He let them in.‘I’m having coffee,’ he said.‘Want a drink?’
‘Coffee’s fine. So tell me about it.What happened?’
‘Oh, she got pretty legless at the club, more than normal, but at least she was willing to leave earlier than usual. Not for me,’ he added quickly.‘With her parents away there was another attraction. When we got to the house she said her father kept dope in his office safe and she wanted my help to get into it. She had the key and a combination for the lock, but she couldn’t get it to work.’
‘Why did she think you could do it?’
‘I’ve told her I work as a security consultant. So she took me into her dad’s office and I had a look. It took me ten minutes to figure out what he’d done-you had to subtract one from each of the digits he’d written down to get the true entry code.Inside there were half a dozen sachets of cocaine, some of Magdalen’s mother’s jewellery, a pile of papers and a file. Magdalen removed one of the packets of coke and we went out to the living room.’ He shrugged. ‘Like I said,it took forever for her to fall asleep.She got all wild and lively again, wanting to dance, and then finally flaked out, just before the time I was supposed to leave. So I sent you the message and went back into the office and had another look. The papers seemed innocuous-birth certificates, company registration documents, stuff like that-but the file was odd. It was labelled “Dragon Stout”, and seemed to be concerned with a consignment of Jamaican beer for the Paramounts off-licence chain. I thought it was strange having just one business file in among that other stuff, and I had a closer look. Most of it was straightforward letters and documents about suppliers’ contracts, container layouts, shipping arrangements, customs forms, things like that, but then I came across this sheet . . .’
Tom opened the yellow envelope and emptied its contents onto the coffee table. He thumbed through them for a moment, then lifted a single sheet with the letterhead of the head office of Paramounts Beers,Wines and Spirits, Importers and Retailers. It was dated the previous year and took the form of a handwritten list of points, like a summary for a presentation or a report, and ran as follows:
TERMS:
standard 20' container holds 1120 cases of 2 doz bottles of DS
300 (25%) cases of ‘special’ = 7200 bottles
@ 80 gm/bottle = 576 kg FGBC
@ ?20,000/kg = ?11.52m
‘DS is Dragon Stout?’ Kathy said.
Tom nodded.
‘What’s FGBC?’
‘Could be first-grade base cocaine. Twenty thousand a kilo is about right for wholesale Colombian, uncut.’
‘You think they’re bringing it over in bottles of beer?’
‘That’s how it looks.’
‘This isn’t the original, is it?’
‘No. There was a photocopier in the room, and I copied as much as I could of the file until I ran out of time. I haven’t really examined the rest. I know there are letters to the bottling plant in Jamaica and the names of distributors in the UK.’
Kathy frowned, worried.‘Isn’t this a bit too easy? I mean, are they really going to put this sort of stuff down on paper?’
‘It’s a business, like any other, Kathy. They have to keep records of what’s been agreed, what’s been paid. Look at the initials at the bottom: I.R., Ivor Roach. He’s the accountant, he has to know. It’s his file, in his private safe, in his home.Where else would it be?’
‘When is this going to happen?’
‘It already has. According to the dates there were four container loads delivered last year. That’s forty-six million pounds worth of cocaine wholesale, say a hundred million on the street as crack or coke.’
‘Well.’ Kathy felt incapable of judgement. It was four in the morning and she wanted sleep and time to step back and digest this. She felt she barely recognised the man beside her. His face was flushed, his pupils contracted and his nose running. ‘No wonder they’ve all got better cars than me,’ she said.
‘Yeah.’ He sniffed and wiped his nose.‘And no wonder they’ve got plenty of friends.You look tired.’
‘Yes, I’ll be on my way.’
‘Kip here. Then you can run me back to my car in the morning.’
She was too weary to argue, and they tumbled onto opposite sides of his bed and fell into a troubled sleep.
TWENTY-THREE
It was one of the more difficult interviews of her life. Tom managed it as well as he could have, speaking with conviction, taking full personal responsibility and painting her role in the most favourable light. But still, she felt rotten. Brock didn’t rant or scold, that wasn’t his way. His silence was far more eloquent. He just sat there behind his desk, expressionless, his eyes fixed on Tom as he told his story, occasionally appearing to focus on some detail of his appearance, his puffy eyes, his inflamed nostrils. He didn’t look at Kathy at all, and she felt his disregard like a weight on her chest. Then, when the story was finished, he bowed his head over the papers and read them carefully, line by line, making notes on a pad in his deliberate script.
Finally he said, ‘You haven’t corroborated any of this? The shipping movements, the customs details, the contractors’ companies?’ This to Tom.
‘No, we thought we’d better talk to you first.’ ‘Check what you can, without arousing suspicion. Come back
at noon.’
‘Right.’ Tom began to draw back his chair.
‘And bring a written report of your operation, as brief and succinct as possible. Leave Kathy out of it.’
‘Fine.’ Tom was on his feet.
‘How did she get hold of the key?’ Brock asked suddenly.
‘The key?’
‘To her father’s safe. You said she had the combination and the key.’
‘Oh, yes. There was a false bottom in one of the drawers of his desk. The key and the note of the combination were kept there, along with other keys. She’d seen him access it.’
‘Hm.’ Brock turned away and they left.
They worked at adjoining desks, Tom tracking the movement of the containers and their consignments of Jamaican Dragon Stout through a friend in Customs and Excise, while Kathy checked the details of companies whose names appeared in the record using Companies House and a contact in the Fraud Squad. By noon they had compiled a fairly comprehensive background to the story outlined in Tom’s photocopied material. He had also written a highly abridged account of how he had come by it, with the help, so he said, of an unnamed member of the Roach family.
‘So there certainly were those orders and those shipments last year, Chief,’ Tom said as Brock finished reading their report.
‘What about this plastics business?’ Brock pointed to one of the names on Kathy’s schedule of companies involved in the transactions.‘Are you sure it existed?’
The order to PC Plastics in Solihull was one of the most incriminating items in the Dragon Stout file, involving the supply of 50,000 brown plastic sleeves, described as ‘wine sample containers’. These would presumably have been used to hold the cocaine inside the ‘special’ bottles of beer, hidden in the middle of each container load. However the company had gone out of business the previous year and Kathy hadn’t been able to contact its directors.
‘It certainly existed,’she said,the first time she’d spoken.‘I got details from Companies House, and I rang the local chamber of commerce, who knew of it. They also know of the managing director, name of Steven Bryce. He has other companies that are still functioning. I tried one of them and was told he’s overseas at present, on a business trip.’
A hurried breakfast and several cups of strong coffee had restored her confidence to some extent. They hadn’t been able to find anything in the papers that didn’t have some form of corroboration,and Kathy was beginning to be infected by Tom’s obvious excitement. Brock, though, betrayed no particular enthusiasm.
‘All right,’ he said eventually. ‘Leave it with me.’ He reached for the phone and they left.