Bootlegged Angel (28 page)

‘It’s a sharp right once we hit the road,’ Combo was saying, ‘but it’s a straight road so you can see a good way and there’s not much traffic.’

That was just as well. Fifty feet and more of truck and trailer emerging out of a wooded nature reserve in front of you could unsettle the most experienced of drivers, let alone the local
milkman on his float.

So I stopped dead with a satisfying hiss of the air brakes at the junction where the woods ended and the B-road ran left towards Whitcomb and Folkestone and right to Canterbury, the M2 motorway
and eventually London.

I had been there twice before, once in Scooter’s Jeep and once on Dan’s bicycle in the middle of the night, but I’d never been there fourteen feet up in the air in a truck with
powerful headlights. That’s why I hadn’t seen the broken sign which lay flat in the hedge by the junction before now.

It was obviously old, weatherbeaten and faded but from where I sat in the DAF’s cab I could still make out the lettering:
SETON
’
S HOP FARM,
WHITCOMB
and underneath, the by now all-too-familiar legend, Seagrave’s Seaside Ales.

If it was a surprise for me, it was going to be one hell of a shock for Murdo Seton.

The B-road ran almost dead straight for three miles, which gave me time to get used to the truck’s little quirks and satisfy myself that the trailer wasn’t going to
run out of control and attempt to overtake me going downhill. By the time we reached the A2 to bypass Canterbury, I was feeling confident and Combo had relaxed enough to take his foot off the
dashboard where he had braced himself.

After we joined the M2 motorway I was relaxed enough to experiment with the cruise control and even sing along to Combo’s tape. There really wasn’t much to this truck-driving
business, even when as out of practice as I was. All you really had to remember was that you had a better view of things than other road users, plus you were about eight times bigger than most of
them so
they
had no excuse for not getting out of the way.

I sat back on my air cushion and held the wheel at arms’ length, rolling my neck to ease the tension in my spine, thinking of myself as part of the machine and as long as I was in control,
nothing could go wrong.

‘When we get there,’ Combo said out of the blue, ‘it’s best not to talk to anyone, Scooter says. Especially Rufus Radabe.’

‘He’ll be there, will he?’

‘Yes, I thought I’d told you. He doesn’t trust anyone else with the money, but we have to be careful.’

‘Why exactly do we have to be careful?’ I asked, not really wanting to know the answer.

‘This Radabe character has been trying to find out where we keep the Mothership ever since we started delivering to him. That’s why I’ve brought this.’

He held up a small, black electronic box not much bigger than the dictaphone I had borrowed from Amy.

‘What’s that? A stun gun?’

‘It’s a sweeper, a debugger. It bleeps when it finds a homing device. Hadn’t you better watch the road?’

I realised I had been staring open-mouthed at Combo instead of straight ahead at the thickening traffic.

‘Rufus tries to bug you?’

‘He’s tried twice. When we get there, we unhook this trailer and pick up an empty one, we don’t wait for unloading, just get in, get the money, change over the plates and get
out. But twice we’ve found transmitters planted on the trailers we’ve collected. We put one on a truck heading for Salford.’

No wonder this mob thought there was something intrinsically funny about Salford.

‘Why would Rufus bug the truck if the truck’s delivering to him in the first place?’

‘Scooter says it’s a great temptation for him to cut out the middle men, that’s us, especially as we’re coming to the end of our run. Think of his profit margin if he
didn’t have to buy the beer at all.’

‘You mean, hijack it from the bootleggers?’

‘Sure, then he’s quids in. It’s happened before. A gang of Czechs working the ferries got turned over earlier this year and lost their entire stock from three lock-up garages
in Dover. They were pretty pissed off about it, but, fucking hell, they couldn’t go to the police, could they?’

My neck suddenly hurt again and I realised I was hunched forward over the wheel, gripping it with white knuckles.

‘What’re you doing?’ Combo asked.

I couldn’t answer immediately as I was ripping the cellophane wrapping off the packet of cigarettes with my teeth.

‘Falling back into bad habits,’ I said.

It was fully dark and raining heavily when Combo directed me off the last exit of the M25 before the toll booths for the Dartford crossing (tunnel going north, bridge coming
south). Rush-hour traffic reduced our speed to a crawl until we were off the motorway proper and heading for the warehouses and docking facilities which lined the Thames to the east of the
bridge.

‘That one,’ said Combo.

A warehouse that big should not be that anonymous, but it was, sandwiched in between dozens of others equally grey, equally drab, identified only by a sign saying ‘Unit 43’ high up
near the metal roof. It was perhaps six times bigger than the stripping shed at Whitcomb and this one would not have looked out of place at Heathrow. There was enough room in front of it to park a
Jumbo jet let alone my rig.

There were two sliding doors, each having a regular door for people built into them.

‘Turn and back in the left-hand door,’ advised Combo. ‘They’ll have seen us on their security cameras.’

Sure enough, the door rolled open automatically as I completed the manoeuvre and edged my way backwards into the neon-lit interior.

A figure in overalls, a middle-aged Asian guy, appeared in my wing mirror. He took up position at the offside end of the trailer and began to wave me back, then over to the left, parking me next
to another trailer unit on dolly legs which I assumed would be my empty load for the return journey. In my left side mirror, another Asian appeared and then I spotted two more off to the side, one
climbing on and firing up a small fork-lift truck.

When I thought my trailer was level with the parallel empty one, I put on the brakes. The door in front of us began to roll shut, cutting off the comforting glow of street lights, the evening
traffic and the lights of the Dartford Bridge.

The great metal cavern of the warehouse was split down the middle by a hanging curtain of plastic strips about a foot wide. They ran from ceiling to floor and were heavy enough to mask whatever
was going on behind them although I could see figures moving around and another fork-lift truck zipping to and fro. It was the scene from the sci-fi movie where the visiting spaceship is isolated
by the heavies from NASA. The only trouble was, the sound-track was wrong.

I turned off my engine and we could hear it quite clearly: fifty-year-old big band jive from the Swing era, belting out from a series of speakers hung from the metal rafters.

‘That’s him,’ said Combo.

‘I guessed,’ I said, reaching for the door handle.

Our Rufus knew how to make an entrance, parting the hanging plastic strips as if he was coming through the curtains at the Cotton Club.

He was no taller than me, but wider in the shoulders, something accentuated by the white three-piece suit he wore, complemented by bright red leather shoes. His shirt was white and his tie was
wide and gold, with a large gold tie pin in the shape of a saxophone. White suit, red shoes. I should have known he was a sociopath then and there.

As he walked towards us, his hips swayed and he snapped the fingers of both hands in time to the music. Even that minimal action showed that he had powerful biceps under the suit. The neon strip
lighting reflected off his gleaming black, bald head, just as it did off the sun-glasses worn by a much larger black guy who walked one yard behind at his right shoulder. That one was dressed more
conventionally in sweatshirt, baggies and trainers. He didn’t need to show off his muscles but he did so anyway. I had him marked as one of Radabe’s Rhythm Section, though I
didn’t think much of the dress code.

‘Where’s that little jive bunny Scooter?’ he asked Combo, his accent pure South London.

Combo reacted like a rabbit caught in headlights. Rufus standing there in front of him, swaying to the music as the track built to a climax, was having a hypnotic effect on him.

‘He’s . . . he’s . . . in . . . dis . . . indisposed.’

Rufus’s eyes rolled, almost in time to the music.

‘In. Dis. Posed. Good word that, innit, Yonk?’

The black bodybuilder behind him grunted and I noticed that Combo’s legs were starting to quiver.

‘He’s got a problem with the regular driver,’ I said, keeping my attitude as indifferent as I could. ‘That’s why I’m filling in.’

Rufus pointed a finger at Combo, then swung it on to me.

‘Him I know, you I don’t.’

‘First trip here,’ I said, bored, looking round, anywhere to avoid eye contact.

‘You like my taste in music?’

The question caught me on the hop, just as the track was ending.

‘Sure. It’s Count Basie, ‘One O’Clock Jump’.

He nodded slowly in appreciation.

‘Try the next one.’

There was an uncomfortable silence and then the tape kicked in with a brash trumpet intro.

‘Don’t know the track, but that’s Harry James.’

He seemed impressed.

‘Very good. You know Harry James?’

‘First bandleader to give Frank Sinatra a job.’

‘Mmmm,’ he mumbled, stroking his chin. ‘Do I know you?’

‘Don’t think so. You want me to unhook this?’ I jerked a thumb at the trailer.

‘No bother, man, no bother.’ He was giving me the once-over, so up close and in my face I could smell his toothpaste. ‘Ali or Mohammed or Mustapha or one of them will take care
of it.’

Even as he spoke, another four Pakistanis or Bengalis came through the plastic curtain, pulling on gloves, heading for the truck.

‘Always hire Muslims in this business,’ Rufus told me like I wanted to know. ‘You get less breakages that way – if you know what I mean.’

‘Wise move,’ I said.

He screwed up his forehead and sighed at me.

‘I
do
know you.’

I shrugged my shoulders. I could feel sweat running down my wrists and into my gloves.

‘Well, I sure seen you around somewhere.’

‘That’s always possible.’

‘Still, no never mind. You’re a Swing man and that’s neat, sweet and
reat petite
. Swing’s coming back, you hear?’

‘I hope so,’ I said, just to be sociable.

‘Trust me on that one.’

He turned back to Combo.

‘Come with me if you want your money. Yonk here’ll check the cargo, just to make sure we’re getting what we’re paying for, if you know what I mean.’

We nodded like schoolboys eager for praise and followed him across the warehouse and through the hanging gardens of plastic.

On the other side of the curtain, we were in Lilliput. Somehow we had been shrunk and placed in a massive off-licence. Pallets of beer towered above us and the towers stretched the whole length
of the place, leaving a maze of corridors just wide enough for one of the small fork-lifts.

We followed Rufus’s wides shoulders through the maze, dog-legging left and then right before coming to a glass box cubicle which seemed to be the office. I wondered if I should have
unwound a ball of string as we walked so we could find our way back.

‘Payment as usual, as specified by my good friend Mr Scooter,’ Rufus said chattily, walking behind a desk and reaching down.

I took a half-step back, expecting him to come up with a gun. But then I was just jittery. He probably had nothing more dangerous than a Tommy Dorsey CD down there.

‘These things are costing me a fortune,’ Rufus grinned.

On the desk he placed a thin metal briefcase, flipped the catches and laid it down open. It was jammed full of piles of £20 notes.

‘But if my friend Scooter specifies this sort of case, then it’s the least I can do.’ Rufus rambled on but I was still looking at the money. ‘You wanna count it? You do
and I’ll have to get Yonk to count all the beer in your rig, and he don’t count too fast.’

I sensed Yonk behind me in the entrance to the office. I certainly hadn’t heard him arrive as the music tape had changed to Benny Goodman’s ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ and Rufus
was miming the Gene Krupa drumbeat. There was another black guy with Yonk, much smaller and thin as a rake, dressed in motor-cycle leathers. They nodded in unison.

‘Yonk and Fatboy here say your load is good,’ Rufus shouted above the music. ‘You happy with the money?’

‘Yes . . . yes, that seems fine,’ said Combo, reaching out with shaking hands to close the case.

‘You guys attend to business,’ Rufus said to his Rhythm Section. ‘I’ll see our friends out.’

He mimed some more drumming then paused, mid-beat, pointing an imaginary drumstick at my chest.

‘I
do
know you, don’t I?’

‘Honestly don’t think so,’ I said, zipping up my jacket to give me something to do with my hands.

‘Want a drink?’

He reached into a drawer in the desk and brought out a stack of plastic cups and a bottle of Wray and Nephew white over-proof rum, 62.8 per cent alcohol by volume, all the way from Jamaica.

‘It’s very tempting,’ I said and I meant it. ‘But I’m driving.’

‘Oh yeah, I forgot,’ he said, pouring out a cup for himself but ignoring Combo. ‘Driving all the way back to – where was it?’

‘Kent,’ I said. ‘It’s near France.’

He stared at me for what seemed like an hour but was no more than two seconds, then he downed the contents of the cup without choking, turning red or falling over, all of which are recognised
medical symptoms following the ingestion of Wray and Nephew rum.

‘It’ll come to me,’ he said.

Rufus walked us out of his office and through the beer maze back to the truck in case we got lost or decided to pocket a few thousand bottles on the way. I thought about what
he would say if the police or Customs paid him a visit. Trouble was there wasn’t much chance of that. Statistically speaking, the odds were on his side and he knew it.