Bible John's Secret Daughter

by David Leslie

  He would make a crucial, disastrous mistake. Mason spilled the beans. It may have been that he couldn’t resist narrating the full story. Whatever his motive, he would have been in severe trouble with his fellow conspirators had they known then what he had done. By the time they found out, it was too late. By the tone and relentlessness of her demands to know what he was doing with a bus, he knew it would be hopeless to try to end her enquiries by simply relating that cash carried to Spain by couples like them, and families, was to buy hash. She was insistent that he tell her what part the bus played. And so he told her how he had bought for the gang first one bus and then a larger replacement. This second had had the seating on either side of the aisle raised in order to create two spaces running the length of the bus in which drugs were concealed. Side panels were lifted out to allow access and then screwed back into place for the journey back to Scotland. Youngsters were provided with free holidays in the sunshine, driven to their destinations and, after a week or ten days, brought home unaware that under their seats were secreted the drugs.

  ‘But don’t worry,’ he told her, when he sensed she was about to make a protest at this evident use of children, ‘it’s only hash.’

  To his credit, at no time did he mention anyone by name, simply referring to the others as ‘them’, and when she demanded to know who else was involved he told her only to forget it. ‘Forget everything I’ve told you. I don’t want to hear about the bus again,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s Balmer?’ she insisted. ‘Is this the guy whose name you gave me for a catalogue?’

  ‘Same one, he’s just a friend and he has nothing to do with the buses.’

  ‘Well, tell him it’s about time he bought something,’ she retorted.

  Thinking, a while later, about what she had been told, she recalled hearing one of her catalogue customers talking of a benefactor who was paying for young footballers and kids from deprived families in Glasgow to have holidays overseas for free. ‘Benji’ Bennett was the coach driver, the woman had said, and that he was brilliant with the youngsters. When Hannah had asked about the millionaire who was footing the bill – she had been told it was a Mr Colin O’Sullivan, an Irishman with some sort of Glasgow connection but she did not know more than that – she had been told: ‘He’s a fine man and these are lovely people to give up so much time and money to help the children.’ Hannah also remembered seeing a bus with a BMH logo parked in Clova Street. She wondered briefly if the initials stood for ‘Balmer Mason Hannah’, or maybe ‘Bennett Mason Healy’. She would never know.

  Hannah was not of a nature to be scared by what she had learned. Events that would cause fear in others simply made her curious. But she was hurt to think the man with whom she had been so intimate had kept so much from her. She saw this as a sign he could not trust her. She also realised he had overstated his part in the business: for something that was clearly so huge, his modest lifestyle suggested that far from being a leader he was but a bit player. The attempt by him to pull the wool over her eyes pained her as well. What other secrets, she wondered, was he keeping?

  He had lied, humbled her and, she believed, been unfaithful: a recipe for separation. Throughout the summer, her anger simmered. The pair now rowed frequently, even over the most minor matters. In mid-September, he suggested another trip to Malaga. As soon as he mentioned he would book it through Square Deal Holidays, she knew this was no attempt at a romantic conciliation but only one more – the seventh – money-smuggling expedition. All the previous trips had been through Square Deal. She thought to herself how she had been used on previous trips and debated letting Mason down at the last minute by announcing at Glasgow Airport that she had changed her mind and leaving with the £70,000 cash in her bags. But she was certain John Healy was someone connected to the smugglers and while she cared not a jot about letting Mason down, she was too besotted to do likewise to Healy. And so she went.

  At their Benalmádena hotel, she made no bones about what she intended doing during the break – and that was simply whatever she decided she wanted to do. So each morning Mason would be left behind while she sauntered off in the direction of the shops. As the end of the week neared, she could no longer prevent herself doing something she had determined not to do: look up James. And so she called in at the little bar where he had first introduced himself. He was not there and when she asked a pleasant young man if he might be popping in, he looked surprised.

  ‘You know James?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, we’re old friends,’ she said.

  ‘You know him in Scotland?’

  ‘No, I met him here a couple of years ago.’

  ‘Ah, that is it. He is no longer here. He is back in Scotland.’

  ‘On holiday?’

  ‘Oh no, señora. He sold his bars to go back there.’

  ‘He has made a lot of money and does not need to work?’

  ‘No, no, his wife in Scotland made him do it.’

  ‘His wife?’

  ‘Yes, he has been married many years. When he was here, his wife was in Scotland. She used to come here sometimes with the children but told him he had to come home. So he sold up.’

  She thanked him and left, knowing she had once more been taken for a ride, in more than one sense. ‘You bastard,’ she murmured to herself, as she headed towards the beach. ‘Bastard, bastard, bastard.’

  It was in the first hours of October that she and Mason returned to Clova Street, but the days of their affair were numbered. When she told him she was leaving, he neither asked why nor made any attempt to stop her. She packed her little car and headed back to Bellshill, all feeling for him gone.

  She had learned the truth about his meetings with Daisy, the ultimate slap in the face. When she had challenged him about this duplicity, he had replied simply: ‘Well, I like a drink; you don’t and she does. That’s all there is to it. We’re just drinking buddies, nothing more.’

  Depressed on the drive to Bellshill, her morale at rock bottom, she recalled his insults and complacency. ‘I took on a lot when I set up home with him,’ she would later tell her good friend, ‘but I didn’t expect it to end in such unpleasantness. Lots of couples lose their feelings for one another but hang on, thinking the good days might come back. They don’t go out of their way to be offensive. Maybe towards the end he saw me as a negative influence, but he would come out with things like “You don’t know what you’re talking about” in front of others, or if I’d made an effort to look presentable “You look awful.” In the end, I couldn’t stand him.’

  She settled down to life on her own once more. Christmas 1996 passed and then came the anniversary of Isobel’s birth. The ‘baby’ would now be 27, she mused, maybe with a family of her own.

  She was still knocking at doors, showing the latest catalogues, but was struggling to make ends meet. Then one day in mid-February, she answered a knock at her door to see a familiar face smiling down at her. ‘Hello, Hannah,’ said her caller. ‘Can I come in? I have a little job I wonder if you might be interested in doing for me.’

  Late on 29 March, Hannah and a woman friend set off in darkness from Glasgow in an unfamiliar vehicle, a Land Rover. They drove south, arriving at the Dover ferry terminal in time to take the quarter to six morning sailing to Calais. On board, they settled down to breakfast, studied a map and napped. At Calais, they drove carefully down the ramp leading to dry land and disappeared.

  Their journey had not gone unnoticed. For months, the police – aware that hash was flooding into Scotland but baffled as to the source – had been studying the movements, telephone calls and meetings of a number of prime suspects, among them Tam McGraw, John Healy and the likeable Irishman Manny McDonnell.

  Surveillance reports noted a meeting between Healy and Hannah, but the police were baffled by this unlikely combination. Their efforts were concentrated on him and it was as a result of this that they saw the Land Rover and subsequently spotted it motoring south with the women inside. It was watched off the ferry
at Calais, though there was no need for it to be followed. Telephone taps had indicated its destination to be Torremolinos, another resort just along the coast from Malaga. Had it been detained, a search would have yielded a fortune in cash, money to buy another consignment of hash. But it was not. It was allowed to proceed freely, and with the help of Spanish police the Land Rover was tracked on 1 April to the Scirocco Hotel, where the women were seen with two men, later discovered to be Glaswegians Robert Gillon and Donald Mathieson.

  Two days later, the Land Rover driven by Hannah and her friend set off back to Scotland. When it reached Dover, it was stopped by Customs officers and police, who were convinced it was packed with drugs. The women were arrested, but a search produced nothing: no drugs at least, just some personal cash.

  Suspicious that the authorities might be wise to what was going on in Spain, the smugglers had decided to use the Land Rover as a decoy, knowing that there was every chance it would be seized and searched, and confident that the forces of law and order would concentrate on it, thus allowing the drugs to be hidden away until they were to be carted back to the UK.

  Working out what happened while the Land Rover was being dismantled in the search for contraband requires little imagination. The women were taken to interrogation cells and grilled, every technique, ruse and dirty trick available to the interrogators being used to scare them witless. And as the examiners knew it would, it paid off.

  The friend genuinely knew nothing, a fact that quickly became apparent, but Hannah had been seen with Healy and that almost certainly meant she was a party to secrets. Just how much she told is open to speculation, but two days later Gillon, Mathieson and Liverpudlian Keith Barry were arrested. A helicopter dropped armed Spanish police into the grounds of a luxury villa used by the trio in Torreblanca and 470 kilos of hash, with a street value of nearly £1 million, was recovered. Chief Inspector Ignacio Bulanyos – known as ‘El Latigo’ (The Scourge) because he was such a thorn in the side of drugs smugglers – admitted he had been told that Gillon and Mathieson would be using two hired cars to take hash to the villa in hessian sacks.

  ‘They seemed surprised to see us,’ he told reporters asking questions about the arrests. ‘We acted on very specific information and were lying in wait.’

  When, weeks later, the men – who would be given three-year jail sentences – were visited in their prison cells by detectives from Scotland, they said nothing. But there was a feeling among them that the police already knew too much. From the day Hannah was questioned, the surveillance in Glasgow and elsewhere of those suspected of being the smugglers’ ringleaders was intensified.

  Graeme Mason is in no doubt as to what happened. ‘The friend probably knew nothing, but the feeling was that Hannah talked to save herself. From then on, things began to go wrong.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  SOWING SEEDS

  Hannah drove back to Glasgow in the Land Rover and then to her home in Bellshill. The ordeal with Customs and police interrogators at Dover had left her frightened. She could not foresee it but never again would she breathe air not tainted with fear. The police in Glasgow would now step up their surveillance on prime targets believed to be linked to drugs smuggling to a remarkable degree. They bugged hotel rooms when the gang of which Mason had boasted to be the leader went for a weekend break and even put a tiny camera in a street light outside the McGraw home in Mount Vernon, the suburb where Hannah’s elder sister Isobel had perished over 30 years earlier.

  When he went out for a drink in the evening, Mason would be asked, ‘Where’s Hannah?’ He replied that they had split up, unaware of the hate his treatment had planted within her. As she tried to gather together the threads that her been her life, desperate to weave them into something at least resembling normality, cracks were meanwhile appearing in the smuggling set-up.

  Men who had been paid more money than they could have dreamed of wanted even more. The wise saved or let their womenfolk invest the proceeds. But not all were prudent. Many spent and wasted, often buying a brand new car only to change it a month later for a similar model in a different colour. One would later confess he had blown more than £200,000 on cocaine, his ability to afford the drug being, he reckoned, the worst thing that had ever happened to him. One or two decided to break away on their own, running their own little smuggling sidelines, none of which worked out but they all succeeded in bringing an even greater degree of police attention.

  The bus runs continued, even though the gang suspected it was under surveillance. Strangers who were all too obviously policemen began appearing in the hotels frequented by the traffickers in Benalmádena, Fuengirola and then Torremolinos. Even petty Spanish criminals in Benidorm, the resort on the northern Costa Blanca, were making jokes about the policemen with strange accents who were in town. The outcome was inevitable.

  One evening in September 1997, as she sat at home alone in Bellshill watching a television newscast, Hannah heard the presenter announce that a bus had been stopped near Uddingston on the southern outskirts of Glasgow and a fortune in hash found in it. Over the next few days, she read and heard of a growing number of arrests. Most of the names meant nothing, but others did, including those of Benji Bennett, who was driving the Mercedes when police surrounded it and forced it to a stop, and John Wood, whom she thought she remembered meeting once at the Thornlie Arms.

  Mention of Benji made her heart race. She knew it would only be a matter of time before Graeme Mason was in the net. Then it would be her turn. She wondered if John Healy might escape, but he too was bagged, and then so was Tam McGraw. She had never met the Licensee but knew, from remarks made in the Thornlie Arms, that he placed huge dependence and trust in his wife Margaret, a shrewd woman and fiercely protective of her husband. What, she pondered, was the fate of Balmer? No doubt his turn would come to be questioned. And what lay in store for her? She would not have long to wait.

  There was an inevitability about the arrival one day of Strathclyde Police at her home because they already knew about the Land Rover trip. In a tone not of invitation but of threat, the officers told her they would like her to come to a police station to have a ‘chat’. It would be helpful if she would come willingly, but if not, then they would haul her along anyway. It was up to her. Alone and scared, she realised there was no choice. Climbing into the Corsa, her heart beating, pale and feeling sick, she followed the two detectives to the police station at nearby Coatbridge.

  Sitting in an interview room, a policewoman discreetly in the corner, she listened while the detectives told her how much they knew rather than, at that stage, asking her to talk. They were able to give dates when she and Mason had flown to Spain and the names of hotels in which they had stayed. What the men in shirtsleeves, seated opposite so composed and confident, wanted to know was what it was all about. When she hesitated, a voice rasped the reality of her position.

  ‘Listen, Hannah. This isn’t going to go away, nor are we. How you became mixed up in this we don’t know, but mixed in it up to the neck we know you are. We have files a metre thick and your name features in them throughout. We are talking about millions and millions of pounds’ worth of drugs being smuggled into Scotland. You don’t have a family of your own, but you will still appreciate what those drugs can do, especially to kids. It is your decision whether or not you want to help us. If you do, and we find you are telling the truth, then you’ll discover we can be very good friends to you. We’re not going to make promises, but we’ll discuss your situation with the Procurator Fiscal and it’s very likely he will take the view that having your collaboration and help as a prosecution witness will be infinitely more useful than having you charged.

  ‘On the other hand, if you decide you are going to bluff this out and hinder us, then we guarantee you here and now that firstly you won’t be returning home but will be sleeping in Cornton Vale women’s prison tonight, and second when this comes to court we’ll make sure you get nothing less than three years’ imprisonment. And that’s a
minimum. Given what we know already, you are more likely looking at five years.’

  The police assured her that they had the entire gang in the bag. This was not true – others were yet to be arrested and the police case was far from complete or conclusive – but she was not to know that. Their words made her feel isolated. She thought of John Healy and wondered if he was alone in a prison cell. Hannah wanted desperately to be able to pick up a telephone, call him and ask what he wanted her to say and do. But, of course, she was on her own. The decisions that would come within the next few seconds were hers alone.

  The interrogators were not to know it, but the tears that followed were not of fear but because they had forced her, by mentioning family, to think about her daughter. True, it had only been hash, but had Isobel followed the same path as so many youngsters into drug dependency, her arms and thighs a mess of bloody holes where the needles had gone in, her teeth rotting, her hair falling out, her speech incomprehensible? Could she have helped her on this road to destruction? No, she knew the answer to that. It was Graeme Mason who was responsible, Graeme Mason who had boasted of being the mastermind, Graeme Mason who had dragged her into this, Graeme Mason who had repaid her loyalty with humiliation and scorn. The sound of the two words that formed his name was enough to make up her mind. ‘What is it you want to know?’ she asked.

  What followed was the ruthless extermination of her ex-lover. Mason’s culpability extended page after page of a witness statement. And just as she painted venom over his canvas, so she lied and gambled with her own freedom by trying to draw a picture of Healy as a man in whom she had never seen wrongdoing. If he had been one of the plotters, then, she claimed, she had never been present when he schemed. True, she had met him when she and Mason visited one of his pubs, and once he had called to wish them well before they set off to Spain on holiday, but never had she heard him discussing drugs or buses. That was not what the detectives wanted to hear.