“Bootlegging.”
“What?”
“That’s how he made his pile,” Banks explained. “Making bootleg recordings of live concerts, getting them pressed and selling them.”
Burgess narrowed his eyes. “You seem to know a lot about him. Sure you want me to go on?”
Banks smiled. “It’s a matter of making a little go a long way. That’s all I know. Anyway, it looks as if it paid off.”
“Big-time.”
“What kinds of things is he interested in now, if it’s not drugs?”
“All sorts. I’ll give him his due; he’s innovative. Prefers newer, safer rackets to the old true, tested and tried. That’s why I don’t see him dealing drugs. Taking them, yes, but not dealing them. Not his style. You won’t find him running girls or protection rackets, either. Not Barry Clough. Guns, though, now there’s another matter. Remember that business with the reactivated firearms a year or so back? Up around your neck of the woods, wasn’t it?”
“Thirsk,” said Banks. “Yes, I remember.” Undercover policemen posing as London gangsters had arrested four men on charges of conspiracy to transfer firearms and ammunition, and for selling prohibited weapons. Since stricter gun laws were introduced after the Dunblane school massacre, firearms became harder to get because the risk attached to possessing or selling them was far greater. That also put their price up. To fill the gap, workshops like the one near Thirsk sprang up. It took about two hours to reactivate an Uzi that had been disabled for legal sale to a collector, and you could sell it for about £1,250. Tanfoglio pistols went for about a grand apiece. Discount for bulk. Needless to say, the weapons were especially popular with drug gangs.
“We thought we had Clough on that but we couldn’t prove he was involved.”
“What made you think he was?”
“Circumstantial evidence. Tidbits from informers. He’d made a couple of trips to the area shortly prior to the arrests. One of the men arrested had been observed visiting Clough’s house. He was a collector of disabled firearms himself. He had connections in both the drugs and firearms worlds. That sort of thing.”
Banks nodded. He knew what Burgess meant. You could know it in your bones that a man was guilty of something, but if you couldn’t get enough evidence to interest the Crown Prosecution Service, then you might as well forget it. And the CPS was notoriously difficult to interest in anything other than a dead cert. He also remembered the guns in the case on Clough’s wall. Still, not evidence.
“What happened?”
“We leaned on him a bit. Not me personally, you understand, but we leaned. I think he shied away from that line of business, at least for a while. Besides, I think he found out that it’s not as lucrative as he’d hoped. Reactivating guns is more trouble than it’s worth, when you get right down to it. And it’s not as if they aren’t still being smuggled in by the cartload. Christ, I know where you could buy an Uzi for fifty quid not twenty minutes from here.”
“And after that?”
“We suspect, and you know what I mean when I stress that it’s just a suspicion, don’t you?” Burgess flicked some ash and winked at Banks. “We suspect that, for one thing, he’s behind one of the big smuggling operations. Booze and fags. High profit, low risk. You might not know this, Banks, but I’ve done some work with Customs and Excise, and about eight percent of cigarettes and five percent of beer consumed in this country are smuggled. Have you any idea what sort of profits we’re talking about here?”
“Given the amount people smoke and drink, I should imagine it’s pretty huge.”
“Understatement.” Burgess pointed his cigar at Banks. “A player like Clough might employ fifty people to get the stuff from warehouses in Europe to his retail outlets over here. Once they get it through customs at Dover, they go to distribution centers – industrial estates, business parks and the like – then their fleet of salesmen pick up their supplies and sell to the retailers. Shops, pubs, clubs, factories. Even schools. Christ, we’ve even got fucking pet shops and ice cream vans selling smuggled booze.”
“And Clough’s in it that big?”
“So we suspect. I mean, it’s not as if he drives any of the freighters himself, or drops off a carton or two at the local chippie. Whenever Clough comes back from a month at his villa in Spain you can be damn certain he’s clean as a surgeon’s scalpel. It really pisses me off, Banks, that when a law-abiding citizen such as me drinks his smuggled French lager, there’s probably a share of the profits going to a gangster like Clough.”
“So what have you got on him?”
“Precious little, again. Mostly circumstantial. Earlier this year customs stopped a lorry at Dover and found seven million cigarettes. Seven fucking million. Would’ve netted a profit of about half a million quid on the black market – and don’t ask me how much that is in Euros. Clough’s name came up in the investigation.”
“And what else is he into?”
Burgess flicked some more ash on the floor. “Like I said, we don’t know the full extent of his operations. He’s cagey. Has a knack of staying one step ahead, partly because he contracts out and partly because he operates outside London, setting up little workshops like that one near Thirsk and then moving on before anyone’s figured out what he’s doing. He uses phony companies, gets others to front for him, so his name never appears on any of the paperwork.”
Something in what Burgess had said rang a bell for Banks. It was very faint one, a very poor connection, but it wasn’t an impossible one. “Ever heard of PKF Computer System?” he asked.
Burgess shook his head.
“Bloke called Courage? Charlie Courage?”
“No.”
“Jonathan Fearn?”
“Nope. I can look them up if you like.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Banks. “One’s dead and the other’s in a coma. Would murder be Clough’s style at all?”
“I’d say a man who does as high a volume of crime as he does has to maintain a certain level of threat, wouldn’t you? And if he does that, he has to make good on it once in a while or nobody’s intimidated. He has to keep his workers in line. Nothing like a nice little murder for keeping the lads focused.” He slurped down some lager and lime. “Two weeks after Clough’s name came up in connection with that seized shipment, two known baddies got shot in Dover city center. No connection proven, of course, but they were business rivals. It’s a fucking war zone down there.”
Banks pushed aside the rest of his chicken, which was too dry, and lit a cigarette. He fancied a pint but held off. If he was going to see Barry Clough tonight, as he planned, then he’d need to be sharp, especially after what Burgess had said. “What about women?” he asked.
Burgess frowned. “What do you mean?”
“From what I can gather, Clough’s a bit of a ladies’ man.”
“So I’ve heard. And apparently he likes them young.”
“Has he ever been under suspicion of hurting or killing a woman?”
“Nope. Doesn’t mean he hasn’t done it and got away with it, though. Like I said, Clough’s good at staying ahead of the game. The thing is, with someone like him, people don’t like to come forward and make themselves known, if you catch my drift.”
“Right.” Banks sipped some black coffee. It tasted bitter, as if it had been left on the burner too long. Still, it beat instant. “Heard of Andrew Handley?”