if you go after 6 p.m. Plus you can also buy your duty-free allowance going and coming back and prices on Eurotunnel are very competitive. Some things are cheaper than they are duty-paid in France.’

  ‘The papers say that duty-free is going to be abolished.’

  ‘So what?’ He shrugged his shoulders, but not enough to crease his denim shirt. ‘It’s a nice addition to our margins while it lasts.’

  ‘You seem to have it well sorted,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve tried to cover all the bases. No one load is so big that it attracts suspicion but everybody buys over the limit. If you’re stopped, you say it’s for a friend or a party or a wedding and – oh, dear, am I over the limit? So you offer to drop a few cases because you’re only a student and you can’t afford to pay the excess duty. Most times they wave you on. Most times they don’t even stop you. Fuck, it’s only a bit of beer after all. It’s not like it was drugs or tobacco. And you’re not a regular runner because they’ve never seen you before and you’ll not do it again. Or at least not until the Customs boys change shifts.’

  ‘So you have a big pool of drivers, then?’

  ‘You know how much the average student loan is these days?’

  ‘But not many students have HGV licences?’

  ‘True,’ he agreed, almost philosophically. ‘That’s why we had to bring in Axeman. It was always a risk. He wasn’t exactly stable.’

  ‘But you needed him to drive the Mothership?’

  He smirked at that.

  ‘Yeah, the Mothership. I thought that one up one night in the student union bar.’

  I might have known, but I said nothing.

  ‘It was just a question of logistics. I had lots of drivers in small vehicles bringing in relatively small quantities so the chances of them being pulled were remote. But they made their profit by doing lots of trips, three or four a day.’

  ‘And they couldn’t do that if they had to drive up to London to unload,’ I added.

  ‘I see you’ve thought it through,’ he said.

  ‘Some. London’s still the main market, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, though Manchester’s coming on strong. But you’re right. By the time a small pick-up delivered in London and got back here for another run, the numbers just didn’t work out, not to make any decent money. So I thought of the Mothership – and that’s exactly what I called it, though the original concept was too off the wall to work. I planned on having it driving up and down the M20 and my guys driving their cars up into it to unload. Up a ramp, like without stopping. Got the idea from a film.’

  ‘The Italian Job,’ I said automatically.

  ‘You’ve seen it?’ said the one called Painter with wonderful innocence.

  ‘Hasn’t everybody?’

  I despair about modern youth sometimes. Then another thought struck me.

  ‘You all use these daft nicknames, don’t you? Scooter, Painter, Chip, Dale, Axeman. That’s so you don’t know anyone’s real name and you can’t grass them.’

  ‘I didn’t know Axeman was called Alex until now,’ said Painter sadly.

  ‘You got that from Reservoir Dogs, didn’t you?’ I shook my head. ‘Jesus, how have you lot survived so long?’

  ‘We’ve got security,’ said Combo petulantly.

  Scooter was sucking his teeth, happy to let us squabble. It wasn’t a good move to give him too much thinking time.

  ‘A video camera which points one way and some fake grass to cover tyre tracks? I found you easy enough.’

  ‘But you were looking,’ said Scooter suddenly. ‘How come?’

  ‘I saw two of your boys recycling French beer bottles down the pub. You all drive pick-ups. France is twenty-two miles that way. It didn’t need Sherlock Holmes. In any case, Sherlock Holmes doesn’t need a driving job which pays cash and is tax free. And don’t forget, I saw how much cash there was in Axeman’s wallet.’

  I hoped Scooter didn’t register the ‘was’ as significant, even though it was absolutely accurate.

  ‘Three hundred,’ he said, suddenly coming to a decision. ‘Two drops, south London, tomorrow and the day after.’

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘You’ll find out when you get there. One of us’ll go with you.’

  ‘Five hundred, each drop.’

  ‘O-kay,’ he said slowly.

  Then somebody else said, ‘Time’s it?’ from the darkened end of the building and a light came on, an Anglepoise bedside lamp, but at ground level.

  ‘You’d better wake ‘em up,’ Scooter said to Combo, looking at his watch. ‘One more run tonight and we’ll have a load for our new driver.’

  ‘Scooter . . .’ Combo started, unsure of himself.

  ‘We’ve not got a lot of choice in the matter, but it’s an acceptable risk,’ said Scooter, all businesslike. Then to me: ‘You sure you can handle Axeman’s rig?’

  ‘I’d like a closer look at it, but if it’s got wheels and a full tank I can drive it.’

  ‘Then let’s do it now. The midnight shift’ll be here soon. Painter, get the new plates and meet us down at the shed.’

  He reached down and opened a drawer in the desk, taking out a rubberised torch and a bunch of keys which he flipped to me and which I managed to catch one-handed. So far, so cool.

  ‘You’ll need those, Roy. Do I call you Roy? Is that your name?’

  ‘If we’re all on code names, you can call me Angel,’ I said, feeling ridiculously pleased with myself.

  So far it was all going smoothly to plan.

  It couldn’t last.

  I was grateful for the light of Scooter’s torch once we were outside as there was no sign of a moon and rain in the air. I let him lead me down to the hop field and the hangar while Painter, with another torch, stumbled off to our left to the other building which I had thought was disused.

  ‘What goes on there?’ I asked him.

  ‘That’s where Painter makes up false plates for us, so we can use the same vehicle more than once a day.’

  I remembered the one I had touched in the car-park of the Rising Sun.

  ‘What’s he got? Some sort of heat sealer?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. He knocks them out on the word processor and then seals them with acetate. Same principle you can make place mats out of photographs, or seal maps so you can pin them on the wall. Every school’s got one these days.’

  ‘And they’re good enough to fool the video cameras?’

  ‘So far. He usually just changes the odd letter or two, so P321 OLG on one run becomes R321 DLG on the next. DLG doesn’t exist, by the way, but by the time anybody’s checked, we’re long gone.’

  Behind us I heard engines and I stumbled as I turned to look and see headlights, three sets of them, coming in our direction.

  Scooter ignored them and shone his torch on the hangar which loomed out of the darkness, focusing on the padlock on the sliding doors. I saw him reach into his shirt for a key on a chain around his neck.

  ‘What was this?’ I asked him.

  ‘A stripping shed,’ he said as he inserted the key into the padlock. ‘They used to cut the hop bines and bring them in here to string them on a moving pulley to go through stripping machines which ripped the hops off them. A conveyor belt would shake them and sift them and dump them in a truck at the other end. It’s ideal for us now all the machinery’s gone. Two big doors. We just drive in one end, load up and drive the artic out the other end. Roll on, roll off, jus
t like the Dover–Calais ferry.’

  ‘Is that where you got the idea, or was it in a movie I haven’t seen?’

  He ignored that and put his shoulder to the door and rolled it back as the first set of approaching headlights picked us out. Once the door was open, he stepped inside and clicked a switch to illuminate the interior.

  The last lot of loaders hadn’t even bothered to close the doors of the articulated trailer properly and had left the metal ramps in place ready for the next delivery. Cases of beer, mostly French bottled lager but some well-known British names too, were stacked the entire width and most of the height of the trailer. I guessed it was full to about eighty per cent of its depth of around fourteen metres and there wasn’t room left for a pick-up to drive up into it any more. I was looking at an oblong block of beer about eight feet wide, twelve feet high and forty feet long.

  I was impressed.

  ‘How much can you get in there?’

  Scooter pulled the metal ramps away and let them clang to the floor, then pulled the trailer’s doors fully open. He made a circling movement with his right hand and the Ford pick-up which was now right outside the door began to turn and reverse into the shed. Two more pick-ups bounced down the hill and waited in line, turning off their headlights.

  ‘The big brewery fleets reckon one of these will take twenty-two pallets,’ Scooter said, casually waving the reversing Ford up to the tail of the trailer. ‘But we can’t bring pallets over intact, so we buy in advance and then split them into smaller loads. It means we have to handball the cases in once we get them here, but it makes the guys feel they’ve earned their money.’

  ‘How many in a pallet?’ I said, finding myself trying to count the cases in one visual line, but quickly losing track.

  ‘Fifteen cases per layer, nine layers.’

  Two figures climbed out of the Ford, its rear lights now up against the trailer. I had seen neither before but a wild guess would have put them as first-year medical students as they already had bags under their eyes.

  ‘Who’s he?’ the driver asked Scooter.

  ‘He’s Angel,’ Scooter said deadpan. ‘He’s replacing Axeman for the last two runs.’