Bootlegged Angel (7 page)

Murdo explained that one pump of each beer was the latest brew whilst the second would be the same beer but an earlier batch, so the trick was to guess which was one day old and which was up to
thirteen days. The only person who could tell for sure, especially after the first three samples, was the Head Brewer. He, I was told in a whisper, was the short, bearded man in a white coat,
smoking a pipe at a table by himself with eight glasses and a clipboard.

Beatrice, the gatekeeper, the draymen and a couple of other staff drifted off after Murdo and I entered and when only the Head Brewer was left, minding his own business, Murdo suggested we see
if they had left us any lunch. I was grateful on the basis that any more of this professional sampling on an empty stomach and I would be in no fit state to get Armstrong out of the brewery yard
let alone back to London.

At the end of the bar was a glass-fronted electric hot cabinet in which was a large joint of roasted beef, half a dozen soft bread rolls and a carving knife which could have doubled as a pirate
sword.

‘Help yourself,’ said Murdo. ‘We have a different roast on every day.’

‘You don’t employ many vegetarians, then?’ I asked cheerfully, making myself a sandwich.

‘We have salmon on Fridays,’ he said hesitantly.

‘Those are Catholics, not vegetarians.’

He waited a good half-minute before he laughed.

‘Oh yes, very good. Miss Rudgard told us you were. . . . Now, what was the expression she used?’

‘A chopsy little git?’ I offered.

‘Yes!’ He was wide-eyed. ‘That was exactly it.’

‘Shot in the dark,’ I said modestly, munching on an inch-thick slice of beef and surveying fourteen beers as yet untried. Life suddenly seemed good.

‘Your glass is empty,’ Murdo said, not for the first time. ‘Let me try you with something else.’

He took my glass without much of a fight and marched around behind the bar, selecting and grasping a pump handle like he was sizing up an opponent at Olympic arm-wrestling.

‘Have you worked for the Misses Rudgard and Blugden for long?’ he asked as he pulled.

‘I’ve never heard them referred to as that before. Thanks.’ I took a full glass from his hand. The pump he had used had a brightly painted bird on it, a swan or something. Then
the words ‘Seagull Special Bitter’ came into focus. ‘You not having one?’

‘I’m taking it easy. I have to go up to town tonight to a brewers’ dinner. Very boring. Tell me about the R&B agency.’

‘Well, you hired ‘em.’ I toasted him with my glass. ‘And they hired me, so wouldn’t it be better if you told me what exactly you want me to do?’

Murdo flipped his eyebrows then jerked his head and I automatically looked behind me, but there was only the old Head Brewer sitting in the corner sipping beer.

‘Later,’ Murdo mouthed without a sound, so I went along with it. After all, he was buying.

‘Well, I’m only a freelance, you understand. A specialist, working on a job-to-job basis. The agency’s main business is security systems.’

‘Yes, I know,’ he said, leaning over the bar and resting his elbows on it. He was so long his hands jutted out way over the edge. ‘What’s Miss Rudgard’s
speciality?’

Stella’s speciality? Oh God, could I get into trouble here.

‘I think she’s the brains of the outfit, the business brains that is. Veronica is more the muscles in the partnership.’

‘Sort of good cop, bad cop, eh? She jolly well frightened me.’

I nodded in agreement as I sipped my beer. Then I realised he was talking about Veronica and I was thinking about Stella.

‘Do you know her well?’ Murdo asked quietly.

I must have been going down with the ‘flu or something because I only just realised that Murdo was sniffing around the subject personally, not professionally.

‘We don’t exactly move in the same social circles,’ I said carefully, ‘and of course she doesn’t get involved in my side of the business. You know, the covert,
behind-the-lines, get-your-hands-dirty side of things.’

‘Oh, obviously not. You couldn’t see Stella rubbing shoulders with criminals, could you?’

No, that was true. Sleeping with them, yes, but not rubbing shoulders.

‘She leaves the sordid end to people like me,’ I said.

He nodded in agreement at this, then did a double-take.

‘Oh, I say, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply anything about your role in the operation.’

‘Don’t fret it,’ I said generously, waving my glass in salute. ‘We all have our specialities.’

‘And yours is?’

‘Didn’t Veronica tell you?’

‘She may have done . . .’ He hesitated.

But I bet myself he had been too busy looking at Stella’s legs.

‘She was probably being deliberately vague,’ I said reassuringly. ‘Sometimes it’s best if the client doesn’t know
exactly
how we get results.’

He tapped the side of his nose. Honest to God, he tapped the side of his nose like he’d seen Cockney wide boys do in black-and-white films shown on Sunday afternoon television.

‘I’m with you. Say no more.’

I was glad one of us knew what we were talking about. I noticed my glass was empty.

‘What’s that one?’ I pointed to the pump at the end of the bar.

‘Ah, that’s the last of our special Christmas brew, Noel’s First. It’s a really quite powerful barley wine. Try a drop.’

He took my glass and started to pull.

‘You don’t get many barley wines on draught these days but my Uncle Edgar always has a pin at home over the Christmas holiday. He keeps it near the fire in the drawing-room and puts
a heated poker into his tankard before he drinks it.’

‘Why?’

Murdo paused, mid-pull.

‘I don’t honestly know.’

‘Still, nice name for Christmas,’ I said, ‘First Noel and all that.’

He looked slightly stunned.

‘It’s named after our Head Brewer, Noel. It was his first Christmas brew. The Christmas carol had never occurred to me. Makes sense now you think about it.’

Behind me I heard a snort, and then a chair scraped back across the floor and footsteps stomped out of the door. The Head Brewer had taken his leave of us. He probably had made the connection,
and heard it a million times.

Murdo looked positively relieved that he had gone.

‘Ah, good, he’s gone. That’s a relief,’ he said and because I had been thinking that, it seemed quite amusing and I think I giggled into my new beer.

‘Listen, Mr Angel – or can I call you Roy?’ he asked, walking round to my side of the bar.

I had just taken a mouthful of Noel’s First and seemed to have lost the use of several motor neurones. As far as I was concerned, he could call me Rafael Sabatini. I think I mumbled
something to the effect that it was cool by me.

‘I know it looks as if I’ve been messing around for the last couple of hours, but I really need to brief you in private. Now we’re alone, I suggest we stay here as this is just
about the most private place in the brewery, but I need to get something from my office. Something to show you. It’ll only take me a few minutes to get it but I’ll be right back.
I’m afraid I’ll have to lock you in while I’m gone. It’s company rules. Do you mind awfully?’

Did I mind being locked
in
a brewery sampling cellar? There was a poser.

‘No worries,’ I said.

He was gone about five minutes, or it could have been two hours, I really didn’t mind, and when he returned he was carrying a thin grey case under his arm.

‘My laptop,’ he said proudly, setting it up on the bar. ‘I’d be lost without it. It does absolutely everything for me.’

‘Can it pull a pint?’ I asked, thinking that was just about the wittiest and most charming thing anyone could have said in the circumstances.

‘Er . . . no.’ He looked around, flustered for a moment. ‘Please, help yourself.’

‘Thanks, I will.’

I already had.

‘Grab a bar stool,’ he said, settling on one himself, but even when he was sitting down I still had to look up to him. Maybe that was because my legs had started to turn to
rubber.

When I had a full pint glass, though I couldn’t remember which beer it was, I pulled up another bar stool next to his and tried to make out the graphics appearing on his computer’s
screen. The image was of a mosaic design and the colours were oddly soothing.

‘This is a map of the European Union,’ said Murdo.

And so it was. I closed my left eye and it became clear.

‘Sixteen countries from Portugal to Finland, all living in unity, peace and harmony under the provisions of the Treaty of Rome, and all with their own systems of tax – income tax,
value added tax and, most importantly for brewers, excise duty.’ Murdo hit a button on his keyboard, and on the map all the borders between the countries disappeared. ‘Then came the
Single Market in January 1993 and – in theory – all obstacles to trading between these countries disappeared. It was supposed to be a Europe without borders, without Customs officers,
without restrictions. If you want to buy a German washing machine, go do it. You want an Italian car or a Spanish video recorder, the choice is yours. But of course this only makes sense if the
goods are taxed the same in all the member states.’

‘Harmonisation,’ I slurred into my beer.

‘Quite right. Harmonising taxes must be the logical outcome of a Single Market, otherwise the thing doesn’t make any sense and there would be little point in being in it. But all the
member countries have their own tax regimes and they guard them very fiercely, so much so that even with twenty years’ warning, they couldn’t agree to do it before the Single Market
came in.

‘On some taxes, though, they at least agreed to move towards a band or range. Value added tax, for instance. There are still different rates of VAT in the different countries, but
they’re all in roughly the same ballpark.’

‘Ah yes, ballparking,’ I murmured. I had heard Amy talking about ‘ballparking’ on wholesale prices of TALtops. I still didn’t have a clue what it meant.

‘And the same stop-gap measure should have applied to excise duties, where the discrepancies are even more pronounced.’ He hit another key and his Powerpoint program hummed and began
to colour in the countries on the map. France, then Italy, then Spain began to turn blue whilst Denmark, Sweden and Ireland were the first to go red. Eventually, the European Union was split red
and blue, the red countries mostly the northern ones: Ireland, the UK, Denmark, Sweden and Finland.

‘The red countries are the high tax ones, blue is low tax and here’s the nub of the problem.’

Murdo typed something on his keyboard and, on the graphic, borderlines began to flash in yellow between Ulster and the Irish Republic, between Germany and Denmark, and Sweden and Finland, and in
the Channel between England and France, and in the Kattegat between Denmark and Sweden.

‘In these places, you have high tax countries next door to low tax ones when it comes to alcohol – especially beer – and, in theory, no border controls or restrictions on how
much you can buy. This isn’t like the duty-free booze you bring back from holiday; this is duty-paid but paid in a country with a very low rate of tax. For example,’ he began to point a
long, thin finger at the screen, ‘beer tax in Denmark was about eight times higher than in Germany at the start of the Single Market, so any sensible Dane would have driven across the border
to buy their beer. Sweden came in, with a much higher beer tax than Denmark, so nipping over to Copenhagen on the ferry to load up the Volvo was the obvious thing to do. Same story with Finland and
Sweden, and, of course, the classic one – us here in Kent only twenty-two miles from France where the beer tax is eight times
lower
with regular ferry crossings and now we’ve
even got a tunnel and high-speed trains.’

‘What about Ireland and the border between the North and the South?’ I asked, very proud that I could think of something to ask. Indeed, I was quite pleased I could still speak.

‘Well, in theory there ought to be a fair bit of cross-border shopping there, but it doesn’t seem to have become as much of a problem as elsewhere. I think it must have something to
do with the Irish attitude to tax. They don’t seem to take it very seriously.’

‘Maybe they have a point,’ I said wisely.

‘Perhaps they do, but down here near the Channel, we have to take things seriously because the problem’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Look at this, and remember
what I said about value added tax.’

I nodded enthusiastically but in reality I couldn’t remember which beer I was drinking let alone what he’d said about VAT.

The screen dissolved and reformed into a bar chart with sixteen columns each with the flag of a member state of the Single Market. Some filled the screen, some were very small and there were two
dotted lines horizontally near the bottom of the screen. Each column had an arrow pointing towards the dotted lines. The colours were really cool.

‘This shows the beer duty in pence-per-pint in all the EU countries and this line would be a harmonised rate.’ He pointed to the lower dotted line. ‘Now that’s only a
couple of pence per pint and look where we are.’

His finger rested on one of the flags on the screen and by holding a hand over my left eye I could see that he had picked out the Union Jack, way up near the top of the screen, flanked by the
Irish tricolour and the flags of Sweden and Finland.

‘Now that’s a long way to come down for these high tax countries so, as with value added tax, Europe agreed a target
rate
which countries could at least aim for. The low ones,
like France and Spain, would put their beer duty
up
to get to near that target, which is about 7p a pint, whilst the high tax countries should come
down
to meet the others coming up.
Guess what?’

Oh God, I hate the quiz part and he never said he would be asking questions afterwards.

‘What?’

‘It didn’t happen. Well, not here. It did everywhere else.’

‘You surprise me.’

‘I share your instinctive cynicism about pragmatic politicians.’