by Dan Kavanagh
‘I don’t know whether to hope it does or hope it doesn’t.’ Ah, Hendrick’s logic was beginning to tire at last.
‘Put it this way, Mr Hendrick, it is entirely your decision, and naturally I respect whatever you think it’s best to do. I would just ask for a little more time, though. I can see your point of view – you haven’t had anything for your money yet. On the other hand, you haven’t lost anything for your money yet. And I take it my work in the shed is satisfactory.’
‘Oh yes, quite satisfactory. In fact, Mr Duffy, if you were thinking of giving up your present employment … ’
‘That’s very kind of you. So’ (you always had to get the next line in before the client did) ‘we’ll leave it as it is for a bit, shall we?’
‘I suppose we’d better.’
As he rang off, Duffy thought, well, that’s a bit more time; but not much. And if the worst comes to the worst I could always tell him I’ve got a criminal record; that way he’d probably promote me straight over Mrs Boseley’s head.
It was funny, he reflected, as he drove to work. Some bits of it always were funny, that was what kept you going. The eager guy from the Gemini had ended up painting his insides into the Watches box; and the girl in Dude’s had been the one who’d drawn the double cream. You’d never have guessed that, said Duffy firmly to himself; you’d never have guessed that if I’d given you the options beforehand.
But in other ways, it wasn’t particularly funny, or neat, or comprehensible. As he drove to work, the jumbos were following him again. Duffy read the news to himself. ‘All 352 people …’ ‘All 113 people …’ ‘All 2,345,918 people …’ That was always how they began the news of aircrashes. Never just ‘254 people … ’ And as soon as Duffy heard that first All on the radio, he knew how the sentence was going to continue: ‘ … were killed when a DC-10 of Cockroach Airways flew straight into the side of a mountain near Lake Honky Tonky. Wreckage was strewn over a wide area. As far as is known the plane was on course and experienced no mechanical trouble … ’ Presumably they just had a tape ready and fed in the minor details that made this crash different from any other. And always they began with that All.
As the Cockroach Airways jumbos queued up for their go at crashing, Duffy thought about yesterday’s exhilaration and today’s disappointment. The exhilaration came from being carried away by a hypothesis; the disappointment from examining the facts as he knew them to be. And they were still uselessly thin.
Start at the beginning. Hendrick had some goods stolen; that we believe, don’t we? Yes, for want of any contrary evidence. McKay was crashed. No – McKay crashed, that’s all you know: he sideswiped something, or something sideswiped him, and he ran off the road and is all fucked up in hospital. Could have been accidental, could have been deliberate; just because the other vehicle didn’t stop doesn’t make it a contract job; people often don’t stop if they think they can get away with it.
Next, he got fifty quid in his locker and six calculators. To bribe him into something, to pay him off for something, to set him up for something? He couldn’t tell, and his exchange with Gleeson under the bonnet of the van had probably closed off finding out any more about that.
Next, there were two people working for Hendrick with criminal records. So – the sun still rises in the east.
Next, nothing more had been stolen since he got there. That could mean that he’d been fingered; or that McKay had been the thief; or that there hadn’t been anything particularly tempting since he’d arrived.
Next, he’d had a good look round the shed on his own, had gone through the accounts, kicked a few packing cases, snuffled about, and come up with nothing. He’d also sat outside a few houses and come up with nothing there too. Except …
Except that beyond this point it was all hypothesis, probably based on the fact that he disliked Mrs Boseley as unreservedly as she did him. And some prejudice like that always got the old hypotheses scurrying off in all directions.
Mrs Boseley kept a photograph of Mr Dalby in her office drawer; face down. Mrs Boseley went up to Dude’s with her hair loose, and stayed there an hour. Mr Dalby – he’d checked in his notebook – was one of Hendrick Freight’s regular customers. Mr Dalby popped the odd capsule of amyl nitrate before getting on the job; perhaps he had ignition trouble. So what else was new? And what did a really smart fellow conclude from this set of facts? That Mrs Boseley was having an affair with Mr Dalby, which was quite understandable: if you lived in Rayners Lane with an invalid husband and had once had a fruity career as a stewardess, wouldn’t you occasionally fancy putting your hair down and taking a trip into town? It would be worth driving all that way for that, wouldn’t it? It always seemed to be. Duffy had driven further himself. And this would explain why the photo was face down – the touch of shame, the decorum of adultery. And as for only staying an hour, well, the girl had given Duffy the lowdown on Mr Dalby’s brevity of indulgence. Besides, he had a business to run, especially at the time Mrs Boseley had called: must get out there and keep the girls hitting those bells. Duffy felt almost sorry for Mrs Boseley.
Argued this way, the hypothesis – and Duffy’s assumption that there were two strands of action at Hendrick Freight, not one – fell apart. The only thing that made him want to keep on nagging at it was his dislike for Mrs Boseley’s character and Mr Dalby’s prices. Fifty quid – no, fifty-four quid – for a hand-job, a small amount of champagne and a whisky which you could only see was there because it was coloured brown; ask for a vodka at the bar and they could give you an empty glass and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
So, what had seemed, in the exhilaration of drink and spending someone else’s money and not having his clothes laughed at and feeling like getting lucky, to be some sort of a break, now struck Duffy as little more than an extra insight into the way shits lived. Nothing more than that. If he wanted to hold on to the job – and it did keep him off the streets – he would either have to find out more, or make something happen.
Or both, perhaps. At lunchtime he rang Willett and invited himself over after work for a question-and-answer session; still just background work, but maybe with a more precise focus than before. And in the afternoon he got down to some thinking about the morning’s telephone conversation with his irritatingly logical employer. Hendrick said there hadn’t been a theft since Duffy was hired, and his tone seemed almost complaining. Well, if a client wanted a theft, who was Duffy to stand in his way?
‘Catch any stuffers this week?’ asked Duffy as they sipped coffee in the bazaar of the imperial city. Willett gave a creased smile.
‘No – couple I wouldn’t have minded having a good rummage in, though.’ He gave his old Waterguard’s grin. ‘Best thing that happened was to a mate of mine down at Gatwick. Bit of old Pakki-smuggling.’
‘That still going on?’
‘Sure – God knows why, but they still want to come. Costs them about five thousand each, too, that’s the going rate. Some of them do it on H.P. – you know, something down at the start, and then a few quid a week over twenty years or so. Twenty years when the guy they’re paying can decide to up his rate, or just turn them in if he gets bored. They must really want to come.’
‘Well, it’s a Tory paradise here, isn’t it?’
‘I’ll ignore that one, Duffy. Some of them, of course, never get here. They get as far as Rotterdam, hand over all their money, and then the little boat in the night never turns up; the decent chap who promised to help them and told them how scandalous the immigration laws were has just buggered off. There’s a lot of penniless Pakkis in Rotterdam.’ He nodded sagely, as if advising Duffy not to go off and join them.
‘Anyway, this mate of mine down in Gatwick. He has this great container of stuff to search. All jumbled up. You know, you can hire part of a container, you don’t have to have the lot, and this one had been split up among lots of firms, and there were all sorts of cases and packages and whatnot in it, and it was pissing down with rain, and he
really thought, you know, you get those nights sometimes – he thought What am I doing here? So he just bashes on this big cabinet and says, “You all right in there?” and a Pakki voice comes back, “Yes, fine, thank you very much”.’
Duffy burst out laughing, then guiltily tried to calm down as a tiny Asian cleaning-woman floated past. It was pathetic, of course, and all that; but it was fucking funny as well.
‘That’s the way it is, you see,’ went on Willett. ‘The blokes we’re dealing with are either too clever by half, or they’re so thick you feel sorry for them. And even the ones who are normally clever often turn thick when they decide to smuggle something; they’re just not up to it. Take all the Iranians we were picking up last year. Bloody smart back in their own country, doing well, nice pot of money, then along comes the old Ayatollah Whatsit. Bad news, time to leave. Only trouble is, currency restrictions: you can leave, the old man says, but two Crunchy bars each, that’s the limit. So they think, aha, well, we won’t take it out in money, let’s take it out in heroin, after all the Ayatollah doesn’t think much to that anyway, so he isn’t going to mind us taking some with us.
‘They fill up a suitcase, bung in the heroin, jump on a plane, and turn up here. And what do we see? One wealthy Iranian businessman in a lightweight suit, straight off a flight from Teheran, just a small case and sweating like a pig. He’s only just realised that if we catch him and pop him back on the next plane, it’s not going to be Oh, you are a naughty boy, it’s going to be a couple of quick paragraphs from the Koran, and then Bang bang. So the fellows with gold rings round their sleeves take a quick dekko at him, then look at each other and say, “After you, Claud; no, after you, Cecil”.’
Duffy nodded, and got down to business.
‘If I was you … No, if I was me and looking for something, where would I look?’
‘That’s a bit vague.’
‘If I thought something was coming in, but didn’t know what it was.’
‘That’s still too vague, Duffy. I mean, you’d have to use your nose, wouldn’t you? And you can only learn nose, so that wouldn’t be much good. Still, if you want to know, you start by standing there and seeing how people react to you as they go past.’
‘It’s hard to do that with freight.’
‘Ah, now he mentions it. Well, freight’s always a bugger. There’s the very occasional tip-off, and the usual amount of luck, which means not very much. And grey matter still works. Sometimes you spot something suspicious when you go round a shed.’
‘For instance?’
‘Well, say there’s something wrapped up in hessian, you might give it a gentle kick, put the toe-cap in, and see how it feels underneath. Normally you’d expect cardboard. So if you feel metal underneath, you start wondering: why wrap something in hessian when it’s already in a tin box? So you might very well want to take a gander.
‘Or you might get a line on things from the documentation. Why is someone importing four thousand cuddly toys from Ghana when you happen to know there isn’t a cuddly-toy industry in Ghana? You’re looking for things that don’t feel right. Why is someone bothering to import something when the shipping costs exceed the declared value of the goods? That sort of thing.’
‘Lots of paperwork.’
‘Well, we do have LACES. The computer.’
‘But a computer can’t tell you what to search.’
‘You’d be surprised. I mean, often that’s exactly what it does do. It sorts the stuff into channels for us – like the green and red channels for passengers. With freight it’s Channel One, scrutiny of documents; Channel Two, scrutiny of documents and examination of cargo; Channel Three, clearance within one hour.’
‘How does it decide?’
‘Well, every airline gives us a cargo manifest for every flight, saying what they’re carrying, and we feed it into LACES. We have a read-through of it at the same time – the cargo’s usually still in the air at the time, sometimes it hasn’t even left – and if we spot something we think we ought to take a look at, we key in a 97. That’s an inhibitor: tells the computer to route the cargo to Channel Two, which is then done automatically.
‘But it does a lot by itself as well. There’s a whole lot of things keyed in all the time: suspect importers, for instance, or cargo from what we call the Badlands. All new importers are picked out automatically the first couple of times, and so are any one-offs that come through. Plus what I just told you about: if the declared value of the goods being shipped is less than the shipping costs, the computer turns that up for us, and we take a look. Often that means quite innocuous things get examined, like samples of booze being sent from a factory abroad back to the home country for analysis. Still, it’s a useful check.’
‘What about random sampling?’
‘Oh, the computer does that for us too. It diverts something like one per cent through Channel Two on a purely random basis. We get a printout, an E1, telling us the reason the stuff’s been picked out. Then we take a look.’
‘Hm.’ This might have made things easier for the likes of Willett, but it didn’t seem to help Duffy much. ‘So nobody smart would use a one-off shipment for smuggling? They’d know you’d look more closely at it.’
‘They might, yes, if they knew how we worked. But then …’
‘ …?’
‘Well, it’s all bluff and double-bluff, isn’t it? I mean, sure we look at the one-offs as a matter of routine. But we also have to look at the regular stuff just because it’s regular. You have to be always on the hop. It’s like them being either very clever or very thick. Or like the way they hide stuff. To start with, they put things in the least obvious place, then for a bit in the most obvious place, then back in the least obvious place.’
‘What would you look for if you were me?’
‘Well, I don’t know. You’re still vague as vague. But if you know what you’re looking for, then you can work a bit from the origin of the goods and their destination. And it’s always a good idea to look out for something that’s being freighted unnecessarily. I mean, it’s expensive, air freight: so you should think, Why are they importing this fruit from Ghana when they can get it more cheaply from Italy, or wherever, so you have a bit of a rummage and maybe you find something. It’s like that big drugs haul they had down at London docks. There were a couple of Volkswagens coming in on a boat from Malaysia; perfectly normal, all the papers were O.K., no problems. Except one of the officers thought: Why are they importing these two rather old Beetles when the shipping costs are greater than the cost of buying similar cars over here? So they stripped them down and found them full of Chinese Number Three.’
Duffy felt the conversation was drifting in one particular direction; that was the one he’d intended, but he thought he’d better clear some ground first. He went and got them a couple more coffees.
‘Let me start at another angle. What do they kill for? What do they think about killing for?’
‘Oh – varies. Depends how nasty they are. Depends what you’ve done to them. Depends how easy it is to do it. I don’t come across it myself, but then I wouldn’t.’
‘Gold?’
‘Nnnn. Not much of that about nowadays. Most of the money stuff is all paperwork. You know, altering documents so that the goods appear to have come from one place instead of another; then you pay less import duty or whatever. That sort of thing. Gold’s really tight nowadays. Not like the Fifties – that was the Gold Rush. You’d have pilots and stewardesses with special shirts, everyone was mad and greedy; just one run, they’d say, and I can retire. Just one run. And sometimes they’d try and take a double load, and just keel over with nerves. Or heat. One chap I remember, keeled over on the tarmac at Calcutta Airport. Shirt pockets full of gold. Got seven years in Calcutta jail. Lasted a couple, then just died. Poor bugger.’
‘Porn?’
‘No. It’s not that nasty a business, from what I hear. Not that I see too much – the big shipments come in by road. It’s so heavy. We
don’t get much here except private consumption stuff: half a dozen fladge mags down the Y-fronts, that sort of thing.’
‘So, if – and it’s only if as far as I know – someone, say, arranged an accident for someone, then, unless it was personal, it might be what … drugs?’ After the meandering of the sentence Duffy pronounced the last word sharply.
‘There’s more ifs in that sentence than when I’m trying to get the wife into bed, Duffy.’
‘Well, let’s assume some ifs.’
‘O.K., what do you want to know?’
‘Where would I look?’
‘Turn it round. You’re not you, you’re them. Where would you put it?’
‘Dunno, that’s why I asked you.’
‘Well, think about it.’ Willett suddenly seemed severe, as if Duffy were one of his stumbling assistant officers who’d just let the French Connection through. ‘You tell me how you’d bring it through, and I’ll tell you an improvement on what you suggest.’ He was proposing a game, Duffy realised. He sipped his coffee and imagined himself – with extreme difficulty – on a plane descending to Heathrow. All 256 passengers … was what came into his head.
‘I’d … I’d have a special pocket sewn in my clothes.’
‘Go to Pakistan,’ said Willett dismissively. ‘They’ll sell you ready-made shoes, all built up with special compartments in the heels and soles. Buy them with or without the dope inside. Of course, we’d pick you up straight away. Had one only the other day: Pakki and his small son, teetering along, both wearing them. Walking awkwardly, but never looking at their feet. No problem.’
‘I’d dress smart and walk through the customs next to a hippie.’
‘Not bad – if you can find one on your flight. They’re not as common as they used to be. I’ll tell you a better one. You hire a couple of couriers, one smart, one a bit scruffy; actually, it doesn’t matter what they look like, but you need two. You give a small amount of stuff to one, and all the rest to the other. Then you tip off the customs about the first guy. They wouldn’t think there’d be two couriers on the same flight.’