Bootlegged Angel (4 page)

‘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 what 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.

‘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 would 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.

I sneaked a look at the CCTV around the edge of Mrs Singh’s sari to make sure that the shop was empty, then turned back to the beer shelves and spoke over my shoulder, dead casual, while
running a finger across the shoulders of a row of bottles.

‘Haven’t you got any of that French lager, Mrs S.?’

When I didn’t get a reply, I turned and saw that she was staring at me.

‘You know, that cheap beer in the little bottles. Mr Singh let me have a couple of cases last month.’