Bootlegged Angel Read online

  Mike Ripley has twice won the Crime Writer’s Last Laugh Award for comedy crime and his Angel novels have been optioned by the BBC. He has written for television and radio and is the crime fiction critic for the Birmingham Post, as well as co-editor of the Fresh Blood anthologies which promote new British crime writing talent. He lives with his wife, three children and two cats in East Anglia.

  Also by Mike Ripley

  Just another angel (1988)

  Angel touch (1989)

  Angel hunt (1990)

  Angels in arms (1991)

  Angel city (1994)

  Angel confidential (1995)

  Family of angels (1996)

  That angel look (1997)

  As editor (with Maxim Jakubowski)

  Fresh blood (1996)

  Fresh blood 2 (1997)

  Fresh blood 3 (1999)

  Constable Publishers

  3 The Lanchesters

  162 Fulham Palace Road

  London, W6 9ER

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in Great Britain 1999

  by Constable & Company Ltd

  This paperback edition published by Robinson, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2001

  Copyright © 1999 M D Ripley

  The right of Mike Ripley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  ISBN 1 84119 299 6

  eISBN 978 1 47210 396 3

  Printed and bound in the EU

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Author’s Note

  ‘Two men were shot yesterday in what detectives believe could be a feud over bootlegged beer, as record numbers of day-trippers crossed the English channel to fill their cars with cheap continental alcohol.’

  The Independent, 24 August, 1997

  ‘Jim Bolton, senior investigations officer within the Customs and Excise said: “It’s a case of dog eats dog.”’

  The Sun, 1 January 1998

  In researching this book I am grateful to various honest (and brave) publicans in the Dover area, policemen, security consultants and Customs Officers who all prefer to remain nameless. One brewer must, however, be credited: Stuart Neame, who continues to fight the good fight against all odds.

  To my wife Alyson for staying cool.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  1

  I could tell from the way the phone was ringing that I shouldn’t have answered it. At best it would be somebody selling me a time share or double-glazing. At worst, it would be someone I knew.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Hello, is that Angel?’

  Oh no, not her.

  ‘Pronto! Pronto!’

  ‘Angel? This is the right number, isn’t it?’

  ‘Che?’

  ‘I know this is the right number.’

  She was talking to herself now. With a bit of luck she’d get as bored with that as everybody else did.

  ‘Can I speak to Angel, please?’ she persisted. ‘This is Veronica. Veronica Blugden.’

  I knew it was.

  ‘Ich bin ein Auslander, ich spreche kein Englisch . . .’

  ‘Angel, is that you? If it is, just stop messing about, will you?’

  I put my new birthday-present watch to the receiver and triggered the alarm.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Or you can send a fax right now . . .’

  ‘Angel! I know it’s you and you’re not going to put me off.’

  ‘Or you can press zero and hash and an operator will take your call. Decide now!’

  ‘There’s no need to shout, Angel. That is so rude. I only rang you to offer you a job. An undercover job. Working for a brewery.’

  She finished in a breathless rush and I let her hang for half a minute.

  ‘Hello, Veronica, it’s Angel. I’m listening.’

  I should have pressed hash and hung up myself, right there and then. But then, I shouldn’t have answered the phone in the first place. Actually, I shouldn’t even have been in the house on Stuart Street as I didn’t really live there any more. Well, not full-time. Springsteen did, though, so I had a perfect excuse for dropping by. Somebody had to visit him regularly to see how he was bearing up, make sure he was eating right, tell him the gossip, pick his brains on matters of national importance, smuggle him in some red meat and basically just make sure he hadn’t killed anyone. I thought of myself not so much as a prison visitor as a one-man United Nations peacekeeping force.

  Maybe the UN should have been called in anyway as I found a single sheet of paper taped to the door of my flat which was headed: CAT KILLS THIS WEEK. Underneath, in unmistakable finishing school copperplate, were listed: pigeons (2), sparrows (3), one yellow canary (missing from Number 27), one hamster (see card in window of Mr Patel’s shop), mice (2), coypu (1).

  A coypu? In Hackney? Well, I supposed it was just about possible, given global warming and all that, but probably I would have to take Fenella on one side and explain to her what a rat was. The recent mild winter had led to a boom in the rat population and there were now thought to be more rats than people in the country. It had always been true of London, though it was not something Fenella would ever have been able to get her head around. She had enough trouble with people.

  For a start, she lived with Lisabeth in the flat below mine and Lisabeth was enough to cramp anyone’s style, with the personality of a religious cult and the social skills of a Tiger tank. Still, you could have worse neighbours, I suppose. A Klu Klux Klan franchise gift shop perhaps, or an aerobics class line dancing to old Abba hits.

  And they were good about Springsteen – mainly because they were, with justification, frightened of him – feeding him on a regular basis and letting him in and out whenever the whim took him, not to mention disposing of the bodies he seemed to be generating on an increasing basis. I put this down to the fact that he missed me. Others would be less generous.

  And, to be fair, both Fenella and Lisabeth had been diamond geezerettes about me not actually living at Number 9 Stuart Street for the past year. It had cost me (chocolate for Lisabeth, aromatherapy oils for Fenella) but they had faithfully stacked up the junk mail, taken phone messages and, mostly, told the right people that I had moved to live with Amy in Hampstead and the wrong people that I was working abroad as a mercenary disc jockey in a maximum security holiday hotel on Ibiza.

  Best of all they had kept that fact that I was no longer a full-time resident from our esteemed landlord, Mr Naseem Naseem. For years I had persuaded him that, thanks to a passing friendship with a great-niece of his, my rent on Flat 3 should in effect be frozen at round about the going rate for 1990. It seemed a reasonable price for him to pay on the condition that I had no intention of becoming a legal, or even permanent, member of his family. Likewise, he turned a blind eye on the ‘No Pets’ house rule even when I cut a cat flap in the flat door, and a deaf ear to the complaints about the music even when they came from two streets away. But I knew he had a ‘non-resident’ clause in the rental agreement – most landlords do to stop tenants sub-letting. If he found out I was living in Hampstead and only keeping th
e flat on as a bolt-hole in case of emergencies, then he would have me out and the rent up and four trainee solicitors in there before you could say ‘house-warming’.

  So I was grateful that Fenella and Lisabeth had not mentioned the fact that I had moved out to him.

  But I was even more grateful to them for not mentioning that I hadn’t to Amy.

  I was only in Hackney to leave an envelope with the rent money for Naseem Naseem. As long as it was cash and it was regular, he wouldn’t mind not actually seeing me for months at time; he probably preferred it that way.

  I only answered the phone mounted on the wall by the front door because I assumed it couldn’t possibly be for me. Anyone who needed to get me had the number of the smart new Ericsson cell phone Amy had issued me with, and because she knew I often turned it off, she had also made me wear a pager on my belt, to which she alone had the number. I had worked out how to switch it from ‘beep’ to ‘vibrate’ so that the experience, whilst often inconvenient, was at least pleasant.

  Absolutely no one knew I would be in Stuart Street that day as I hadn’t even decided to go myself until that morning. I hadn’t seen anyone in the street who knew me and even parking Armstrong II outside hadn’t raised an eyebrow or twitched a net curtain. But then, why should it? No one notices black Austin Fairway taxis in London; at least I hoped not.

  Number 9 itself was devoid of legitimate residents, Springsteen included, though with him there was always a chance he was lying in ambush somewhere. Lisabeth would be out at work, though I never liked to ask what it was she did, and Fenella was still employed, for a second consecutive month now (a record), by a telesales company who liked her Home Counties accent and her totally innocent refusal to take ‘No’, ‘Go away’ or ‘Piss off’ for an answer. I had a theory that she sold things because the punters she called simply couldn’t bring themselves to be rude enough to turn down whatever offer she was pushing.

  Mr Goodson, the solitary civil servant who rented the ground-floor Flat 1, would be at work. He always was. Or maybe he wasn’t. It was difficult to tell, he was so quiet. No problems on that score with the couple in the top flat: Miranda, still Welsh, depressive and bored with her reporter’s job on a local newspaper, and her partner Inverness Doogie, still Scottish, still mad and now an up-and-coming second chef in one of South Kensington’s trendier restaurants. Both of them were definitely out at work. I could tell that as soon as I opened the front door, because of the absence of (a) shouting, (b) cooking smells as Doogie experimented, or (c) the muffled sound of ‘The Beautiful South’ played with too much bass.

  I only answered the damn phone because I thought I was doing one of them a favour, I never dreamed it would be for me. So much for helping out your neighbours. Okay, ex-neighbours. It might have been the first time I had done so. I was sure it would be the last.

  And I only kept listening to dear old Veronica Blugden – bless! – because she said those intriguing words ‘undercover for a brewery’ and then I agreed to meet her and find out more.

  So what happened subsequently was all a combination of me being in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing something innocent to help my fellow man, woman or Lisabeth, and being in a particular psychological state.

  State of mind in question? I was bored.

  Where I was supposed to be that morning was in a maximum security crypt the other end of High Holborn, surrounded by several million pounds’ worth of hallmarked silver and at least six scantily clad models, all aged between twenty-four and twenty-six and all size 10.

  It was all to do with Amy’s expanding business empire, for which I had cheerily volunteered the Mission Statement (which every company has to have these days): ‘Tomorrow The World’. But she’d replied, rather primly I’d thought, that she already had one: ‘Quality, Choice, Variety, Value’. I still maintained that mine was the snappier.

  When I first met Amy she was involved with two partners in designing and marketing clothes for female office workers. Their main item was a TALtop, the TAL standing for Thalia, Amy and Lyn, the three masterminds behind it, and their sales technique took the best ideas from the Tupperware parties of old and the naughty underwear parties still held in respectable homes up and down the country when the husband is down the pub playing darts. Using computer databases the TAL girls would identify offices in central London with a certain number of secretaries or junior clericals, then find the wine bar where they drank after work (usually Thursdays – payday – not Fridays, which were for boyfriends) and organise a mini fashion parade using the punters themselves as models.

  To be fair, their main product, the TALtop itself, was a good product, an all-purpose top which by pulling the drawstrings around the neck could turn from long-sleeved to short-sleeved, round-neck to plunging V-neck. And the beauty of the deal was that they all came individually tailored with a very flattering label denoting the size. A size 10 TALtop mysteriously fitted a woman who could have sworn she was a size 12. A size 12 TALtop would mould perfectly around a woman who knew she was a size 14, even if she wouldn’t admit it. In fact, ninety per cent of the production of TALtops were actually size 12, whatever they said inside the neckline. Once Amy moved production out of a Brick Lane sweatshop and discovered colour dyes which didn’t run and stain the upper body parts in a light shower, then she was ripe for the big time.

  She had promptly sold out to a big retail chain, though she retained various patents and rights and secured herself a position of power and a neat line in royalties.

  Of course, having one of her original partners in jail and the other dead helped smooth the deal through, but she was never one to sit back on her laurels, take it easy and see out the century counting her money. Oh no, innovate and upwards was her motto, that’s what she said. A pox on Chinese restaurants who gave out fortune cookies was what I said.

  The latest must-have designer concept she had cooked up followed her discovery that there was now the technology to produce a silver thread – real silver – fine enough and strong enough for use with an industrial sewing machine. A nifty bit of designing ensured a single silver motif on the left breast of a black TALtop which gave the garment a uniqueness as no two motifs were exactly alike thanks to human error on the sewing machines. Amy swore this was the cleverness of a deliberately vague original design concept for the motif which allowed a certain amount of self-expression on the part of whoever was sewing it on. Not too much variation, though, this was real silver after all, just enough to give it a USP (unique selling point) and, naturally, a premium price. In fact the silver thread added less than a pound to the wholesale unit price, so it must have been Amy’s design genius which accounted for the other £15 added to the retail price compared to a bog-standard TALtop.

  Amy didn’t see all of that extra margin of course, as she was always telling me, but she did get a percentage and as British women spent £1.002 billions a year on blouses and tops (I loved the ‘.002’), which was twice as much as they spent on tights and stockings, though less than they spent on shoes, even a small percentage was worth having. I had to agree there, saying I would drink to that – and I had.

  The silver TALs were destined to hit the High Street shops in the autumn but to cater for the Sunday newspaper magazine supplements and their long lead times, the publicity photographs had to be taken now. It had been my idea to stage them in the Silver Vaults down Southampton Row.

  I don’t claim any divine flash of inspiration, in fact I was watching football on Amy’s 48-inch flat-screen wall-mounted television (the ones that cost so much the BBC has to rent them) at the time. Amy had arrived home late, as was usual these days, from a high-powered planning meeting in Milan or Tooting or somewhere, and before I could ask her if she had remembered to pick up some more lager on the way back, she had started to moan and gripe and kick the furniture, growling a rosary of obscenities in the middle of which I managed to identify the words ‘Bank of England’.

  For a moment I thought she was improvising
her own rhyming slang but when she calmed down to half speed I worked out that the Bank of England had actually refused permission for her to use it as a venue for her fashion shoot. So why not try the Silver Vaults, I’d said casually, without taking my eyes off the giant screen where a corner kick was about to be taken. And she’d asked me if I knew the place and I said I’d been there and, like most casual visitors, had spent a happy hour or two dreaming of how you could rob it – not because I wanted three tons of silver tankards, cutlery, plates, you name it, but just to see if it could be done.

  ‘Does it have silver on show?’ she had asked.

  ‘Your photographer won’t need a flash,’ I had said, stifling a groan as eight million quid’s worth of striker missed an open goal.

  ‘Get it sorted for me, darling. A week Tuesday. There’ll be six girls.’

  ‘Why me?’ I had shouted over my shoulder as she headed for the kitchen.

  ‘Because that’s your job,’ she had shouted back.

  So that was what I did to earn my wages as a ‘management consultant’. I had often wondered.

  Fixing up the gig at the Silver Vaults was easier than I had dared to hope. Having opened my big mouth and suggested it, I just knew it would be all my fault if anything went wrong but as it turned out, it couldn’t have gone smoother. If anything, everyone I dealt with down there was glad to see me and fell over themselves to be helpful. Perhaps they just didn’t get as many visitors as they used to and more than one of the dealers mentioned that silver ‘wasn’t sexy’ any more, so the prospect of half a dozen nubile young ladies modelling lingerie (okay, so I blagged it up a bit) in and out of the silverware, seemed to go down well. The female dealers thought it would be good for the Vaults’ image. The male dealers tried not to look excited and thought it would be cool.

  For all their maximum security trappings, and the fact that they are underground, the Vaults have the atmosphere and layout of an indoor market just like you could find in Oxford or Leicester or Huddersfield or a hundred other places. The difference was that instead of the aisles and cross-streets being lined with open stalls, the Silver Vaults boasted closed-in shops each with more locks, alarms and closed circuit cameras than the average off-licence in Hackney. There was another difference, of course, as in most indoor markets you can buy fresh fruit and vegetables, fish, meat, second-hand books, clothes, hardware, offcuts of carpet, you name it. Here you could buy silver; that was it.