by Tig Hague
One of the cops came back and opened the door of the van and I followed him into the building and into the first room on the right, a small office with a desk and computer in the centre of the room and a few chairs and shelves lining the walls. The cuffs were removed again and I sat waiting for fifteen minutes or so, fidgeting and squirming a little, stretching my neck, cracking my knuckles and opening my eyes as wide as they’d go to shake off the fatigue, dreaming of a bacon sandwich and a strong cappuccino. The door opened and in breezed a couple of cool-looking dudes, both in their mid-twenties: one with collar-length blond hair and wearing jeans, T-shirt and trainers, the other with short-cropped brown hair, collared shirt, jeans and leather jacket. They dress like I do at the weekends, I thought. They could be my mates. They smiled, invited me to sit down as they took their seats behind the desk, and the blond one, with the hint of an American accent, said: ‘Hey, how you doin’? We are here to help you out with your little problem, to find out what’s really going on and sort it out. I used to work at the US Embassy and I have spent a lot of time over in the States. My colleague also speaks good English, so you will be able to explain everything to us and we will understand.’
This is looking very promising, I thought: both lads speak good English, they’ve both smiled at me, one’s got his feet on the desk, the other is leaning up against the wall looking very chilled… I felt the tension ebbing away, my shoulders relaxing a little. A middle-aged man with greying hair and moustache, dressed a little more formally, came in and sat down on a chair along the wall by the door. He nodded to me and exchanged a few words in Russian with the other two.
The conversation began casually and they asked me dozens of general questions about my life in England. The blond was doing most of the talking and he seemed genuinely curious and interested in my life back home, about England, my family, my mates, my job, London, the pubs, my football team Arsenal… We chatted away like two like-minded guys who had fallen into easy conversation on a long train journey. Every now and then the short-haired guy tapped something into the keyboard. The questions came fast and I answered them all honestly and politely. I figured these guys must have some connection with the Embassy, or the Consulate.
After ten minutes I asked: ‘So who exactly are you guys?’
‘We’ve been asked to come down and help sort out your problem. Straighten out the facts,’ said the blond guy.
‘Great, and who sent you?’
‘The authorities involved in your case,’ he said, pinning me with a friendly grin.
‘Do you work with the diplomatic service?’
‘Yeah, kind of.’
‘Do the Embassy know about me?’
‘They sure do. We’ll take you to them later.’
The conversation continued with plenty of half-jokes, chuckles and casual banter amid the questions. We got on to the subject of my arrest at the airport and I told them the truth: I’d been to a stag party, drunk a lot of beer, smoked a bit of puff, put a piece of hash wrapped up in Rizla to smoke later into my change pocket. I’d then fallen asleep as soon as I went back to the room where I was sleeping and had completely forgotten about it when I came to pack my jeans for this business trip to Moscow. ‘It was just one of those stupid, absent-minded things and I’m really, really sorry for all the bother it seems to have caused,’ I finished.
We chatted about recreational drugs back in England and I explained that, as they probably already knew, millions of people smoked hash these days, that there was a more relaxed attitude to cannabis, and that the police no longer really bothered about people carrying hash for their own personal use and there was a policy of virtual tolerance towards it. They were more concerned with those trafficking the heavy drugs like heroin and ecstasy, I explained.
‘I used to smoke a few joints when I was at university, but nowadays it’s only when I’m at a party and somebody’s handing one round,’ I added, filling a pause in the conversation.
Drug use, it turned out, was the last subject of our conversation, which made me feel a bit uncomfortable as I was reminded that that was why we were all there in the first place. The moustachioed man walked across the room and whispered some comments to the guy on the computer, pointing to the screen from time to time. The younger guy then, ad-libbing, read out a tightly condensed summary of our conversation, ninety minutes of chat squeezed into two or three minutes. There was nothing blatantly incorrect in the plain facts that he read out: I lived in London, I worked at Garban Icap, I went to a stag party, I smoked hash with my friends sometimes, I came to Moscow on business… but somehow it didn’t sound quite the same as it had when we were chatting. All the nuance and subtlety of it had gone. It was just a list of bare facts.
‘Have I got anything wrong, Mr Hague?’ asked the crop-haired character on the computer.
‘Er… not quite… yeah… roughly. I mean, I wouldn’t have put it exactly like that myself but…’
‘Very good, then we’ll print it off.’
The blond one left the room and came back a couple of minutes later with two pieces of typescript in Russian. ‘This is a copy of the summary we just read out to you,’ he smiled. ‘We need you to sign this before we can go any further. Please…’
Standing by the desk he beckoned me forward with the pen.
‘No problem… fine,’ I said, all relaxed. There was a silence as I leant towards the document on the desk and I tried to fill it with a joke. ‘I’m probably signing my own death certificate here!’ We all chuckled, apart from the grey-haired man with the moustache and the policeman on the door who didn’t understand. I signed the document, and the moustachioed man put it into his briefcase.
3
We returned to the minibus and the terrible Moscow traffic but I had no idea where they were planning to take me. Airport? Police station? Courtroom? British Embassy? Back to my cell? We drove for over an hour and the mounting uncertainty started to fray my nerves once again. It was almost forty-eight hours since I’d eaten any food and I was feeling light-headed and nauseous as I looked out of the window at the drab, grey streets of Moscow. I leant forward towards the two silent cops in the front, holding myself steady by pressing my cuffed hands against the bench seat in front.
‘Excusy… spasiba… Excuse me… Where we go?… Please… We go Embassy?… Angliski Embassy?…’
But they carried on looking straight ahead, saying nothing. They had no English, I had no Russian and I guess they weren’t going to try to explain what was happening with hand gestures. The silence said: you’ll find out soon enough.
We entered a large tree-lined square, full of smart town houses made from attractive grey stone, not regulation concrete like the rest of Moscow. It looked like a posh London square, the kind you find in Chelsea or Knightsbridge. As the minibus pulled over I saw half a dozen people standing in a small group about twenty yards away, all of them looking towards us. There were five men, dressed in suits and ties, and a young girl with long brown hair, smartly turned out in a dark twinset. They were all wearing sunglasses except for a tall guy with silver hair who had little round Gandhi glasses. It was like a cast of extras from Reservoir Dogs.
The cop opened the door for me and as I stepped out on to the pavement, the posse started walking towards me. The tall guy was smiling at me sympathetically as he strode out of the group to greet me. I went to shake hands, forgetting I was cuffed, and looked away, embarrassed.
‘Hi, I’m Peter Smith from the British Embassy,’ he said with a mild northern accent. The sound of an English voice was reassuring. ‘Your family contacted us and told us what had happened. We heard you had a spot of bother at the airport. We’ll be coming to the court hearing with you,’ he added, pointing to the building behind.
Courtroom! I closed my eyes and exhaled loudly, thinking, well, that’s my career in the City gone.
‘How are you bearing up?’ asked Smith, sensing my dejection.
‘Not brilliant, to be honest.’
; Smith introduced the other four, who were all lawyers. Four lawyers! The older, skinny-looking guy with a tash and glasses was my Russian lawyer. He had the reassuringly English name of Alfred Piskin. I didn’t catch the names of the younger two guys, but I got that they were Russians working for one of the world’s biggest law firms. The English girl, Julia, was a trainee at the firm and was going to translate for me in court. As he introduced each of them I felt my spirits rising, thinking: I’m walking right out of here. The Reservoir Dogs boys are taking charge. Mum, Dad, Luce and John at work had clearly been reacting quickly to blow this daft episode out of the water before the system had a chance to take it any further.
‘Wow, that’s quite a team we’ve got,’ I smiled. ‘I can’t quite believe that such a tiny piece of pot has caused such a palaver. Mad, isn’t it?’
As one, we all moved up on to the steps of the courtroom, and Smith started asking me how the police had been treating me, whether I’d been beaten or abused and so on. I was in a daze of excitement and nerves and I wasn’t concentrating. All I could think about was getting out of the courtroom, into a hotel, and speaking to Luce and Mum and Dad and then getting the first fucking flight out of there. I just wanted to be home. I found myself leading the way up the steps, eager to get the hearing over and done with.
The words rushed from my mouth in a torrent as I told them about my arrest. I was aware that I wasn’t making much sense, but they were making all the right-sounding noises: ‘Is that right… really?… what a shock… well, don’t worry… be calm…’ As we headed down the wood-panelled corridor in the courtroom I saw the two young casual lads from the office, who had been so laid-back and friendly earlier, chatting in hushed tones. I tried to make eye contact with them as we brushed past but they didn’t look my way. In the smart, sober surroundings of the courthouse a wave of embarrassment spread over me as I realized how filthy and haggard I must look. Four days of thick, dark stubble covered my face and my eyes were puffy and bloodshot from crying and sleeplessness. I was going to court on a drugs charge looking like a bloody junkie!
‘We’ll see you after the hearing,’ said Smith as he and the lawyers – my legal team! – disappeared through a set of wooden doors. My hands were still cuffed in front of me as the policeman took me by the upper arm and led me round the corner and through a side door. I shivered as I stood in the dock. It felt unreal. I started to sway a little as the panic spread over me and I pressed my legs against the wooden railing of the dock to steady myself. The room was roughly fifty feet square and the walls were panelled with wood. The dock was at the side of the room and, almost opposite me, in the corner slightly to my left, was the judge’s bench, which looked down on the rows of tables and benches in front. My legal team took their seats at the long desk nearest to me. At the table beyond them, the two friendly young dudes took theirs with two older, smarter guys, one of them the silent guy with the tash from the meeting earlier. I realized with a jolt that the ‘friendly’ guys were not that friendly after all. They had to be cops, or prosecutors, or investigators, working on behalf of the state. Shit, shit, shit! What the hell did I tell them?
Julia the translator smiled at me as she sat down right in front of me on the other side of the dock. The court fell silent as a handful of officials entered the room. The usher invited everyone to stand for the judge and I was taken aback to see a woman in her mid-forties emerge from a door on the opposite wall. I’d never seen a real judge, let alone a Russian one, but for some reason I’d been expecting an elderly man with white hair and half-moon glasses, not a slim, stylish woman with short brown hair that she’d fashioned into neat crescents curling down and then back up her cheeks, like a pair of microphones. She looked like a character from Blake’s Seven or Star Trek, but her being a woman made me feel confident for some reason.
Then it began, with a flurry of exchanges in Russian. Julia, trying to keep pace, whispered rushed snippets of translation to me through the wooden railings. I leant forward to hear what she was saying but I caught only every other word or so, or whole phrases of legalese that meant sod all to me. It all sounded very technical and procedural. Charges were solemnly read out with the names and numbers and clauses of acts and codes. The lawyers exchanged words with the judge in hushed, earnest tones. The translator mentioned the word ‘smuggling’ and I was seized with alarm. Smuggling! I’m not a smuggler! A fucking drugs mule! I’m a derivatives broker in the City. I wanted to butt in and say: ‘Hey! Let’s just slow right down and see it for what it is, can we? This is getting way, way out of hand! Smuggling – you’re kidding me…’
But I might as well not have been in the room, because no one was even looking at me, let alone including me in the exchanges. There must have been a dozen people at the hearing, and a sensation of dread ran straight through me as the realization struck me that with so many of them involved, they weren’t just going to let me walk out of here with a slapped wrist. They were going to make me come back for a fuller hearing of some sort. You didn’t assemble that many professionals from all over the city, make them sit in a room for half an hour or however long, and then send them all home without doing something to justify them all being there in the first place. They were all having to give the impression that the matter in hand was, in fact, a matter of the very greatest seriousness. I’d been to enough business meetings to know that when you assemble a room full of people, it can only come to an end once there is satisfaction that something has been done, or has been arranged to be done. That’s what we all get paid for: playing at being serious, diligent professionals.
‘Hague was smuggling 28.9 grams of hashish…’ the translator continued. 28.9 grams! Adrenaline exploded through my body like an electric shock and I found myself getting to my feet. That’s an ounce! An ounce! There wasn’t so much as a twentieth of an ounce. An ounce is 100 quids’ worth of gear. You can’t even get an ounce into the change pocket of a pair of trousers…
‘But that’s not true!’ I shouted. ‘It’s not true! There was nothing like an ounce. That’s a bloody lie!’ I went to throw my hands out to the side as if to say: ‘Come on! This is ridiculous!’ but again I forgot my cuffs were on and I lost my balance a little as my arms pulled me forward. Everyone in the room was staring at me now. The judge scowled at me and motioned for me to sit down and at the same time someone in the room let out a loud ‘Shhhh!’
‘Say something, will you?’ I whispered at the three lawyers, whose heads were all turned in my direction. One of the law firm guys tilted his head and patted the air over the table, telling me to calm down and implying that everything was going to be fine if I just sat the fuck down and listened.
I was breathing heavily and fast and I felt I was going to start crying like a baby again as a prosecution lawyer started reading out the summary of my conversation with the two young guys earlier that morning. The translator whispered that it was my ‘statement to the police’ – and the statement certainly wasn’t coming across too well in translation. It was all about drugs. Drugs. Drugs. Drugs. Me and drugs. About me smoking drugs at home with friends. About me having smoked drugs since I was at university. About me not thinking drugs were wrong. About me smuggling drugs into Moscow… As the young girl translated through the railings at a rate of knots, it was clear that what the judge and the court were hearing was a heavily edited and abridged version of what I’d said to the blond guy, a grim mixture of half-truths, shorn of all context and wider detail and with all mitigating facts removed. From where I was sitting, it sounded like this: Tig Hague admits he smokes hashish; he ‘smuggled’ a large amount of it into Russia; he doesn’t think smoking cannabis is a big deal; he has smoked it for over ten years; Tig Hague is one big mother-fucking dope smoker…
I tried again to get the attention of my lawyers, to get them to say or do something, to challenge what was being said, but they sat there with long faces, just listening. I began to panic. I was standing up and talking directly to the judge. I heard myself say:
‘Excuse me, excuse me, your honour – please listen to me, it was just a silly mistake. I’m not a habitual drug user. I have the odd toke on a joint occasionally but that’s it. So does half of Britain. In the UK this wouldn’t even be treated as a misdemeanour, let alone a crime. It’s not that serious. Please. I wouldn’t be arrested for such a tiny amount. The policeman would just take it off me and that would be the end of the matter. I didn’t have an ounce, it was enough for one joint, barely even that. It wouldn’t even get my dog stoned…’
It was running away from me now. I’d lost it. I was rambling, barely aware of what I was saying. It was just an incoherent appeal for clemency, for common sense and decency to prevail. The judge cut off the translator relaying my garbled plea, with the question: ‘So you can buy “hashish” in shops in England, can you?’
‘Well, no,’ I stammered. ‘But such a small amount…’
She turned to Pete Smith and asked him the same question.
‘Er, no. No, you can’t,’ he replied, looking a little uncomfortable.
‘Fucking cheers, Pete,’ I muttered.
One of my lawyers – the older one called Piskin – got to his feet. Finally! And he looked the part too, with his grey hair, round wire-rimmed glasses and serious face. My yo-yoing hopes rose again. He’d addressed the judge for half a minute or so when the translator whispered through the railings: ‘He’s putting in a bail application for you…’