by Ripley, Mike
‘Out of Yellow Pages,’ she answered too quickly. Then when she saw my eyebrows hitting the roof, she gabbled: ‘But our clients are buying impartial, expert advice from professionals they can trust.’
‘Of course they are, Veronica, that’s absolutely right.’
I left the thought Stella has trained you well hanging in the air.
Her face darkened. ‘There’s no need to patronise me, Angel.’
‘Hey, I’m not,’ I said, palms up, all innocence. ‘I think it’s a great idea. You’re like personal shoppers for the Neighbourhood Watch. Sounds like a business plan to me.’
She screwed up her eyes so they looked like a pair of seagulls coming at me head on.
‘We do do other sorts of security consultancy as it happens.’
She shot the cuffs on her TALtop and opened a drawer in the desk, taking out a thin blue file. She laid it on the desk top in front of her and tapped it with a forefinger.
‘This is why I rang you.’
She paused for effect.
‘Why did you ring me at Stuart Street?’ I asked, which she wasn’t expecting.
‘I keep in touch with Lisabeth and Fenella. They said you popped round quite a lot to rehearse.’
‘Rehearse?’
‘To play your trumpet. They said you kept them up until two o’clock one night last week.’
Yeah, well, it had been a good night out with some of the lads from the old days and I hadn’t felt like going home when the pubs had shut and in truth I was getting out of practice now I didn’t play in public and, anyway it had seemed like a good idea at the time. You had to be there.
‘I do pop back occasionally,’ I said.
‘And I didn’t have your new number. It’s Hampstead, isn’t it?’
Some detective.
‘It’s best to get me on my mobile,’ I said casually.
‘But I didn’t have that either and neither did Fenella.’
Too right she didn’t. I may be getting old but if you can still remember it’s called Alzheimer’s, you haven’t got it.
‘Anyway,’ Veronica went on airily, ‘I wasn’t too sure about ringing you at home. I didn’t know how your new . . . er . . . your . . .’
She had seen my expression change this time. Maybe she wasn’t such a bad detective.
‘Partner,’ I completed for her.
‘Yes, of course, partner. I didn’t know how she would react to me contacting you.’ She paused and stroked the sleeve of her TALtop. ‘She makes nice clothes, though.’
‘I’ll pass on the official Veronica Blugden seal of approval,’ I said keenly, almost as if I meant it.
‘Please do. I’ve read about her in Hello magazine, you know.’
I remembered the day they’d come to interview her. She’d sent me to a factory in Leicester with an urgent delivery of colour swatches. By train. Second class.
‘Next time I see her,’ I said. ‘She likes to keep the customer satisfied, stay in touch with the grass roots motivational driving force of the market – the consumer. That sort of thing. She might even ask you to join one of her focus groups.’
‘Would she really?’
How would I know? I’d just made them up.
‘Could do.’ I made a point of looking all around the office before resuming eye contact. ‘Wasn’t there something else you wanted to say?’
For maybe two seconds she blanked me – the lights on but nobody home, her mind on another planet. Then she cleared her throat and flipped open the file on her desk in as professional a manner as she could muster.
‘Seagrave’s Seaside Ales,’ she announced, as if making a presentation from a lectern.
‘That’s very kind, Veronica, but I’ve got to drive later, so how about a cup of tea?’
‘No, no, I meant have you heard of them?’
She was more flustered than angry, but then she always had been dead easy to wind up. Too easy really. I should pick on someone my own size, even though she was bigger than me.
‘Vaguely,’ I said slowly. ‘A small family brewery in Kent, with about half a dozen pubs in London mostly in the City or south of the river. Got their own hop farm, so they use a lot of hops. “A positive frisson of bitterness”, I think the Good Beer Guide said of their premium bitter. Famous for their very strong winter warmers and they pick a new name every year, usually something to do with the Church. I think it was Archbishop’s Revenge last year. They also, though there’s not many people know this, brew Mongoose beer – the lager you get in most Indian restaurants these days. Oh, and they’ve still got horse-drawn delivery drays which you see in virtually every BBC costume drama series. A private company, I think, so they’re not quoted on the stock market. Apart from that, never heard of ‘em.’
Veronica gave it a beat, then quickly closed the file in front of her.
‘You’ve looked them up, haven’t you? How did you know it was Seagrave’s?’
‘You said it was a brewery when you phoned.’
‘Yes,’ she snapped triumphantly, sharp as a pistol, ‘but I didn’t say which one.’
‘No, you didn’t. It was the other thing you mentioned that gave it away.’
‘What other thing?’
‘Smuggling.’
My father always used to say that he’d voted to join the Common Market, as it was then back in the early Seventies, for the cheap booze. To me, that was the one, best and only reason for going to the polls. Ever.
But twenty-five years on, it still hadn’t happened even though we were now in the European Union and for five years had been in a Single European Market, with a single pan-Europe currency – the Euro – looming on the horizon. There was cheap booze all right, trouble was it was all in France.
With excise duty something like eight times higher in Britain, beer was a particular bargain across the Channel and since the Single Market came in allowing (supposedly) the free traffic of goods across borders, around thirty dedicated booze stores had opened up in Calais alone. Not that the good burghers of Calais did their shopping there; the vast majority of customers were British – day trippers, returning holiday-makers, lorry drivers on the home run and, as always, the wide boys out to make a quick profit.
The press called them Bootleggers at first, which made a good headline even though it was totally inaccurate. Bootleggers were involved in the making of illicit booze, not just the buying and selling. The guys in Scotland who brewed up a counterfeit version of Stolichnaya Russian vodka a few years back, they were bootleggers and they would have got away with it for a lot longer if they had noticed that an honest Stoly bottle had ‘Made in Russia Liquor Botle’ embossed on the base. They just hadn’t considered that a spelling mistake could be used to identify the genuine article rather than the fake, so they got caught. And there was the fact that their version, unlike the real thing, also contained 1.34 per cent methanol which, according to the Poisons Unit at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, gave rise to ‘the possibility of permanent damage to vision’.
Those sorts of guys were bootleggers. Okay, not very good ones. They got caught, fortunately before anyone went blind.
The guys who hired a beat-up Transit van, drove down to Dover, threw up on an out-of-season ferry, bought (for cash) enough bottled beer to bend the axles on the van and then flogged it door-to-door round Woolwich or Barking, those guys were smugglers not bootleggers.
Just about anybody could do it, that was the beauty of it. You didn’t need a Heavy Goods Vehicle licence, just a relatively clean driving licence and a local van hire firm who probably made you sign a waiver saying that you wouldn’t do anything illegal in it, not that you would.
Nipping over to France to do a bit of shopping wasn’t illegal. Buying booze there wasn’t illegal; it had, after all, paid French tax even if the French idea of excise duty was somewhat cavalier compared to that of your average British Roundhead politician. And you could buy as much as you liked.
Sure, there were theoretical limits to wh
at you could bring back but these were ‘indicative limits’ though no one was quite sure what they were indicative of. They were, in fact, the limits over which the Customs officers waiting at Dover could rightly have a suspicion that you were up to no good. Someone somewhere in authority had determined that 110 litres of beer (over 180 pints – not a bad night out), seventy bottles of wine and ten large bottles of spirits was indicative of an amount you might use for personal consumption. Funny that they never used those sorts of volumes when they talked about cannabis.
But you could get a lot more than 110 litres of beer in the back of a Transit van, maybe ten times that if you stuck to cases of beer and beer was where the bargains were to be had. Unless you had a doctor’s note saying you were a registered alcoholic (and that had been tried), there might be some doubt in a suspicious Customs officer’s mind that getting on for two thousand pints was indeed for ‘personal consumption’. All you had to do then was give a good excuse. It was your fiftieth birthday party next week and you had invitations to prove it; the ones you’d had printed up on the £3-a-go business card machines in every train and underground station. Or it was your daughter’s/sister’s/cousin’s wedding next month and you even had a booking form for the church hall which you’d hired for the reception; and which you’d cancel as soon as you got home to get your deposit back.
And so on. That was if you got stopped, of course. Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise officers admitted that maybe they pulled one in ten suspicious vans. They did, after all, have other things on their mind such as drugs, guns and illegal immigrants. And even if they did pull you, all they could do was ask questions about why you had enough beer in the back of the van to keep a country pub going for a week.
If you had a semi-plausible excuse, and you would have because you would have rehearsed one, they had to let you go. After all, you were still not doing anything illegal.
It was when, a few hours later, you had unloaded the van and were selling the beer from the back of a car at a car boot sale, or delivering to the back door of an unlicensed drinking club in Brixton, or flogging by the bottle to school kids behind the bike sheds, that’s when you were doing something illegal.
That was smuggling.
‘So you’re an expert on smuggling, are you?’
I assumed this was Veronica’s attempt at sarcasm.
‘I never said that. I know it goes on, sure. Who doesn’t? I’ve probably bought a few pints which were smuggled at one time. Inadvertently of course.’
In fact I had a fridge full of 25-centilitre ‘dumpies’, the small, fist-sized bottles, of French lager back at Stuart Street as we spoke. I kept them there in case of emergencies, a bit like explorers in the Antarctic have depots of supplies stashed at strategic intervals.
‘Oh, that’s a pity,’ Veronica sighed. ‘I sort of assumed you would be.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you were the sort of person who was street-wear . . .’
‘Streetwise. Streetwear is what Amy sells.’
‘Yes, streetwise, wise in the ways of. . . .’
‘The street.’
I tried to think of the opposite of ‘streetwise’ but there wasn’t a word bad enough.
‘Quite. You always seemed the sort of person who would know what was going on. You kept your eyes open, you were good at observing things others missed. You always used to see through people who weren’t genuine. And you were always ready to help people when they needed it, just like you helped Estelle and I. We would never have set up this agency if it hadn’t been for you.’
She was going out of her way to flatter me and she had obviously rehearsed what she would say, so I decided to sit back, enjoy it and let her say it. Then I realised she was talking in the past tense.
‘Of course, that was a couple of years ago and things have changed. You’ve done very well for yourself and you’re moving in different circles now. You’re wearing suits – and very nice you look, too. You’ve got a stake in a very successful business. Maybe you’ve got commitments at home now that you’re . . .’
‘Veronica, when do I start?’
I knew when I was beaten.
3
‘So what exactly are you supposed to do?’ was the first thing Amy asked. It was the one thing I should have asked.
‘First off I have to go down to Kent and see a man who owns a brewery, tomorrow morning.’
One of the silver thread TALtop models pushed between us facing me and proving that not all models were flat-chested waifs. I leaned back in case Amy got the wrong idea and almost sent a family-pizza-sized silver salver flying.
I was back in Sloman and Son’s emporium in the middle of the Silver Vaults and Nigel the photographer seemed no further forward that when I had left. There must have been fifty Polaroid test shots scattered around the place, mostly on the floor, and at least three silver tankards and a specimen golf cup trophy had been pressed into service as ashtrays. Nigel had taken my tip and killed the floodlights but with him, six models, Amy and a couple of Nigel’s assistants milling about the place, the temperature was nudging unbearable. To avoid sweatstains, the models were happily standing around in their bras, a can of deodorant in one hand, a Marlboro in the other.
It wouldn’t have surprised me if young Reuben Sloman had thrown a wobbler and told us never to tarnish his silverware again, but he seemed to be loving it. He flitted around the girls like a moth round a bedroom lamp. I half expected to hear the hiss as he got his fingers scorched. He was explaining the beauties of an eighteenth-century cruet set to one of them, who looked about as interested as I would have been, when he saw me. He grinned inanely, gave me a thumbs-up and went back to his lecture on hallmarks. Even across the shop through the smoke haze, I could tell that his glasses had misted up.
‘If Nigel doesn’t get his finger out soon, we’ll have the bloody cleaners in here with us,’ Amy was saying. ‘It’s like something out of a Marx Brothers film as it is. Are you taking the BMW?’
‘What?’
It never pays to let the mind wander (especially over a young model) when Amy is talking.
‘Tomorrow, when you go to this brewery in Kent.’
‘Drive the Beamer through south London? No way. I’ll be picked up as a pimp.’
‘You wish,’ she said unkindly. ‘So you’ll take the Freelander?’
‘Don’t you need it?’
‘No, I told you, I’m doing a marketing seminar out at Brocket Hall. They’re sending a car for me.’
‘Oh yeah, of course,’ I said, trying to remember if she had told me or whether this was a test. ‘But the Freelander might give the wrong impression out in the country. People might think I’m a farmer or something.’
‘So to avoid being mistaken for a pimp or a farmer, you’re going to take Armstrong and let everyone think you’re a cabbie who’s lost his fare?’
‘A London cab blends in, nobody notices them,’ I tried.
‘Out in the sticks in Kent? In the middle of all those orchards and fields and things?’
‘Come on, Amy, it’s only Kent, for Christ’s sake. It’s commuter country, part of the stockbroker belt, it’s like Woolwich with green bits in between the houses.’
‘You’ll stick out like a sore thumb. The locals will have you spotted in minutes. They’ll probably stone you or shoot your tyres out for being an incomer.’
‘Oh, don’t be such a big girl’s blouse. I’m talking about a drive down to Kent not a safari through Iraq.’
But perhaps I should have been.
As things turned out, that might have been safer.
I left Amy in the Silver Vaults promising to pick her up later and run her down to the River Café where she was due to have dinner with some clients, potential buyers from Estonia or somewhere. I wasn’t actually invited along to the dinner but I was needed to chauffeur her there as parking was such a bitch in Chelsea. The BMW or the Freelander could have been ticketed or clamped or even nicked but Armstrong wou
ld have just blended into the background. It was nice to know he had his uses.
Before that he had another job on, getting me to Hackney and back in the rush hour as I had a vital piece of research to undertake: I had to go shopping.
In the days before the expressions like ‘7–11’ or ‘convenience store’ were imported from America, any shop which opened early and closed late was either a garage or a ‘Patel’ after the owners who always seemed to be Mr and Mrs Patel. There were three Patels within walking distance of my old flat in Stuart Street and all, in their turn, had saved my life by being conveniently open when I needed them at short notice: for that desperate packet of cigarettes at 6 a.m. when I had run out at 5 a.m., for that vital herb or spice half-way through a recipe and, most importantly, for that essential bottle of vodka to take to a party after the pubs had shut.
The one where I had bought the French lager wasn’t a Patel in the technical sense as it was run by a Sikh family, Mr and Mrs Singh, and it was Mrs Singh who was on duty by the cash register when I pushed open the door, activating the closed-circuit television cameras.
Mrs Singh had a black-and-white monitor behind her checkout counter, next to a portable television which showed Zee TV all the hours they were open. The closed-circuit system was there to cover the aisles of the shop, where everything from knitting wool to cat food to rental videos to Panadol (another regular on my shopping list at one time) was piled on shelves well above head height. The only items stacked in plain view of the counter were the sweets and chocolates and the alcohol. The confectionery was at risk from thieving school kids in the afternoon and both from drunks late at night, when they realised that they didn’t have enough cash for a take-away because they’d just whacked back eight pints on an empty stomach. Mrs Singh obviously trusted her own eagle eyes rather than the closed-circuit for security, and even then the cigarettes and spirits were stacked behind her cash register. I wondered if she’d bought the system from Veronica.
Despite the suit, she recognised me, though I had not seen her for several months. I smiled and we exchanged Hellos and I drifted along the shelves of canned and bottled beer which were interspersed with bottles of alcoholic concoctions flavoured with lemons, oranges, cherries, passion fruit, ginseng, ginger, glucose, even hemp. (No, not that sort.) It took me a while to focus on those that were actually flavoured with beer.
