Where Ryan was slightly taken aback, Aidan Hughes was definitely amused.
“Does that happen often then?”
He set his cup of coffee on the desk and reached across for a biscuit, biting into it with a crunch. After a few seconds his eyes lit up. “This is a great biscuit.”
Harding smiled proudly. “French. I make a lot of trips there for work, especially now with Brexit.”
Ryan nodded. “Perk of the job. I used to work in Strangford and we crossed the Lough to Portaferry a lot.”
It didn’t have quite the same ring.
Andy focused on the reason they were there; so far that day they’d heard a lot about drugs and counterfeits, now they needed to find out where they might be coming from.
“Thanks for seeing us, Chief Harding.”
“Max, please.”
“Max then. OK, the reason we’re here is because we’d like to know what you can tell us about the smuggling in of drugs from abroad generally, and counterfeit medication in particular. In particular any ideas you have about who might be bringing them in.”
It prompted a lengthy pause while Harding raised his eyebrows, furrowed his forehead and muttered beneath his breath. The latter surprised Ryan, who had always associated muttering with elderly people for some reason, something he would have been disabused of if he’d ever heard Craig talking to himself in his room.
After what seemed like five minutes but was much less, the customs chief’s facial acrobatics ceased and he hunched his impressive shoulders forward, gazing mournfully at each of them as he responded in a confessional tone.
“We don’t catch them all and it’s got worse in the past few months.”
His, “Mea Culpa” was implied.
“We should catch them but we don’t. Smuggling by boat should be easier to detect than through the airports, because we have more time to check cargo, but you’re contending with thousands of containers a year and we can’t check every inch. Have you seen the size of those things?”
It was accompanied by a vague wave out the window that made them all turn to look, expecting to see an enormous ship anchored outside, before realising that it had just been a symbolic gesture towards the city’s docks.
“We just can’t open every container, and we can’t take any we do open apart looking for things hidden behind false bottoms and walls-”
The words made Ryan gawp. “They do that?”
Harding’s apologetic hunch transformed instantly into chest-puffed-out bravado, in the manner of, “You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen”.
“Far more than that! And it’s getting worse. In October we found a container whose inner walls had been painted with liquid cocaine. Painted. If one of my men hadn’t got suspicious and decided to scrape test it, a million pounds worth of the stuff would have got out on the streets. We had a smaller one done the same way with diazepam.”
Andy was impressed and he didn’t hide it. “So tablets are the least of your worries.”
“Exactly. Usually they’re easy enough to find. You see discrete shapes if you x-ray or scan and you go looking further, or you find barcodes or seals. But...”
The D.C.I. nodded, grudgingly impressed by some criminals’ inventiveness. “But if they bring the component materials in as liquids painted on the walls of a container and then shape them into tabs when they get here, it becomes almost impossible to pick them up.”
Harding looked glum. “It can be, and that’s just the stuff coming in at the docks. There are a ton of coastal drop-off points where smugglers leave things to be collected by their mates too-”
Aidan cut in. “In the rocks?”
“Or the caves, yes. But also in the water itself. They seal the stuff in plastic and weigh it down below the surface, marking its position in some way. With a swimming float, or by attaching it to a fixed buoy that’s already there, and so on.” He sighed heavily. “Not to mention the people that they sometimes smuggle in the containers as well. Even though they’ve already charged the poor sods for their passage they use some of them as mules too. Body-packers full of swallowed condoms that have been stuffed with cocaine.”
Aidan’s eyes widened. “How long are they in there?”
Harding shook his head. “That depends on the container’s origin point. If they’re coming from the Middle-East through Europe, a day or two maybe. But from South America or Africa by sea? You’d be talking weeks.”
“Carrying a lethal dose of coke inside you? My God, how many survive?”
“Up to a third can die from the condoms bursting on longer trip, but that doesn’t bother the smugglers. They just cut the condoms that haven’t burst out of their corpses and cover any losses by raising the prices they charge on the street.” The customs officer shook his head again. “You’d really have to be desperate to do it.”
After a moment thinking about what they’d just heard Andy changed the subject; he’d had all the sadness that he could cope with right now.
“You said that smuggling by boat should have been easier to detect than at airports. Are airports particularly difficult for customs?”
Harding ran a tanned hand through his mane as he answered in a way that might have had quite an effect on someone attracted to him, and Andy guessed that he probably put it to good use at work. The only effect it had on the D.C.I. was to make him wonder how often the official practiced the gesture in front of his mirror every day.
“OK, so, the pluses in airports are that all boarding passengers pass through security, so their hand baggage is scanned and swabbed. We pick up a lot that way. But we can’t open and assess all hold baggage; there just isn’t the time with the tight schedules that airlines and baggage handlers work to. We have to rely on dogs to sniff out drugs mostly, and experienced officers to spot someone dodgy looking and do a random search, so there’s no doubt that some drugs and meds get through. It’s the same with the postal service. They’re very vigilant, so most meds that have been posted get picked up on x-ray, but some definitely get through.”
“The prisons say their dogs are having challenges detecting psychoactives.”
Harding nodded. “Odourless. The same can be true of medications, especially if the smuggler’s taken the trouble to blister-pack them.”He gave a shrug that lifted his uniform epaulettes almost to his ears. “We’re doing our best, but despite that the problem’s definitely getting worse.”
More out of habit than any insight, Aidan asked a question whose answer’s importance would only become clear in the coming days.
“You said the counterfeit imports were getting worse. Since when exactly?”
“Well, it’s been pretty bad for a couple of years, which is why your lot did Pangea, but there’s been a definite upsurge in the meds coming in since September and we haven’t a clue why.”
The return of Harding’s apologetic tone contrasted with his sudden lurch forward and the eager light that had brightened his eyes. “So are you going to tell me who died? And how did it happen?”
Andy thought that his helpfulness deserved a reward.
“It wasn’t a courier or a smuggler. It was-” He stopped abruptly, deciding that he’d better check something. “You’ve signed the official secrets act, haven’t you?”
The customs chief rolled his eyes. “No. I’m planning on telling The Belfast Chronicle everything that you say.” He gave a loud tut, “Of course I’ve signed it” adding, as he pointed to his badge, “that’s why they made me the boss.”
It was unlikely that was the main reason or everyone would have been in charge, but Andy took his point.
“Sorry, but I had to ask. The deceased was a prison inmate.”
Harding frowned. “That wasn’t on the news. It just said a man near Armagh had died.”
The D.C.I. nodded. “We’re at a very early stage in the investigation. Information gathering.”
Before Harding pushed for further information Aidan cut in. “Which means anything we ask you should just
be seen in that light. We’re just forming a broad picture at the moment, not one that necessarily relates to the death.”
A disappointed Harding sank back in his chair. “Oh, OK. Gather away then.”
For the next five minutes Andy asked about recent drug finds for Davy to check out and finally for anything that wasn’t written down; any useful gossip that Harding’s team might have heard. That was the stuff that often led them to a break.
“Eastern Europeans.”
Andy nodded him on. “From where? Armenia, Belarus, Ukraine...”
The last was a well-known source of medication ordered from websites, although they weren’t always counterfeits. What doctors in the UK wouldn’t prescribe without a damn good reason other countries often found more accessible under their rules.
They were surprised when Harding shook his head. “No. Well, yes, we’ve had issues from all of those, but recently the gossip’s been about places further north-”
Ryan cut in. “Are you talking about Scandinavia or the Baltic States?”
“The second one.”
None of which were actually Eastern Europe according to the UN, but what was a geography exam between friends? The Baltic States: Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia were ex-communist bloc countries that had regained their sovereignty in the nineteen-nineties and had been members of the EU and NATO since two-thousand-and-four.
“OK, so which of The Baltic States, and what specifically have you heard about them?”
Harding shook his head. “The gossip isn’t specific, just that The Baltics were turning into a sweetie shop. The thing is that they’re part of the Schengen zone...” The Schengen Zone or Area comprises twenty-six European states that have officially abolished passport and all other types of controls at their mutual borders, “...like we are, so there’s free movement.”
They braced themselves for his next words to be xenophobic. Bloody foreigners being to blame for everything bad that happened in the country, etcetera, etcetera; as if no-one in Ireland or Britain had ever done a thing wrong. They were pleasantly surprised when that didn’t happen and instead the official added.
“The people are fine, we just scan them and check them like everyone else, but the Baltic containers, well there are a lot coming in from there, sometimes on Russian boats, and it’s like I said before, we can’t check them all.”
Andy nodded, glancing at the others to stand down, in particular Aidan’s readiness to jump on an anticipated racist comment too visible for comfort.
“OK, thanks for that.”
The D.C.I. closed his notebook and rose but Harding waved him back down.
“I hadn’t got to the best bit yet.”
Andy brightened up. It hadn’t been a wasted meeting anyway, they’d got more searches for Davy to do and learnt something about how sneaky drug smugglers could be, but more was always good. As he sat back in his seat Harding leaned forward confidingly.
“So these boyos from the Baltics...” Boyos from the Baltics. It was catchy; the name of a new rock band perhaps?“...we think they’re working with someone here to get their stuff in.”
Ryan felt as confused as the others looked, so he pushed for more clarity.
“Do you mean they’re working with other people from the Baltics who live here?”
There were approximately ten thousand people from Lithuania and Latvia resident in Northern Ireland currently.
Harding frowned, considering for a moment. “To be honest I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe that’s what they meant when they said it, but...”
He let the words tail away and Aidan used the ensuing gap to ask a question of his own.
“You sound as if you think it was someone Northern Irish that they meant, not Baltic, but we can come back to that in a minute. First we need to know who ‘they’ are. Who did you hear this gossip from?”
That one Harding could answer, but it wouldn’t prove helpful to their case.
“Plenty of people. I’ve heard it lots of times, down at the docks and around here. It’s sort of become common knowledge. Any drugs that sneak in now get blamed on it.”
In Aidan’s experience anything labelled ‘common knowledge’ should be subtitled ‘needle in a haystack’ for investigative purposes, but at least it gave them something more to check out.
He pressed the official further. “OK, but you don’t think that they meant the handovers were to Baltic nationals living here, do you?”
Harding conceded the point. “No. I always had the impression that the stuff might have been coming in from Eastern Europe...” they were seriously going to have buy the man an atlas, “... but then it was being handed over to someone from here, one of our lot. Home-grown.”
“And by that do you mean home-grown gangs here, or?”
“Maybe gangs, but more the real bad boys. I mean the paramilitaries rather than just bunches of kids.” He shook his head vaguely. “But now that you pin me down I don’t know why I thought that. It’s not like anyone ever mentioned any names.” He shrugged. “Just an impression I suppose.”
Impression and common knowledge were first cousins that the police heard about a lot.
Andy cut in. “I don’t suppose that impression stretched to which side of the fence those paramilitaries came from?”
Harding’s head shake was definite this time. “Definitely not. I would have remembered that.”
A feat of memory rooted no doubt in the desire, seemingly universal in Northern Ireland, to pin any and all bad behaviour on the other half of the population, in a kind of religious stroke criminal, “What about him?”
This time when Andy rose to leave he was joined by the others, and they followed Harding back down to the reception where Andy reached out and shook his hand.
“That was very helpful, Chief. Thank you. We’ll come back to you if we need to ask anything else.”
“Or if you want to see our procedures at the docks or airport. I’d be happy to show you around.”
That depended on what Craig thought of their leads.
With another nod, and a smile at Nadine, Nia, Natalie, Naomi, Andy led the way back to the car.
****
Garvan’s Bookies. 3 p.m.
“Everythin’ seems quiet enuf so I think we shud kill the other one now. The quicker the message gets out tee every prison the better.”
Rory McCrae’s words were ignored by his companion, whose attention was focused instead on the ritual of lighting his cigar. After a moment of sniffing, and listening as the tobacco leaves crackled between his manicured fingers, a click and three sharp puffs ignited the cigar’s end and sent a plume of dense white smoke up and out across the room, making the UKUF boss cough ostentatiously.
“You do not like my cigar, Rory?”
The words, said in accented and strangely precise English, were less a concern for the paramilitary’s health than an implied threat.
Be careful how you answer my question, little man. We may be allies for now but never forget that the hate runs deep.
Sadly McCrae rarely used the brains that God had given him, and even they weren’t much, his natural role to be a follower rather than a leader and that elevated status only having been reached by lack of any other candidates when the mantle had come to be passed on by his retiring boss, Tommy Hill.
“Nah, I hate the stink af them. Those an’ pipes.”
It left his companion with two choices: kill McCrae for the insult now or make a note of it and kill him later. Sadly, business dictated that the pleasure would have to be deferred until the Loyalist was of no further use, so as interim revenge the man took another deep puff and blew the smoke deliberately in the UKUF man’s face before speaking again.
“We cannot move on the second killing yet. The police are sniffing around and that must settle first.”
McCrae gave a grunt of disgust. “Bloody peelers ar alays stickin’ their noses where they shudn’t, but I still say we shud move. Strike while the iron’s hot, like.”
The insistence was another black mark against the Loyalist and if it had been possible to kill him twice then his companion would have done it; disrespect was something that he couldn’t tolerate. First by insulting his cigar, a Gurkha that had cost him a month’s wages for an average man, and then by daring to grunt at him and answer back! It was a step too far.
To make his point without killing, and as a kind of appetiser before his future murderous main feast, the well-groomed man set his cigar down carefully on the edge of the desk that sat between them and then his right hand shot up and forward and locked itself around Rory McCrae’s malnourished throat. The move was accompanied by a softly accented hiss.
“Listen to me, little man, and pay attention. We do what I say we do, and we move when I say we move. Comprehend?”
When the eyes in the reddening face above his hand changed expression from panic to confusion, he realised that another word would have to be used.
“You understand?”
It brought a restricted nod that was his cue to continue speaking, while his gaze wandered across the paramilitary’s face, enthralled by the purple and white blotches that were starting to appear.
“And if you ever,” the grip tightened further, “ever grunt at me again, then it will be the last sound that you will ever make.”
With that he released his hand abruptly and lifted his cigar again, blowing on its lit end until the embers brightened before inserting it back in his mouth. As he did so he read the now-gasping McCrae’s mind and added a warning.
“And if you are thinking of declaring war on my organisation then I would not. My close protectors may not outnumber yours but there are many more on whom we can call.”He straightened up briskly in his chair. “Now. We wait until I say so and then we move to finish our work. The message will still get out loud and clear.”
He rose to his feet and gazed down at the still purple-faced paramilitary for a moment, then he lifted his fedora and set it neatly on his head, calling out, “Come.”
Crossing The Line Page 12