Cocaine (29 page)

It was his third deal of the year. When one subtracted the purchase cost – in Suares’s case this was always zero – he had made nearly twelve million dollars in the last three months, some of which was deferred until he was paid by his distributors, but which was more money than he had made in thirty years working for the Cartels.

Retirement was treating him well.

***

I leafed through the pictures, wondering what the police were thinking.

‘
Just come down the station’, they said, and when we arrived the porter, Fortescue was already there, looking through the sets of pictures that I had now been given.

‘
Tell me again what you were doing with the men in the limo, they asked me. ‘We’ve got the CCTV footage from your college. What was in those four suitcases? Where are the suitcases now? What about the briefcase?’

‘
I want to speak to my lawyer.’

‘
Ryan Jacobs’, he continued, looking at me with the pity I could hear in his reedy voice. ‘Three years for class ‘A’ drugs possession in Colombia. Foreign Office report.’

He turned to Kieran, sitting next to me in the interview room underneath Hills Road Police Station. ‘Kieran Macdonald, twelve sentences for class ‘B’ dealing and one for class ‘A’ possession. Oh dear.’

Twelve?
He still had on his blue-tinted sunglasses. Things were made worse by the fact that, to add insult to injury, the briefcase, when Jeavons finally opened it, contained nothing more than a one hundred dollar bill which was torn in half. We could hardly complain to the police that we’d been stiffed in a drugs deal and that the perpetrators had also murdered Warmington in order to create a diversion.

‘
Alkaloids’, he continued, now looking at Jeavons, the three of us sitting like a row of condemned ducks waiting for the marksmen. ‘And this book’, he said, waving my Colombian journal at me. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, gentlemen, you are the biggest bunch of fucking idiots I’ve ever come across.’

It was when he started to laugh that I began to agree with him.

END OF PART ONE