Peter looked at me and gave me that universal handshake that overrides any language. ‘I know what you are talking about,’ he said. ‘I can get you girls.’
‘Are these girls working as prostitutes now?’ I asked, not wanting to fall into the same trap as the bloody railway station.
‘No, no, no, they come from Luník; they are poor girls …’
I interrupted him. ‘I don’t want poor girls. I want good girls with good teeth, beautiful hair. I want pretty girls. I’m bringing in people who want to spend a lot of money.’
‘Ah, yeah yeah yeah, no no no … girls good-looking in Luník just very poor,’ he assured me. ‘I tell them they are gonna work for you, and you are gonna look after them. You can break them in easy. I help you.’
This was great stuff, if true, but obviously I needed to see the girls, and I suspected they probably weren’t at the high end of the market. He explained to me about their passports – he would take care of that. Getting them in and out of the country was no problem – he clearly had a tried and tested route. I could even sell them back to him, and he would move them on to Ireland. That was all I wanted to know.
Richard Bilton had shot the lot from the other side of the street but we had none of this on film. I needed to arrange a dinner for the next night so we could go through it all again on camera. They hadn’t patted us down – euro signs were all they saw. In the meantime, we needed to get some general shots of Luník – even our interpreter from Prague said the place was frightening. David would drive Julius the next morning and keep moving and rolling on a tiny camera. It wasn’t the kind of place where you wanted to stop.
We needed to make a plan. I went down to the bar area to arrange the seating. It was only a small place and I wanted to commandeer the big table. That would mean getting there a couple of hours early. I told the bar manager I needed it for an important meeting.
‘We don’t reserve tables,’ he said. I slipped him twenty euros. ‘No problem, Sir.’ And he slipped a glass on the table with a reserved sign propped up against it. Local rules always applied.
As the meeting drew closer, Richard and Julius got a table in the restaurant opposite – it really was that easy. They would film Peter arriving. We got kitted out in my room, checked my buttonhole camera in my shirt, and drilled everything a couple of times. All we had to do was to get him to run through everything he had said last night and mention the girls by name, and we had him.
The bar was busy by the time Peter and his sidekick came in. Before they reached where we were sitting, a guy two tables to our right got up and said something to Peter. Fuck – he had been there an hour. Who the hell was he and what did he say? Was that a business associate, a coincidence or some kind of back-watcher for Peter? I was on my guard now. Ten minutes later, a couple came in to the bar area to meet this guy and then left with him. On the way out he made a point of saying goodbye to Peter – did it mean everything or nothing? I couldn’t know for sure. I certainly felt less paranoid now they had left, but it didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone else watching out for him in the bar.
It was time to get down to business. Peter asked me where the girls were going to live. I told him near Hounslow – there would be lots of people coming in to Heathrow who wanted a bit of fun for the night. That was my clientele, along with people who wanted ‘private parties’, and I needed them just after Christmas.
‘Not a problem,’ he said. ‘But we need to talk money.’
I had a rough idea of the going rate but it wasn’t the 10,000 euros each he was looking for.
‘What?’ I laughed in his face. ‘You’re joking. I’m not paying 10,000 each for a girl I have to break in. That’s too much money.’
‘Okay maybe between five and seven.’ He automatically dropped his price.
‘I want good girls. Good hair, good teeth and not been fucked many times,’ I reiterated.
‘Yes, no problem. I’ve got two good girls,’ he promised.
‘From Luník?’ I asked, disbelieving again.
‘Yes, from Luník.’
I had to be sure they were my girls and mine only, and nobody else got commission. ‘Why should they be working for someone else?’ he replied. ‘What would be the point of it when she works with him and then she works with him?’
‘I will put them on the coach. Somebody will travel with them to make sure they are delivered to you. You can meet them at Victoria. And I need the money up front.’
I had 10,000 euros on me. ‘I don’t do business like that,’ I replied. I couldn’t just hand over BBC cash like that and risk not seeing him again. ‘Half up front, and half when I take the girls,’ I bargained. ‘I need to see the girls. Where are the girls?’
Then we hit a brick wall. ‘The girls aren’t here at the moment.’
My alarms bells started ringing. Was he bullshitting me, expecting me to just hand over the cash? Did he really have the girls? ‘Where are the girls?’ I repeated.
‘At home,’ he lied.
I knew it was bollocks. At best, I thought we would be lucky to get two old dogs. ‘I need to talk to my boys, Peter.’
I walked away from the table to discuss it. I told Paul and Dom I thought he was a small-time crook, just after our money. Why come to this second meeting without the goods, and worse, not really knowing where they were? We were so nearly there, in that we had it all on tape, but we couldn’t get over the final hurdle. Paul persuaded me to hang on, have a few drinks and see what else he had to say, so I fed him the usual waffle about football, sex, cars – again I promised he could have a foot in the door of my empire, bigging myself up to get the girls back on track, promising him imports into Slovakia.
‘Okay, I call you tomorrow,’ he assured me. Then his phone rang. ‘I need to take this call. I need to take this call,’ he said, excusing himself. He was garbling away in some sort of Romany Slovak dialect at twice the speed of anything comprehensible. I looked at David to see if he could pick any of the words out. He looked slightly shocked – he couldn’t make it out either.
When he hung up I asked him if everything was OK.
‘Yeah, yeah, problem, problem. I might have to go back to England pretty soon.’
That was perfect – we could meet him there, then come back into Košice to get the girls. We shook hands and waited for his call the next day. Meanwhile Julius went back through the tapes with a local translator – not even they could make out what Peter had been saying on that call. Had we been rumbled?
The next day, breakfast came and went, followed by lunch and no phone call. I was marching up and down wearing out the hotel carpet. I tried to ring him – no answer. David did the same and left him a message. Nothing. I went to see Richard Bilton. If we hadn’t heard anything by tonight, we would have to call it in to London. Richard was equally as frustrated.
‘Look, we’ve got some brilliant footage. We’re nearly there,’ he said.
But what could you do? We had nine-tenths of the show but with no pay-off, there was no show. I couldn’t do anything except wait for that knock on my room door.
Then it came. ‘We’ve spoken to him,’ Paul announced. I was punching the air. ‘But he’s on his way back to England now.’ Now I was punching the wall. ‘That call he took last night – that’s why he has had to go back.’
It had all looked so good. ‘Why didn’t he tell us that?’ I asked Paul.
‘He was too embarrassed.’
What was so awkward that he had to go back to England?
‘What about the girls?’ I quizzed Paul.
‘He’s definitely got two. He has to be back for Christmas.’
That didn’t cut it for me. ‘That’s no good to us,’ I told Paul. ‘We’ve got nothing.’ By now, Dom was in the room. ‘Do you think he’s bullshitting us?’ I addressed them both. ‘Do you think he genuinely has a problem and has to go back?’
I felt he was full of shit. It left me with no alternative. We had to go home, too. We never saw Peter
again – not that one anyway. The story in Košice was dead. There was little appetite to continue. Home News didn’t think we had a story. Clearly, we did, but without an ending. We didn’t follow the lead to Ireland on the grounds that the story was about trafficking through Europe to get to the UK rather than taking girls already on the game off the shelf. Either through lack of journalistic nous, frustration at the blind alley we had gone up, or for economic reasons, nobody was prepared to put their reputation on the line to try to nail down an ending. Richard didn’t want to discount it. Pre-Christmas apathy didn’t help either.
Privately, we agreed to keep an eye on it – we could always come back to it if David came good or something new sprung to light. Paul and Dom were as desperate as me. They would only get paid in part. The year was stuttering to a finish, and I was pretty pissed off. I told Paul that we had to finish the story. After the big bosses called the whole thing off, my parting shot had been to start ringing David and get onto Peter. My only concern was not to ring him every two minutes asking where the girls were. We were meant to be big time Charlies after all.
Paul did get a call – but it was from the gang in Kent. Košice may have been fading but Štefan the boss wanted to meet us again. The obvious thing to do was to try to link the two stories. There couldn’t be too many different operations coming out of a city of nearly a quarter of a million people and ending up in Kent. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. We would concentrate on Kent until we knew better.
It was now 13 December and we were heading to Chiquitos in Stroud. We still needed actual footage. We got there early, and recced on the day. Dinner was set for 18.00 – we had already been in place for two hours. This time we upped the surveillance. A mate of mine in security had a painter and decorator’s van. This was to be my trump card. Just parked randomly at some faceless retail park, who would take notice of the white van man, Sun newspaper hanging out his arse, his jeans more paint than denim? You would never know that it was fitted out with cameras inside. Julius was further up the road, armed with a hand-held camera, just in case. Paul and I were also kitted up lightly. I loved my new gizmo. We were good to go.
They, too, had upped the ante.
‘Štef wants me to do business with his cousin now?’ I questioned Štefan the translator. I felt they had introduced a bigger player – I was getting further up the ladder, nearer to the source. But I needed to know who I was doing business with.
‘He has two girls.’ Štefan the translator wasted no time.
We shook hands on the deal as soon as he told me the figure he wanted to lease the girls. I was staggered: £400 for each girl, and £300 for Štefan. Dirt. Cheap. Dirt cheap.
‘He’s selling to you,’ he explained. ‘You sell on to others. One is twenty-three, the other twenty-five … six.’ He told me the girls were making £300 a day, working from the upper part of a pub, and had already been here for three months. Of course, that wasn’t perfect because we couldn’t show them being trafficked in against their knowledge and will, but that made it more important to me to show the link between Košice and Kent. Potentially, stumbling across the two stories at the same time was much better than what Paul and Dom had originally come to us with. If only we could get there. Everything we had on tape was gold dust. We simply couldn’t end up on the cutting room floor.
I knew the deal was on, even though Štefan the Boss said very little. In fact, when I said to Paul that this was how you do proper business, pointing at Štefan the Translator who was just a kid, Štefan the Boss clearly understood enough to look pretty pissed off. He wasn’t in control, and the deal was running away in a language he barely spoke. I knew I had to seize the moment.
‘I want to see the girls on 5 January or 6 January,’ I told them. All I wanted were the girls. Then the show was in the bag. If Kent Constabulary had come bursting through the door, I couldn’t give a toss. In fact, I would have loved to have got busted just like in Stuttgart.
We had the agreement. There would be another meeting in the New Year. My houses would be ready. If something came up over the festive season, Sue knew I would push my Christmas dinner aside and be on it like a shot, tearing down to the Kent coast. That was unlikely. The next meet was set for 2 January. Deal done, now I had to sit down and eat a Mexican meal with these low lifes.
On New Year’s Eve, we got the location. It was time to talk about the man from Margate. Štefan’s cousin was running the show from there.
The fact that we got the call on the very last day of the year, when nobody was doing business, told me we were well in the game and they wanted to deal – badly. I had slipped back into being Craig Summers, eating and drinking all day long, watching The Hammers, and hosting Mum and Dad, who were over from Spain. I had switched off momentarily and parked the story. I wasn’t expecting them to call.
Dom was in Bulgaria, so Paul and I tore down to Chatham. We were to meet outside an estate agents – only because they did most of their dodgy business from an internet café about ten shops up the road. As ever, we got there early to check out the location. I left the Mercedes round the corner – if only the license fee payer knew my attention to detail, to living the part so that there were no flaws in my story! Something like that, anyway.
We were both filming, but we knew we needed good light. Early evening in January meant that we had to over-prepare the scene. No noise from the street would help, and if I stood right next to the estate agent’s window, there would surely be a light inside doing the work for us. Just down the street was a bus shelter with a lamppost. That would provide a perfect mood shot. Paul texted Štefan the Translator to say we were here.
‘Are the girls still available?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘You don’t sound so sure.’ I was doubtful.
He confirmed they were.
‘Am I going to be doing business with Štefan or his cousin in Margate?’ I needed to know. ‘I will respect Štefan but I want to do business with the bigger boss.’
I would say any old shit to reel them in. The game of cat and mouse would continue the next Sunday at Gatwick, with Mario, the man from Margate. Štefan the Translator told me that the girls weren’t working at the moment, and that nobody was paying them. They were staying in Mario’s house.
‘This is different to what you told me. You told me they were working in a pub.’ I was furious. The trail of bullshit was beginning.
‘He’s got other girls working in the pub now.’ Štefan explained. I asked if they were for sale, too. ‘He’s just brought them up,’ Štefan fobbed me off.
‘Are they virgins – clean?’ I must have sounded like a right perv on the tape.
‘They’re not virgins but they are like …’
‘Fresh,’ I interrupted Štefan. ‘And how have they been broken in? Have they been fucked properly?’
They had.
It was essential I spoke like this playing the role. I had to make sure I wasn’t buying Hilda Ogden but equally I didn’t want some frigid totty who had only had a knee trembler behind the bike sheds. They needed to know how to treat my clients properly. How did Štefan know that they were broken in? Well, obviously he had tried the product first-hand.
Within twenty minutes or so, we were heading back out of Kent. Events here had overtaken Košice, principally because the trail had gone cold there. Here, we had a potential sting. All I needed to see were the girls – get the job done. If we had them on film, we had hit the jackpot. Editorially, how it worked was no longer my concern. I would let the grown-ups deal with that in London.
The meetings were coming thick and fast. This was good news. We were rapidly climbing the ladder of trust the Eastern European way. At some point, this had to pay off. If they could do this business at this speed, what was the bigger picture? How many times had they done this and used these same venues to meet? The estate agents must have been a regular RV.
On 6 January, I checked into the Sofitel at the North Terminal in Gat
wick. Busy man that I was, wheeling and dealing, I would fit them in ‘on the way out to Spain’. I booked a suite with connecting doors to another room, and we rigged up everywhere. My mate Alan from a specialist surveillance company came in and layered the place in hidden surveillance gear. Paul had a backup camera. I was clean. Annie Allison, the producer, was in the adjacent room with Julius and Richard Bilton.
Downstairs, the tropical garden area of the hotel was packed. Julius went down to pretend to be working on the laptop. As we greeted the Slovaks in the bar with a couple of initial drinks, he got his emails up on the screen, feigning interest in BBC bureaucracy. His laptop camera went to work. Nobody would ever know.
In the bar, I held court while Paul went to fetch Štefan the Translator, Štefan the Boss and Mario from Margate! When they arrived, I asked him what they had discussed in the car. The first answer established my character – there was to be no smoking in my vehicle. The second confirmed the hierarchy – the deal was with Mario.
I checked I was speaking slowly enough for them, urged them to finish drinks and ushered them up to the room to do business. I told them once we were done, we could have dinner, then conclude business next week after ‘my trip’. If they’d had half a brain and weren’t just looking at the pound signs, they could have checked every flight going out and wouldn’t have found any sign of Craig Summers. That’s what I would have done. I summoned the waiter and told him to whack it all on room 635. I motioned to Paul to carry the phones – he knew the drill.
‘If the wife phones …’ I began.
‘Yeah, yeah, you’re in a meeting and you’ll call her back.’ We had both become other people far too often!
‘Let’s get fucking down to business,’ I said, straight in there with Mario. ‘I need to know – are you the main man I’m dealing with now? Is that correct?’
Mario needed this translating.
‘I’ve never had Eastern European girls before. I’ve always used English girls before.’ I pretended to ask for advice. ‘I need to know the tricks of the trade if there are any. How do you control them? How do I look after them? Are there any problems with them? Do you understand that?’
Bodyguard Page 19
