“But surely this ball wouldn’t be big enough to smuggle drugs,” said Bernard. “In horses or otherwise.”
“I was told that Peter Komarov imports horses by the jumbo jetful,” I said. “How many horses could you get on a jumbo?”
“I’ll try and find out,” said Toby, and he went out of the drawing room.
“We shall assume that each horse would have a minimum of three balls placed in it,” I said.
“Only the female horses,” said Caroline.
“True,” I said. “But wouldn’t they all be females if that is what he wanted?”
“Wouldn’t it depend on which horses were due to be imported?” said Sally.
“Not if Komarov owned the horses as well,” I said.
Toby came back. “According to LRT, the transport people who take and collect horses from Gatwick and Luton, there can be up to eighty horses on a jumbo.”
“Phew,” I said. “That’s a lot of horseflesh.”
“Eighty horses times three balls each,” said Caroline. “Two hundred and forty balls’ worth. How much is that?”
I remembered from school that the formula for the volume of a sphere was. The balls were about four centimeters across. I did a quick mental calculation. The volume of a ball was about thirty cubic centimeters. 30cc per ball × 240 balls = 7,200cc.
“Just over seven liters,” I said.
“And just how much is that?” asked Bernard. “I don’t work in liters.”
I did another rough calculation. “It would fill a bit more than twelve pint beer glasses.”
“And how much would that volume of cocaine be worth?” he asked.
“I’ve no idea of the price of cocaine,” I said.
“I expect it will say on the Internet,” said Toby. “I’ll go ask Google.” He disappeared again.
We sat and waited for him. I drank my tea, and Bernard sneaked his fourth chocolate biscuit.
Toby came back. “According to the Internet, cocaine is worth about forty pounds per gram at a sort of wholesale price,” he said.
“And how many grams are there in a pint mug?” asked Bernard, holding out his chubby hands with the palms up.
I laughed. “My brain hurts. If it was water, there would be a thousand grams in each liter. So there would be seven thousand grams in all. I don’t know whether cocaine powder is more or less dense than water. Does it float?”
“It can’t be much different,” said Bernard. “Say seven thousand grams at forty pounds at a time is”-he paused-“two hundred and eighty thousand pounds. Not bad. But not that much for all the risks involved.”
“But that’s not the half of it,” said Caroline. “For a start, you probably import cocaine at one hundred percent purity, and then you ‘cut’ it-that is, you add baking soda or vitamin C powder, or even sugar. At least a third, and sometimes as much as two-thirds to three-quarters, of what is sold on the street is the cut.”
I looked at her in shocked surprise. She smiled. “I once had a crackhead as a boyfriend. It lasted for a week or two, until I found out about his habit. But we stayed friends for a while longer, and he told me all about buying coke, as he called it. Users mostly buy it as a twist of powder or a rock of crack. That’s just enough for a single dose. A twist of cocaine powder may only contain fifty milligrams of pure cocaine. So you can get at least twenty twists from a single gram. That puts the potential street value of each gram hugely higher. In all, a jumbo jetload would be worth millions, and how many jumbo jetfuls are there?
“Plus, of course, the profit from the sale of the horses,” I said.
“If there is any,” said Toby. “He would have to buy them in South America and pay for the transportation. I don’t suppose there would be that much profit. Unless horses are very cheap in Argentina.”
“How would we find out?” I asked.
Toby went out again, and I thought he was going to somehow find out the answer to my question. But he didn’t. He came back with a book. It was like a large, thick paperback. “This is a catalog from the Horses in Training sale at Newmarket last October, when I bought a horse from Komarov. I thought I’d look it up.” He flicked through the pages. “Here it is.” He studied it. “It says here that it was sent to the sale by a company called Horse Imports Ltd. But I know it was Komarov’s horse. He was there. He congratulated me afterwards on my purchase.”
“You mean you spoke to this man?” said Sally, disturbed. “Does he know who you are?”
“Not really,” said Toby.
“I hope not,” she said to him. “Not if he’s trying to kill your brother.” She looked at me. “You shouldn’t have come here.” I could see that for the first time she really did believe I was in danger, and, consequently, so was she, and so was her family.
Toby was actually my half brother. We shared the same mother, but my father had been her second husband. Toby was the son of a newly qualified accountant who had died of kidney failure when Toby had been two. Toby’s surname wasn’t Moreton. It was Chambers.
“Komarov won’t know that Toby is my brother,” I said.
“I hope you’re right,” Sally said.
So did I.
19
T oby spent much of the evening going through the sale catalog page by page. He came up with the fact that sixty-eight of the fifteen hundred or so horses sold at that sale were from Horse Imports Ltd. And every single one of them was female, either a mare or a filly. And that couldn’t be a coincidence.
That sale was just one of eleven similar sales held each year at Newmarket. There were also many major bloodstock auctions at Doncaster, and at Fairyhouse and Kill in Ireland, not to mention many others around the world. Then there were the horses sold privately. The horse-selling business worldwide was enormous. Lots and lots of jumbo jetfuls, each producing millions.
As Toby had studied the catalog, Caroline and I had sat in front of his computer screen and run searches on Horse Imports Ltd on the Internet. It was a British subsidiary of a Dutch company. It had an annual turnover that ran into tens of millions, but it seemed to have liabilities to its parent company equal to its gross profit and so it showed no net profit and hence paid no UK tax. I didn’t know how many horses it sold each year, but if they were all as reasonably priced as Toby had said there must have been thousands of them. I wondered if they all had a uterus, and whether they had all arrived in the UK with it containing drug-filled metal balls. And those were just the British-bound horses. I knew he also sold horses in the United States, and I suspected he did too in his native Russia, if only to his polo club. Where else? I wondered. Would there be enough female horses in the whole of South America?
I tried to use the computer to trace the parent company into the Dutch system, but without any success. I was fairly confident that the Dutch company would, itself, prove to have a parent company, and so on. I suspected that the overall parent, the matriarch company at the top of the tree, would prove to have a Dutch Antilles base, to be an offshore entity where such considerations as corporate taxes were not a worry.
Bernard had made an interesting little speech before he had taken himself back to London. “One of the major problems for drug dealers,” he had said, “is what to do with the vast amounts of cash generated by the trade. Nowadays, governments have wised up and put anti-money-laundering measures in place. You know how difficult it is now to open a bank account? Well, that’s because the banks are required to prove not only who you are but that funds in your accounts are come by in a legal and tax-reported fashion. These days, you can’t buy things with cash, not really expensive things like cars and houses. Even bookmakers won’t take a large bet in cash anymore, and they certainly won’t pay you out in cash if you win. It has to be by bank transfer or credit card. So cash is a problem. It’s all right if it’s only a few hundred or even a few thousand. That’s easy to spend. But millions, in cash? You can’t just buy your luxury Mediterranean yacht with suitcases full of cash. The yacht broker won’t take it, because then he has the same problem.”