by Ripley, Mike
Rather than struggling through the West End and crossing the river into Brixton and Lewisham, where BMWs were known as ‘Bobs’ after Bob Marley and the Wailers, I cut north through Hendon and on to the AI until it hit the M25 orbital at South Mimms. In the morning, the M25 clockwise is always quieter than anticlockwise so I made good time, putting my foot down on the early stretch through Hertfordshire and easing off once I got into Essex, where the traffic cops were known to be more active.
I have always enjoyed going over the Dartford Bridge, with its panoramic views of oil storage tanks one way and the fins of the Thames Barrier the other. It is worth the £1 toll whereas crossing south-to-north you have to use the Dartford Tunnel and you pay for a lungful of the exhaust fumes of the car in front.
Half-way over the bridge, I passed a white Transit van. On the rear doors, written with a finger in the dust and grime, was the legend: IF DRIVEN PROPERLY, PLEASE REPORT STOLEN.
I liked that. You saw far too many of those prissy ‘Like My Driving? Then ring . . .’ notices on the back of big corporation trucks these days. What sort of person likes driving behind an articulated lorry carrying frozen fish fingers enough to admire the trucker’s skills? A sad one, that’s who. And what sort of person would bother to phone a corporate PR answerphone to record their gratitude? The one who would buy the T-shirt saying ‘I’m Upholding the Highway Code’ when everybody else was wearing one saying ‘I’m Pissed and I’ve Got a Gun’.
I wondered if the Transit van was beer-running, but I could tell from the way it sat on its suspension and swayed in the wind going over the bridge that it was empty.
There, I congratulated myself as I threw my pound coin into the Auto Toll basket, I was an expert already.
Immediately after the toll booths, something like ten lines of traffic do a Grand Prix start to get back on to the M25 motorway. There’s nothing much to it, the trick is point yourself roughly towards the middle, go like hell and don’t look to either side.
After that I took the M20 exit and followed the signs for Maidstone, Ashford and the Channel Tunnel entrance outside Folkestone. Almost immediately the traffic dropped away enough to allow the Beamer to hit a respectable cruising speed. Even the sun came out, but not enough to make me put the roof down. I might have been tempted if Amy had had any decent music cassettes in the car but I had forgotten to pack any of mine and so I made do with some re-released BBC Sessions of Led Zeppelin. So what if they were over twenty years old? At least I knew all the words.
I stopped at a service station to buy a couple of maps, one of the North Downs area and one a town plan of Dover itself. Next to the local maps was an entire shelf of road atlases and guides to driving in Europe and, in particular, the Calais area. I picked one at random called ‘A Shopper’s Guide to Calais’ and opened it up. On one side was a street map of the town itself, surrounded by adverts for local French businesses. On the other side was a much bigger map which showed only the main roads and the locations of the cheap booze warehouses and hypermarkets, around thirty of them. Nothing else, it would appear, was of the slightest interest to the visitor to France.
Outside the service station shop I dug my mobile phone out of my bag and made a call.
There was a time before the phones were digital when you could really freak out the electronics on the petrol pumps if you used a mobile near a garage. There would be an innocent businessman ringing his girlfriend telling her he was going to be late because he had to go home first, and down the rank an irate trucker would be trying to turn off a jammed pump as diesel spilled out of his full tank and over his boots. Ah, those were the days.
I punched in the number of Nick Lawrence the Customs man, from the card Murdo had left with Veronica, and entered it in the memory just in case I needed to call him again. It was his direct line and he answered on the second ring with the single word ‘Lawrence’.
I said who I was and who had sent me and he told me he’d been expecting a call and would be free at one o’clock. When I asked where, he suggested a pub called the King Louis and, with the town plan stretched over the bonnet of the BMW, I got him to direct me through the one-way system. He told me to head for a multi-storey car-park as there was no parking at the pub, but it was just around the corner so I’d find it.
I asked if we’d find any beer-runners there and he said no, not there, and then hung up like he had something more important to do.
Somehow I managed to refold the town plan without ripping it and climbed into the car before consulting the tourist map of the North Downs area. I found the village of Whitcomb up what was called the Elham valley and worked out a route which would get me off the motorway and across country so that I could do a drive-by of Murdo’s pub the Rising Sun and then pick up the A20 to Dover the other side of Folkestone.
It was still too early for the pub to be open, but I had plenty of time before the meet with Nick Lawrence so I might as well check it out. If nothing else I could keep a private eye on the Bottleback bin in the car-park, which might give me a clue.
A clue to what was another matter, but I was sure I would spot one if I saw one. And what finer way was there to spend a couple of fresh spring days? It beat going to Paris with a trio of scantily clad models, didn’t it?
Didn’t it?
The village of Whitcomb was nothing to shout about. Technically it was probably a hamlet with no more than thirty houses strung out either side of a narrow B-road almost as if they’d fallen off the back of some gigantic lorry as it careered down the lane.
If there was a church I didn’t see it, nor a village shop. The houses were not thatched or timber-framed or anything cutesy, giving Whitcomb a pretty low rating on the picturesque scale.
The Rising Sun was tacked forgetfully on to the northern end of the village a good half-mile from the last house, set back from a bend in the road. I slowed down to a crawl to get a better look, keeping one eye on the mirror in case I was blocking the road, though I hadn’t seen a single other vehicle on it.
Like the village, the pub would never be a contender for a Kent County Tourist Board calendar but a picture of it could have featured in an advertisement for exterior paint, though only as the ‘before’ shot, not the ‘after’. It was probably seventy or eighty years old, which is nothing in country pub terms, built of brick which had been painted sunshine yellow at some time but now looked like bleached custard and had a tile roof.
A weathered inn sign depicting a sun with a beatific, fat smile peeping over a green meadow swung precariously on a freestanding pole from which most of the white paint had flaked. A long rectangular board in a reasonable state of repair broadcast the legend ‘Seagrave’s Seaside Ale’ above the door, which was firmly closed.
To the left of the pub was the car-park, which seemed huge to me but then I was used to London pubs, few of which had them. At the far end were two green plastic bins about five foot high and shaped like beehives with a porthole in the top. I could just make out the words ‘Green glass’ on one and ‘Clear glass’ on the other.
That was it. No sign of life anywhere. No clues.
I reversed into the car-park and turned the BMW towards the Dover road.
There are two ways of driving into Dover. Both are spectacular.
You can come in round the castle and think: why did they build that there? Or you can come in, as I did, from the A20 and see the White Cliffs and then the natural harbour below you and think: why only one castle? For God’s sake, we’re only twenty miles from the enemy, we need more defences than this. You think Land’s End is where England stops. That’s not the point; Dover is where Europe starts. Dangerwise, this is the direction we should be looking.
The road dives down the famous White Clifs into the town. I spotted a Hovercraft out at sea and a car ferry coming in to dock at the ferry terminal, but there wasn’t a bluebird in sight. They had probably been put off by the exhaust fumes of the solid convoy of trucks creeping up the hill out of the port. It really did look
like a continuous stream of traffic and almost all were lorries. From their registrations, most were Dutch or French but there was the old German, Dane, Swede, Italian and something I guessed was either Serb or Croat. The sheer number of them made me think the port must be bigger than I remembered, but it was still the same size, it was just that it was incredibly busy.
I thought of something to ask Nick Lawrence when I met him: how on earth can you control what is coming in this constant flood of traffic? I knew the answer already: you can’t.
Once down in the town proper, with the old Western Docks and the Hovercraft Terminal on my right, I followed the instructions Lawrence had given me against the town map I had open on the passenger seat. The one-way system wasn’t half as difficult as he’d said it was, but you always get that when locals give you directions to where they live. ‘Oh, you’ll never find it’, they say, as if living somewhere easy to find was a bit downmarket.
I eased the BMW through the congested High Street and found the old London road. Every other shop seemed to be a Chinese take-away or a kebab shop. I almost felt at home and figured that this beer-running lark must give you an appetite.
Following the map, I doubled back through the one-way system until I saw the signs for a multi-storey car-park. I took a ticket from the machine and zipped up to the second floor, as the first level was jammed solid, to find I had it entirely to myself. That was not a good sign. The earlier arrivals had squeezed uncomfortably into every inch of space on Level 1 rather than drive for an additional ten seconds to get up to the second or third floors. That meant at best that the lifts didn’t work or that no one wanted to leave their car out of sight of the pensioner who manned the exit barrier and collected the money. I locked the Beamer and tried the door handle out of sheer paranoia, making a mental note to tell Veronica she should pitch for the job of supplying the car-park with video cameras.
The rear exit to the multi-storey brought me out on to a back street behind a shopping precinct and at the end of that I could see the King Louis pub on the corner of the street opposite.
I hadn’t thought about it until I saw the sign above the door but the pub was named after Louis Armstrong and the sign was a painted reproduction of a photograph of old Satchelmouth himself. A sun-faded notice in one of the windows claimed there was live jazz there every Sunday night. I should have brought my trumpet and busked a few quid.
It was still twenty minutes before noon, the magical hour which most Englishmen think is the official start of the drinking day, though it doesn’t seem to worry the French or the Germans or virtually anybody else. But I thought, what the hell. Somewhere on the world wide web it was after noon and that was good enough for me.
The pub wasn’t empty, but you’d have needed heat-sensors to detect that there were six or seven customers in there from the outside. They were fairly evenly spread throughout the one bar, which dog-legged into an L shape ending in a raised stage area decorated with old posters and photographs of jazz musicians. All were reading newspapers and most were smoking, trails of smoke from their ashtrays snaking up to the ceiling, mingling with the dust motes in the sunlight from the windows. Not one of them looked up as I entered and moved to the bar.
There was a single bar stool and I nodded towards it. The man behind the bar said, ‘Good morning’ and shrugged at the stool to indicate that it wasn’t anyone’s favourite seat, or at least nobody important or at the very least nobody coming in today with cash money.
I ordered a pint of Seagrave’s Top Mild in a tone of voice which I hoped sounded as if I knew what I was talking about. The barman looked surprised, but didn’t say anything and reached for the beer pump. I looked around rapidly as I settled my buttocks on the stool. I was the only one drinking the Top Mild and there was a good reason for this: I should have looked first. It was the same situation as when I was once touring Scotland (driving a very bad, but very loud, Heavy Metal band) and had asked a Scot, one Slasher Carmichael, which whiskies to drink in the pubs on the tour. He’d told me to watch what the locals drank and follow suit, as that would be the best value on the premises. It was good advice I should have remembered. There was a Rule of Life in there somewhere.
The barman was a big guy with a beard worthy of an American Civil War officers’ call and his short-sleeved shirt held arms as big as Parma hams except that Parma hams don’t normally have tattoos saying ‘DO NOT start with me, you will NOT win’. He also had several anchors and what I hoped was a torpedo covering one bicep. With that beard he could have passed for a retired merchant seaman. This was Dover; he probably was.
He gave me my beer and change and shuffled off to the other end of the bar to go back to the Daily Mirror crossword. So much for conversation, but that seemed to be the norm. Maybe this bunch didn’t mind drinking before noon, as long as they didn’t have to talk to anybody. I felt as if I should have brought a book with me, or knitting. To keep myself occupied I tried to read all the jazz posters dotted around the pub and it was only then I noticed that most of them had nothing to do with jazz at all. A fair proportion were notices, some of them handwritten. Among them were: ‘Don’t ask for cigarette papers, we don’t sell them’, ‘Runners touting for business will be shown the street’ and ‘All spirits in this establishment are legal’. I got the impression that the people who ran the pub had something on their minds.
‘The reason they don’t sell cigarette papers,’ said a voice behind me, ‘is that there’s no legal rolling tobacco sold in the town any more, so if you’ve got some it must be smuggled. It’s a form of protest. You must be Roy Angel.’
‘And you must be early,’ I said as I turned my head.
He was about my height but chunkier, with light brown hair cropped very short. Under an open reversible storm coat he wore a light blue suit, a four-button Italian cut with high lapels, neither of which he had bought in an Oxfam shop. I guessed he was about forty but you can never be sure these days.
‘Nick Lawrence,’ he said to me, then, to the bearded barman: ‘Usual, Bob.’
The barman took the top off a bottle of Coke and placed it on the bar. Lawrence picked it up without waiting for a glass, making no effort to pay. He tipped it towards me then took a swig.
He seemed to be settled where he was, leaning against the bar next to me, but I thought he might prefer a seat so I asked; ‘Are you OK to talk here?’
Lawrence chose to misunderstand.
‘We’re fine here, aren’t we, Bob?’ he said loudly and the barman bobbed his beard twice. ‘This is a runner-free zone, this pub is, just about the only place in Dover where you pay full whack for everything. Right, Bob?’
There was a grunt from somewhere inside the beard.
‘Bob’s had his car vandalised and his windows smashed but he still chucks ’em out if they come round touting for orders.’
‘Orders?’
‘Oh yeah, they take your order and do your shopping for you, whether you want them to or not.’ He saw me looking at my pint of beer. ‘Not beer, though, not in a pub. A publican would have to be really stupid to sell French beer across the bar. The beer goes to the corner shop, ’specially the ones run by Asians who take it rather than risk a petrol-bombing. But a pub could be tempted by some duty-free spirits or cigarettes at Belgian prices.’
He produced a packet of Benson & Hedges and offered me one but I declined.
‘No, look,’ he said.
On the corner of the flip-top of the pack was a paper seal which carried a price in francs – F118,00 –and the description ‘20 Sigaretten’.
‘I bought these last night out of a ciggy machine in a pub in Folkestone. The landlord of the pub knew nothing about them. Genuine. He wasn’t on the fiddle, the guy who filled the cigarette machine was though. Buys his own stock at £2 a packet and retails them through a pub machine for £4, pockets the difference. Nice work if you can get it.’
He lit one of the cigarettes with a disposable lighter and exhaled blue-grey smoke in my face, k
eeping eye contact, almost willing me to complain.
‘I’m told you’re the man to ask about beer-running,’ I said, not allowing my eyes to water just to show him I was tough too.
He waited a beat before answering.
‘Ah yes, Murdo. I try and help him when I can. Feel sorry for him in many ways, but he should have seen all this coming. If I’d’ve been him, I’d’ve sold up and gone to live in Switzerland five years ago. There’s so much smuggled beer in Kent now I don’t know how he keeps his pubs open. He won’t beat the runners.’
‘Can’t you?’
‘You mean the full might of Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise?’
‘I suppose so.’
He shrugged his shoulders.
‘Other priorities, I’m afraid. It all comes down to money, to budgets. We get more officers, we have to justify them by increasing our results, increasing our productivity. We have targets now, comparisons with industry, all that fucking bullshit.’
I tried to look sympathetic for the plight of a tax-collector. It was a first.
‘And beer-running doesn’t count for many Brownie points, is that it?’
‘Our number one priority: drugs. Has to be. Big problem, big villains, big result every time we score, lots of good press and public approval. Priority number three: guns. Not as sexy a story as you might think but the politicians love us for it. Good for law and order and keeps the Police Federation quiet.’
He was on a roll so I didn’t interrupt.
‘Four: tobacco. Easy to smuggle, dead easy, and mega-profits. Mega tax-loss for the government too, and nobody’s going to stick up for smokers these days, are they? So we’ve got to be seen to be hot on the ciggy-runners and sometimes you can score heavily. We did a lorry two weeks ago, supposed to be carrying rolls of newsprint. One of them was hollow. Contained one and a half million cigs. Whammo! One pull and that’s £4,000,000 to the good on the revenue accounts, or at least it looks that way.
