Bootlegged Angel (12 page)

‘What are they doing here?’

‘We didn’t even know they
were
here until a couple of months ago when the Social Security people did a swoop. There are four or five extended families, a coupla hundred of
them, all living in the same street or bedsits within sight of each other. Only about three of them speak English. You going to eat that cod?’

‘Help yourself.’ I offered him my paper parcel and waved the chips away as well. ‘What brought them?’

‘What brings anybody to a port? Boats or contraband. Europe has stuff we want but can’t have or can’t afford. Beer from France, drugs from Holland, ciggies from Belgium or
Spain. How does it get here? On a boat through a port. Just needs somebody to bring it in. Every lowlife on the Continent knows they can make a fast buck on the Channel run. They come, they sign on
at the Benefits Agency, they work the beer runs for a month, they go.’

I wiped my fingers on a tissue, Lawrence used the bottom corner of his storm coat and continued to eat chips.

‘How do they manage if only three of them speak English?’

‘The kids pick it up first, usually from the television or films. It’s the kids who take dad down to the signing-on office –’

‘No, I meant how do they sell the beer and the tobacco?’

Lawrence shrugged.

‘Not round here, that’s for sure. Oh sure, they’ll sell you the odd carton of fags or a coupla cases of lager round the back door like you saw, but the bulk quantities end up
in London or up north, Manchester, Sheffield, Huddersfield, places like that. The West Midlands police did a road check on the motorway just before Christmas and pulled enough smuggled booze to
fill two warehouses in Coventry. They called off the operation after three days because they’d run out of storage space.’

‘Were your Czechs involved?’

‘They’re not
my
Czechs. And no, they weren’t. They rarely leave Dover.’

‘So there’s a middle man somewhere, buying the stuff off the beer-runners and distributing it.’

‘Seems to be. It’s the best way if you think about it. Let somebody else run the risk of crossing the Channel and getting clocked. If our boys don’t spot them, we at least get
their vehicles on closed-circuit TV and the brewers have their own people on the other side, in Calais, logging the overloaded vans, spotting the frequent flyers. That’s what we call the guys
who do four or five crossings a day, usually with a different vehicle every trip.’

‘Then there must be a base or a distribution centre somewhere nearby,’ I reasoned. ‘You can’t get up to Sheffield and back four or five times a day.’

‘Exactly.’ He scrunched up his fish and chip papers and for a moment I thought he was considering throwing them out to sea.

‘But you haven’t found it?’

‘Nope.’

‘Are you looking for it?’

‘Nope.’

‘Other priorities?’

‘Yep.’

Nick Lawrence didn’t have much more he could – or would – tell me, so he walked me back to Amy’s car, dumping his chip paper in a litter bin on the way.
A lone seagull landed on the rim of the bin, sniffed once then flew off. Lawrence hadn’t left any pickings.

I gave him the cartons of cigarettes I had bought with his money and he stuck them under one arm, shook my hand and said, ‘Good luck with – whatever’ and he wandered off along
the sea front.

I estimated that I still had several hours to kill before anything interesting happened at the Rising Sun, so I decided to head north out of Dover on the A2 and then swing down into Whit-comb
from the other side of the Downs. As you do that, you drive down Marine Parade, heading straight for the cavernous entrance to the Ferry Terminal at the Eastern Docks. At night, lit up, it really
can look like the gateway to hell or at least the overspill car-park for hell if they’ve got a busy night on.

At the last minute, though, you realise there is a roundabout in the road and by following round to the right you are suddenly on the Jubilee Way and the A2 itself and you are, literally, up and
away as the road goes up on stilts and sweeps around the cliff to bring you out on the other side of Dover Castle. It is a spectacular piece of road and gives you great views of the harbour if you
are coming down it into the port. If you are leaving the town, well then you get a different angle on the castle and a cheap laugh at the expense of the foreign tourist as by the time they see the
first sign saying ‘Remember to Drive on the Left’ they have already travelled nearly a mile and are well confused.

I had driven this way before and it was a quiet time of the afternoon with little traffic, not even a confused Belgian to watch out for. That was probably why I noticed the two figures hunched
in brightly coloured rainproof ponchos sitting in an otherwise deserted picnic area to the right of the road, on the edge of those famous White Cliffs. They were obviously watching for something,
perched on camp stools with what I guessed were binoculars on tripods in front of them. I didn’t peg them for birdwatchers as not only was there no sign of a bluebird, there wasn’t even
a seagull in sight. And anyway, their binoculars were pointing downwards into the Ferry Terminal, not up into the sky.

Just for the sheer devilment of it, I pulled off the main road and followed the signs which said ‘Picnic site’, parking the BMW in a crunch of gravel about twenty feet behind the
pair of them. They didn’t seem to have a vehicle anywhere in sight but they had several bags and two metal suitcases, the sort photographers carry their cameras in. They didn’t seem
worried that a car had parked close to them when it had an entire empty car-park to choose from, and neither of them even turned to look in my direction. Or at least not until I had got out of the
car and zipped up my jacket against the wind and walked up behind them and said:

‘Hi there. On the look-out for beer-runners?’

The figure on the right, dressed in a red waterproof with matching sou’wester, turned her head and looked up at me.

‘I beg your pardon? Can we help you?’ she said in an accent which would have cut glass, at range, in any of the Home Counties.

Her partner, in a green plastic poncho and hat, didn’t move from her bent position. Her eyes glued to a pair of tripod-mounted binoculars which could have graced the conning tower of a
U-boat, she said:

‘Is he from the National Farmers Union, Daphne?’

‘Are you?’ asked Red Hat or Daphne as it seemed she was called.

The question had thrown me, I admit, but not as much as what I was seeing now I was up close if not personal.

The one called Daphne had a folded tartan rug at her feet. Laid out on it in the way a surgeon lays out his scalpels and clamps, were a Nikon with the longest telephoto lens I had ever seen, a
short wave radio which looked suspiciously like police issue and a digital camera of the sort which doesn’t come cheap (£1400) even when fenced (£900). In her right hand she held
a mobile phone with a wire running up the sleeve of her waterproof to a neck mike and then an ear-piece, a state-of-the-art hands-free version. Her thumb was poised over the Send button. I guessed
she had an armed response team on speed dial.

‘Er . . . no . . . I’m not from anybody,’ I said. ‘I was just curious when I saw you spy . . . er . . . watching the ferries down there. I’m interested in
beer-runners, you see. Smugglers, boozecruisers, that sort of thing.’

Daphne smiled at me, but then I think she smiled at everyone and that made it just that little bit more difficult to lie to her face but I thought she would go along with the story that I was a
prize-winning investigative journalist for one of the respectable papers.

‘I hope he’s not a journalist,’ said Green Hat, still using the binoculars like she was tracking a convoy.

‘Of course I’m not,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m working for a local brewery doing a survey of smuggled beer. Seton’s Brewery at Seagrave, you may have heard of
them.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Daphne still smiling, ‘my husband owns shares in them.’

That put me in my place. I tell the truth and I’m already reduced to a mere employee.

‘But you won’t spot many beer-runners these days, not here,’ she went on. ‘Well, not at this time of day. Most of them use the ferries at night, say between 1 a.m. and 6
a.m., at least the traditional white van trade does. But you don’t see half as many as you did two or three years ago. It’s the Tunnel, you know, the beer-runners are using flat-back
trucks and estate cars on Le Shuttle these days. I think they must get a cheaper rate or something. We used to see the white vans all the time coming up the hill here. They were terribly slow some
of them because they were so overloaded, and the drivers used to wave to us. One of them even gave us a bottle of vodka one Christmas. The good stuff, Stolichnaya.’

I think I remembered to close my gaping mouth at that point. I was certainly tempted to ask her if she had a spare folding stool so I could sit down and take notes.

‘But you’re not here watching for smugglers, are you?’

‘Oh no, not smugglers. We’re not interested in what’s coming
in
, only what’s going
out
.’

Forget the stool, I needed to lie down but there wasn’t a psychiatrist’s couch in sight.

‘Going out?’

‘Exports – of animals,’ she said slowly as if she was explaining which was the soup spoon to a particularly slow grandchild. ‘Live animals. They are transported in the
most appalling conditions. We have leaflets on the subject if you are interested.’

I’ll bet they had. I remembered the protests when crowds of middle-aged women, students and a fair sprinkling of the usual Rent-A-Mob suspects just out for a punch-up had blockaded ports
like Dover and smaller, private ones such as Brightlingsea in Essex, to stop the export of live animals to the Continent. The animals were mostly calves – all long tongues and wide, brown
eyes – destined for the Dutch veal trade, or occasionally sheep and little woolly lambs, all squashed into trucks, unable to move or eat for days on end. There was no doubt it was an
unpleasant trade, but I had often wondered if the export of live pigs would have garnered as much sympathy. Not as photogenic, you see, and nowhere near as cuddly.

Things had got out of hand, as you should have expected if you put middle-class Britain on a crusade involving animals. The police had been called by the port owners, then the police had called
in the Riot Squad and even used horses for crowd control. Now there was a moral dilemma for the protestors. Assaulting a policeman was one thing, handbagging a police
horse
was a matter of
conscience. It had all turned ugly and got quite violent. People had got hurt; mostly kids and innocent bystanders, as usual. The government had promised to do something or other, as usual.

‘I thought the Government had done something about that?’ I said, then added: ‘Because it was a disgrace, wasn’t it? The conditions those animals had to endure, I
mean.’

Daphne softened visibly and slipped the mobile phone into a pocket.

‘Oh, they brought in some regulations, quotas and things, and tried to make the lorry drivers stick to schedules with rest periods and things, but they still have to be watched – to
make sure.’

‘So that’s what you’re doing, is it? Watching for cattle trucks?’

I pointed to her set of binoculars, a flash single-lens, very modern pair on the tripod in front of her.

‘That’s right. Constant vigilance, that’s what we call it. Round the clock surveillance. Spying, I suppose. We are the private eyes of the animal kingdom. Say it like that and
it sounds quite exciting.’

‘There seems to be plenty to spy on around here,’ I said under my breath. ‘So you spot ‘em and snap ‘em do you?’

Daphne looked down at the cameras at her feet. Her friend in the green hat snorted as if it was the stupidest question she had heard since a canvasser had called at the last election asking if
she would consider voting Liberal Democrat.

‘If it’s at night we have to rely on infra-red and the night shift has one of those cameras developed by that nice David Attenborough so he could film badgers during the dark. What
we do during the day is photograph the licence plate and if there are obvious signs of overcowding or cruel conditions, then we use the digital camera. We have a friend in Dover who can feed it
straight into a computer and e-mail the image to the Ministry of Agriculture in London. The best we’ve done is having an e-mail to the Minister in eight minutes.’

I was impressed. I was very impressed.

‘I’m impressed,’ I said to prove it.

‘Somebody has to do something, ‘ said Daphne. ‘If you could see what those poor creatures have to go through . . . it’s a national disgrace. Would you like a mug of
soup?’

She reached down to one of the canvas bags at her feet and unzipped it. Inside were half a dozen shiny steel Thermos flasks.

‘They’re all home-made. We have tomato and basil, Scotch broth with pearl barley –’ so they didn’t mind the little lambs once they were dead –‘and a
clear borscht – that’s beetroot – spiked, I think they say, with vodka.’

This was getting ridiculous.

Here were two wonderfully nutty English ladies old enough to have been snogged by Philip Marlowe spending their retirement on the wild and wet White Cliffs over Dover pretending to be private
eyes. Fair enough, I was pretending to be one too, but the point was these two old dears were better informed about booze-running than I was. And they had better equipment. Their cameras were
better, they had state-of-the-art communications and I didn’t have any binoculars at all. They were even better fed than I was, and they probably weren’t on expenses.

‘He’s had lunch,’ said Green Hat gruffly.

‘Oh yes,’ said Daphne, blushing. ‘I forgot.’

‘Excuse me?’ I said when the penny finally dropped.

‘We . . . saw you,’ said Daphne, bending over to zip up her bag to give her something to do so she didn’t have to look at me. ‘Eating your fish and chips with your friend
down on the Promenade.’

Like an idiot, I stood on tiptoe and looked over the cliff down into the town below.