Fuck that for a game of soldiers, he often though to himself.
The prisons he guested in over his period of custody — Strangeways, Wymott, Leeds and Walton — became his closed university. Four prisons, four seats of learning. The drugs trade was his chosen subject. He left clutching a Master’s degree.
Not that the theoretical principles were too difficult to learn. They were as follows. It was an easy trade so long as you did not become an addict yourself. The profits were unbelievable for a paltry outlay. You mustn’t tread on anybody’s toes — unless you mean to break them. And finally, if your organisation is set up correctly from the word go, you will not get caught because, basically, cops are thick. The connection should never be made to you, and you become rich on other people’s hard work, suffering and death.
A peach of a trade.
And Billy Crane had a very large deposit to put into his new venture — his share of the money he’d heisted from the Building Society in I986 which had never been recovered, plus a fair amount of cash from other jobs.
Ten years after entering prison he was released with a very firm business plan, some new connections and the idea that he wanted to live somewhere warm, fairly friendly and in the same time-zone as England.
It didn’t take him long to choose Tenerife as the base for his operation. He had considered the Spanish Costas, but dismissed them. They were already overrun by British criminals and were well policed. The Canary Islands were only just beginning to feature prominently in the drug trade. Within six months he owned a small bar in Los Cristianos, paid for in cash, and had bought four other apartments which he rented to holidaymakers. Within eighteen months a supply line of high-trade marijuana had been established into the UK, out of North Africa, via Tenerife and on to the streets of grubby Lancashire towns. Fourteen months on and he was shooting heroin and cocaine up through the vein of holiday air travel into the same area, using stupid young holidaymakers who came to the island for a good time and were always eager to earn extra cash.
After two years, he owned three disco-pubs on Tenerife, a couple of bars on Lanzarote, and had just bought a gorgeous villa on La Gomera, an island reached by hydrofoil from Los Cristianos harbour. He estimated himself to be worth around three million pounds sterling. Life was good and relatively easy. Sometimes, though, things went awry. And fifty grand is fifty grand in anybody’s money. It wasn’t so much the losing it that annoyed Crane. It was the manner in which it had been taken from him.
Sheer stupidity.
He believed that he, personally, needed to make a statement about this. And that was why, two days after he almost fed Loz to Nero, Crane was sitting in a plane making its final descent into Manchester Airport.
He bolted his seat belt as instructed and leaned back in the upright seat, thinking about Nero. Somehow the lion had just been a natural progression — pet-wise. All through his life he had owned big, vicious dogs which fuelled his ego. He’d even owned a couple of pit bull terriers in his time which had been confiscated by a court and destroyed after they had attacked a crying child and almost torn the brat to shreds. At his villa on La Gomera, a couple of Dobermans patrolled the grounds with evil on their minds. He loved them dearly.
The chance to own a lion had been too good to pass up. Nero had been sold to him by an Arab drug dealer and shipped secretly across from Morocco without bothering the Spanish authorities. Crane planned a new enclosure for Nero on La Gomera which would give the beast more space and a better environment. Maybe then Crane would find a mate for him.
He hoped Loz was looking after him properly.
The plane touched down without a hitch. Crane passed through Customs, no problem, and was met by a driver on the other side. Five minutes later he was in the rear of a Ford Granada speeding northwards. He picked up the mobile phone and began to make some arrangements. He wanted to conduct his business swiftly and get back to Tenerife as soon as possible.
The last collection was made at lunchtime. The discreet but heavily armoured security van drew up outside the bank in Carlisle. Two guards jumped out of the front cab, leaving one man at the wheel and another locked inside the rear of the van. All the men were dressed in identical protective clothing: full-face crash helmets, bulletproof Kevlar vests and body armour to protect arms, legs and groins. Even the one inside the back of the van was required by strict company regulations to wear this outfit at all times, although he rarely wore the helmet.
Following a prearranged signal, the two guards were allowed into the side door of the bank. The money was already waiting for them in four suitcase-sized boxes with carrying handles. They were locked, of course. The guards picked up the containers and signed the receipt. A minute later they were outside again. The shute on the side of the van opened and the boxes were slid quickly into the waiting hands of the guard inside. He stacked them up alongside all the other boxes, just under fifty in total, collected from banks all over Southern Scotland and Northern England.
The guards jumped into the front cab. One of them slid on to the seat behind the driver. The doors were locked and the van set off.
Within minutes they were travelling south on the M6.
The driver was a man called Colin Hodge. He gave his workmates a sidelong glance as they chatted with relief. The last collection meant there had been no hitches and now they were on the motorway, it was plain sailing. Hodge smiled thinly, trying hard to mask his evil thoughts.
He turned his attention back to the driving.
His heart was beating fast and he was sweating. The palms of his hands were slimy and damp, making gripping the steering wheel difficult.
None of the security guards knew the exact amount they were carrying in the van. However, it did not take too much discreet nosying about, a few questions here and there, a little listening at doorways, plus the professional guesstimates of people familiar with heaving large amounts of cash about, to make a pretty good stab at the size of the load, all of which was in used, crinkled, sometimes damaged — but eminently serviceable — Bank of England or Scotland notes which were being transported to be incinerated to nothing.
Hodge nearly whimpered in frustration at the thought.
What a waste of perfectly good money!
He pressed his foot on the accelerator and increased the speed of the van to sixty, the maximum it was permitted to travel. He tried to keep his mind focused on the three lanes ahead, blocking the thought from his mind that very soon, if all went well, some of that money would be bypassing the incinerator and going into his pockets instead.
Henry Christie stared at the grease-laden meal in front of him. Typical transport-cafe fare. The Trucker’s All-day Breakfast Special. No wonder, he thought, so many drivers died of heart attacks. All that cholesterol must clog up their veins. The new, health-conscious Henry Christie, the man who had shed half a stone, who had motivated himself to run for twenty minutes every day, found the thought terrifying. His alter ego, Frank Jagger, however, was not so fussy. He tucked in with relish, whilst keeping a wary eye on the comings and goings around him.
He was sitting in a cafe on the A580 East Lancs Road, south of Leigh, near to Junction 23 of the M6. It was an establishment catering almost exclusively for long-distance lorry drivers. There must have been over sixty heavy goods vehicles outside in the huge lorry park, and the cafe itself was bubbling with the last dregs of the lunchtime trade. Although he was not certain, Henry suspected that Jacky Lee had some financial interest in the place. Even if he hadn’t, it was an ideal place to do business, particularly involving large shipments of stolen goods, because it was one of those busy, stop-start places where everyone and everything is transient.