Cat O'Nine Tales: And Other Stories (21 page)

I feel I should
point out that Doug did have some scruples. He made it clear to his new
employer that he would never be willing to transport drugs, and wouldn’t even
discuss illegal immigrants.

Doug, like so
many of my fellow inmates, was very right wing.

When Doug
arrived at the drop-off point, a derelict barn deep in the Lincolnshire
countryside, he was handed a thick brown envelope containing £25,000 in cash.
They didn’t even expect him to help unload the produce.

Overnight,
Doug’s lifestyle changed.

After a couple
of trips, Doug began to work part-time, making the single journey to Marseilles
and back once a week.

Despite this,
he was now earning more in a week than he was declaring on his tax return for a
year.

Doug decided
that one of the things he’d do with his new-found wealth was to move out of his
basement flat on the Hinton Road and invest in the property market.

Over the next
month he was shown around several properties in
Sleaford
,
accompanied by a young lady from one of the local estate agents. Sally McKenzie
was puzzled how a lorry driver could possibly afford the type of properties she
was offering him.

Doug eventually
settled on a little cottage on the outskirts of
Sleaford
.
Sally was even more surprised when he put down the deposit in cash, and shocked
when he asked her out on a date.

Six months
later Sally moved in with Doug, although it still worried her that she couldn’t
work out where all the money was coming from.

Doug’s sudden
wealth created other problems that he hadn’t anticipated.

What do you do
with £25,000 in cash each week, when you can’t open a bank account, or pay a
monthly check into a building society? The basement flat on Hinton Road had
been replaced with a cottage in the country. The secondhand fork-lift truck had
been traded in for a sixteen-wheel Mercedes lorry. The annual holiday at a bed
and breakfast in
Blackpool
had been upgraded to a
rented villa in the Algarve. The Portuguese seemed quite happy to accept cash,
whatever the currency.

On their second
visit to the Algarve a year later, Doug fell on one knee, proposed to Sally and
presented her with a diamond engagement ring the size of an acorn: traditional
sort of chap, Doug.

Several people,
not least his young wife, remained puzzled as to how Doug could possibly afford
such a lifestyle while only earning £25,000 a year. “Cash bonuses for
overtime,” was all he came up with whenever Sally asked. This surprised Mrs.
Haslett because she knew that her husband only worked a couple of days a week.
And she might never have found out the truth if someone else hadn’t taken an
interest.

Mark
Cainen
, an ambitious young assistant officer with HM
Customs, decided the time had come to check exactly what Doug was importing,
after a narc tipped him off it might not just be bananas.

When Doug was
returning from one of his weekly trips to Marseilles, Mr.
Cainen
asked him to pull over and park his lorry in the customs shed. Doug climbed
down from the cab and handed over his worksheet to the officer. Bananas were
the only entry on the manifest: fifty crates of them. The young customs
official set about opening the crates one by one, and by the time he’d reached
the thirty-sixth, was beginning to wonder if he had been given a bum steer;
that opinion changed when he opened the
fortyfirst
crate, which was packed tightly with cigarettes–Marlboro, Benson & Hedges,
Silk Cut and Players. By the time Mr.
Cainen
had
opened the fiftieth crate, he had placed an estimated street value on the
contraband of over £200,000.

“I had no idea
what was in those crates,” Doug assured his wife, and she believed him. He
repeated the same story to his defense team, who wanted to believe him, and for
a third time, to the jury, who didn’t. Doug’s defense silk reminded his
lordship that this was Mr. Haslett’s first offense and his wife was expecting a
baby. The judge listened in stony silence, and sent Doug down for four years.

Doug spent his
first week in Lincoln high-security prison, but once he’d completed an
induction form and was able to place a tick in all the right boxes–no drugs, no
violence, no previous offenses–he was quickly transferred to an open prison.

At North Sea Camp, Doug, as I’ve already explained, opted to work
in the library.
The alternatives were the pig farm, the kitchen, the
stores or cleaning out the lavatories. Doug quickly discovered that despite
there being over four hundred residents in the prison, as librarian he was on
to a cushy number.

His income fell
from £25,000 a week to £12.50, of which he spent £10 on phone cards so that he
could keep in touch with his pregnant wife.

Doug rang Sally
twice a week–you can only phone out when you’re in prison, no one can call
you–to promise his wife repeatedly that once he was released, he would never
get into trouble with the law again. Sally was reassured by this news.

In Doug’s
absence, and despite being heavily pregnant, Sally was still holding down her
job at the estate agents, and had even managed to hire out Doug’s lorry for the
period of time he would be away. However, Doug wasn’t telling his wife the
whole story. While other prisoners were being sent in
Playboy, Readers’ Wives
and the
Sun,
Doug was receiving
Haulage Weekly
and
Exchange & Mart
for his bedside
reading.

He was browsing
through
Haulage Weekly
when he found
exactly what he was looking for: a secondhand, left-hand-drive, forty-ton,
American
Peterbilt
lorry, which was being offered for
sale at a knock-down price. Doug took a long time–but then he had a long
time–considering the vehicle’s added extras. While he sat alone in the library,
he began to draw diagrams on the back of the magazine. He then used a ruler to
measure the exact size of a box of Marlboro.

He realized
that the cash return might be smaller this time, but at least he wouldn’t be
caught.

Among the
problems of earning £25,000 a week, and not having to pay tax, is that after
being released from prison you are expected to settle for a job that only
offers you £25,000 a year before tax; a common enough dilemma for most
criminals, especially drug dealers.

With less than
a month of his sentence to serve, Doug phoned his wife and asked her to sell
his top-of-the-range Mercedes truck, in part exchange for the massive
secondhand eighteen-wheel
Peterbilt
lorry that he’d
seen advertised in
Haulage Weekly.

When Sally
first saw the truck, she couldn’t understand why her husband wanted to exchange
his magnificent vehicle for such a monstrosity. She accepted his explanation
that he would be able to drive from
Sleaford
to
Marseilles without having to stop for
refuelling
.

“But it’s a
left-hand drive.”

“Don’t forget,”
Doug reminded her, “the longest section of the journey is from Calais to
Marseilles.”

Doug turned out
to be a model prisoner, so ended up serving only half of his
fouryear
sentence.

On the day of
his release, his wife and eighteen-month-old daughter Kelly were waiting for
him at the prison gates. Sally drove them back to
Sleaford
in her old Vauxhall. On arrival, Doug was pleased to find the secondhand
pantechnicon
parked in the field next to their little
cottage.

“But why
haven’t you sold my old
Merc
?” he asked.

“
Haven’t had a decent offer
,” Sally admitted, “so I hired it
out for another year. At least that way it’s showing us a small return.” Doug
nodded. He was pleased to find that both vehicles were spotless, and after an
inspection of the engines, discovered they were also in good nick.

Doug went back
to work the following morning. He repeatedly assured Sally that he would never
make the same mistake twice. He filled up his lorry with sprouts and peas from
a local farmer, before setting out on his journey to Marseilles. He then
returned to England with a full load of bananas. A suspicious, recently
promoted Mark
Cainen
regularly pulled Doug over so
that he could carry out
a spot-check
to find out what
he was bringing back from Marseilles. But however many crates he
prised
open, they were always filled with bananas. The
officer remained unconvinced, but couldn’t work out what Doug was up to.

“Give me a
break,” said Doug, when Mr.
Cainen
pulled him over
yet again in Dover. “Can’t you see that I’ve turned over a new leaf?” The
customs officer didn’t give him a break because he was convinced it was a
tobacco leaf, even if he couldn’t prove it.

Doug’s new
system was working like a dream, and although he was now only clearing £10,000
a week, at least this time he couldn’t be caught. Sally kept all the books up
to date for both
lorries
so that Doug’s tax returns
were always filled in correctly and paid on time, and any new EU regulations
were complied with.

However, Doug
didn’t brief his wife on the details of his new untaxed benefit scheme.

One Thursday
afternoon, just after Doug had cleared customs in Dover, he drove into the
nearest petrol station to refuel before continuing his journey north to
Sleaford
. An Audi followed him onto the forecourt, and the
driver began to curse about how long he was going to have to wait before the
massive
pantechnicon
would be filled up. To his
surprise, the lorry driver only took a couple of minutes before he replaced the
nozzle in its holder. As Doug drove out onto the road, the car behind moved up
to take his place. When Mr.
Cainen
saw the name on
the side of the lorry, his curiosity was aroused. He checked the pump, to find
that Doug had only spent £33. He stared at the massive eighteen-wheeler as it
trundled off down the highway, aware that with that amount of petrol Doug could
only hope to cover a few more miles before he would have to fill up again.

It took Mr.
Cainen
only a few minutes to catch up with Doug’s truck.

He then
followed the lorry at a safe distance for the next twenty miles before Doug
pulled into another petrol station.

Once Doug was
back on the road a few minutes later, Mr.
Cainen
checked the pump–£34–only enough to cover another twenty miles. As Doug
continued on his journey to
Sleaford
, the officer
returned to Dover with a smile on his face.

When Doug was
driving back from Marseilles the following week, he showed no concern when Mr.
Cainen
asked him to pull over and park his lorry in the
customs shed. He knew that every crate on board was, as the manifest stated,
full of bananas. However, the customs officer didn’t ask Doug to unlock the
back door of the truck. He simply walked around the outside of the vehicle
clutching a spanner as if it were a tuning fork while he tapped the massive
fuel tanks. The officer was not surprised that the eighth tank rang out with a
completely different timbre to the other seven. Doug sat around for hours while
customs mechanics removed all eight fuel tanks from both sides of the lorry.
Only one was half full of diesel, while the other seven contained over £100,000
worth of cigarettes.

On this
occasion the judge was less lenient, and Doug was sent down for six years, even
after his barrister pleaded that a second child was on the way.

Sally was
horrified to discover that Doug had broken his word, and skeptical when he
promised her never, ever, again.

The moment her
husband was locked up, she rented out the second vehicle and returned to her
job as an estate agent.