The roll-on, roll-off Côte D’Albâtre had just docked after its four-hour voyage and was now disgorging its cargo of lorries, vans and cars. And there was one particular vehicle on its manifest emailed earlier from the Dieppe port authority that especially interested Clive.
Apart from real ale, his other passion was classic cars, and he was a regular attendee at as many gatherings of these around the country as he could get to. He never missed the Goodwood events, in particular the Festival of Speed and the Revival, and he had an encyclopaedic knowledge of pretty much every car built between 1930 and 1990, from its engine capacity to performance figures and kerb weight. There was a serious beaut arriving off this ferry, one he could not wait to see. Bust or no bust, it would at least be the highlight of his week.
One problem for the officers was in the definition of ‘high value’ vehicle. The source of the report was unable to be any more specific. Dozens of cars came under that category. They’d been pulling over and searching many vehicles that might match the description, including a rare Corvette, to date without any success. All they’d found so far was a tiny amount of recreational cannabis and a Volvo estate with a cheeky number of cigarettes on board — several thousand — all for his personal consumption, the driver had said. On further questioning he’d turned out to be a pub landlord, making his weekly run, turning a nice profit and depriving HMRC and thus the British Exchequer of relatively small but worthwhile amounts of cash. They’d impounded the Volvo and its cargo, but it was small fry, not what they were really interested in. Not what they were all waiting for.
As the week had worn on, faith in the intel was fading along with their morale. If tonight came up goose egg too, Clive would be losing most of his back-up.
The first vehicle off the ferry to enter the Customs shed was a camper van with an elderly, tired-looking couple up front. Clive spoke into his radio, giving instructions to the two officers down on the floor. ‘Stop the camper, ask them where they’ve been, then let them on their way.’
Body language was one of Clive Johnson’s skills. He could always spot a nervous driver. These people were just plain tired, they weren’t concealing anything. Nor was the equally weary-looking businessman in an Audi A6 with German plates who followed. All the same, to deliberately make his target nervous if he was behind in the queue of cars, he ordered two officers to pull the Audi driver over and question him, too. The same applied to another elderly couple in a small Nissan, and a young couple in an MX5. The lorries would follow later. Some of these would be picked out at random and taken through the X-ray gantry, to see if there were any illegal immigrants hidden among their cargo.
Clive had heard the period between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. called the dead hours. The time before dawn when many terminally ill people passed away. The time when most folk were at their lowest point. Most, maybe, but not him, oh no. Just like an owl, he hunted best at night. Clive had never set out to be a front-facing Customs officer because he had never been particularly confident with other people in that way, too much small talk and pretence. He used to prefer back-room solitude and anonymity, the company of tables, facts and figures and statistics. When he’d originally joined Customs and Excise, before it was renamed Border Force, it had been because of his fascination — and expertise — with weights and measures. He had an excellent memory which had served him well as an analyst in the department before he had, rather reluctantly, accepted a move a few years ago to become a frontline officer, after his superiors had seen in him a talent for spotting anything suspicious.
Over these past seven years he had proved their judgement right. None of his colleagues understood how he did it, but his ability to detect a smuggler was almost instinctive.
And all his instincts told him that the driver of the approaching Range Rover towing an enclosed car trailer unit looked wrong. Nervous.
Nervous as hell.
He radioed his two officers on the floor.
3
Monday 26 November
When anyone asked Meg Magellan what she did for a living, she told them straight up that she was a drug dealer. Which she really was, but the good sort, she would add hastily, breaking into a grin. In her role as a key account manager for one of the UK’s largest pharmaceutical companies, Kempsons, she sold and merchandized their range of over-the-counter products into the Tesco store group.
She also tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to augment her income by betting on horses. Never big stakes, just the occasional small flutter — a love of which she’d got from her late husband, Nick, whose dream had been to own a racehorse. The closest he’d got was to own one leg of a steeplechaser called Colin’s Brother. She’d kept the share after Nick’s death, as a link to him, and followed the horse in the papers, always putting a small bet on and quite often being pleasantly surprised by the nag getting a place — with even the occasional win. Whenever the horse ran at a reasonably local meeting, she would do her best to go along and place a bet and cheer him on, along with the two mates, Daniel Crown and Peter Dean, who owned the other three legs between them. She’d become so much closer to them both since Nick died. In a small way they kept Nick alive to her and she could see his humour in them.
At 4.30 a.m., Meg’s alarm woke her with a piercing beep-beep-beep, shrieking away a dream in which Colin’s Brother was heading to the finishing post but being strongly challenged, as she shouted encouragement at the top of her voice.
Avoiding the temptation to hit the snooze button and grab a few more precious minutes of sleep beneath the snug warmth of her duvet — and continue the dream — she swung her legs out of the bed and downed the glass of water beside her.
She had to get up now. No option. At 9 a.m., in less than five hours, she was presenting her company’s latest cough-and-cold remedy to the Tesco buying team, seventy miles of stressful traffic to the north of here. Normally, she’d have stayed at a Premier Inn close to the company’s headquarters. A ten-minute drive instead of the three hours facing her now, if she was lucky with the traffic. But this wasn’t a normal day.
Today, her daughter — and only surviving child — Laura, was heading off to Thailand and then on to Ecuador as part of her gap year. She and Laura had rarely been apart for more than a few days. They had always been close, but even closer since five years ago, when they’d been driving back to Brighton from a camping holiday in the Scottish Highlands.
Always car-sick, Laura sat in the front. After Nick had done a long spell at the wheel of their VW camper van, Bessie, Meg had taken over from her husband, who then sat in the back with their fifteen-year-old son Will, and had slept. As she’d slowed for roadworks on the M1, an uninsured plumber, busily texting his girlfriend, had ploughed his van into the back of their vehicle, killing Nick and Will instantly. She and Laura had survived, and their injuries had healed, but their lives would never be the same again — there was no going back to normal family life. Meg would have given anything to have even the most mundane day with her family one more time. Of course, friends and relatives had rallied around her and Laura in the days and months after the accident, when it felt as if they were living in a surreal bubble, but eventually and inevitably life went on, grief had to be dealt with, and as the years passed people stopped talking about Nick and Will.