Bodyguard (20 page)

They wanted to meet tonight in the Hotel Gloria Palac. Bingo. We legged it straight to the hotel. My mind was racing – we would get the overt crew to shoot their arrival and do a mini recce to see if they could film either through the window or get in there themselves. Julius was a genius who could work discreet magic from his laptop. The location couldn’t have been more perfect. Positioned in town on a corner, the hotel had huge glass windows. When night fell, we got there early, nabbed our window seat and arranged two extra chairs, knowing that they never came alone. Julius filmed from across the road. We couldn’t have been more chuffed with their chosen venue. David would come in to help with the lingo – the Gumar girls would have to go elsewhere. We ordered drinks to the table and waited.

After fifteen minutes, two shady characters turned up. One of them was Peter. The other one might have been, too. Everyone was called Peter.

Peter was a completely different character to the other two we had seen – a bit bigger, a bit bulkier, jeans and a jumper on. His mate was in the standard shell suit, with a bumbag around his waist. Only Peter spoke anything resembling English. I told David to quiz him.

‘Can you provide?’ he asked.

(My instructions were simple. Tell him that I’ve been here before, and I don’t want to waste any more money. I need a top up every six months and I don’t want girls working for me that look tired and withdrawn and have been done too many times.)

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.