kept herself hidden by the menu, trying to assess Ed Williams as Paul said he was going for the sea-food platter with a chicken and sweetcorn soup to start. Williams nodded for the waitress to take their order, looking to Anna first.
‘The risotto please, no starter.’
Paul gave his order and then Williams asked for his usual: a steak with salad and French fries.
‘Am I the only one having a starter?’ Paul said, embarrassed.
Back came the waitress with a red plastic basket of hot bread covered with a napkin, and a small dish of butter.
Williams offered the bread to Anna, but she shook her head. Paul took a big crispy hot chunk and slathered it with butter. Anna watched as Williams followed suit.
‘You should try this,’ he told her. ‘They bake it on the premises and the butter is garlic and herb.’
‘No, thank you.’
Anna wondered if it was par for the course that officers in Cornwall all had food on their minds.
‘This is really gorgeous and the butter is mindblowing,’ Paul said, slathering on even more.
‘Go on, try some.’ Williams offered Anna the plastic basket again.
‘No, thank you.’
He dropped the basket back onto the red paper tablecloth.
‘I’ve got a car arranged for you,’ he told them. ‘If you want a driver at all times it’s up to you, but I thought maybe you’d like to take off and see—’
‘We’re not here to see the sights,’ she said briskly, not meaning to sound like a school marm.
‘I didn’t think that you were, but sometimes it’s good to get the feel of the place, and you’ve got a lot of areas to cover.’
He had very pale blue eyes and she picked up immediately that he hadn’t liked her interruption.
‘I’ve run off some maps for you. Focus on the main surfing beaches, hang-outs of the surfers, plus their rentals, hotels, hostels and B and Bs. The property you have enquired about is quite a drive from here.’
‘We’ve been told that it is occupied.’
Williams nodded. He drank some wine.
‘I had a covert look over it. There’s a young guy living there who’s about twenty-five and who drives an MG. We ran the licence plates and it’s owned by a local garage so it’s rented to the people at the house – a Mrs Chapman. There have been a couple of women seen going in: one young woman with grocery shopping and the other one a lot older. They are not locals, but we do have a local woman doing cleaning there twice a week.’
‘You’ve spoken to her?’
‘No. My instructions were to not give any indication that we were interested. She also works for another tenant in a property close by, so it is very easy to question her.’
‘Could the guy be Alan Rawlins?’ Paul asked.
‘Well, I’ve seen the email pictures you’ve sent, so decide for yourself.’
He opened his briefcase and took out an envelope, removing some surveillance photographs which he passed to Anna. She looked through them and then shook her head, handing them to Paul for confirmation.
‘Not him.’
‘No.’
‘Because it’s early in the season, a lot of the hang-outs for regular surfers are closed,’ Williams informed them. ‘The all-year-rounders are still present and we’ve had some high waves this year that attracts them. We’ve also had storm warnings, a backlash of the hurricane, which also attracts the real hard professional surfers. They’re all wetsuited up, obviously, but compared to the high season it’s pretty quiet.’
The waitress served Paul his soup in a brown pottery pot with a lid with baked croutons on a separate plate. Williams asked for another bottle of the Beaujolais while he finished the first one, topping up their glasses.
‘I have also arranged for a helicopter to give you an overview of the beaches and areas where your guy would hang out. It’ll be at the airport at nine tomorrow morning.’
‘Helicopter?’ Anna repeated, unable to cover her concern.
‘It’s not going to dent anyone’s budget. It’s a training scheme we have organised with the Drug Squad officers, using dogs, which lets them get used to being up in the air for when there’s a raid. Also, some of the canine team have been training their dogs to get used to the sounds and . . .’ Williams came to a halt and lowered his voice. ‘The reason I’m interested in giving you as much help as possible is because of Sammy Marsh.’
‘Have you had any information about or sighting of him?’
‘Nope, not so much as a whisper. He’s a real piece of scum. He’s been dealing for years. If we catch him and lock him up, he comes out with more contacts than before he went in. He was always a smalltime operator dealing mostly in weed and ecstasy tablets. He’d move from beach to beach selling to the young kids. I think – in fact, I know – he had access to a farm where they were growing the weed. The plants were inside an old barn with very sophisticated heating, hydroponic lighting and a drainage system, producing top-grade weed. It was busted four or five years ago.’
Again he withdrew photographs and passed them to Anna.
‘The skunk as they call it was moving out on a bloody conveyor belt, being sent all over England. I know he was part of it, but he slipped out of the net and surfaced again a year later. This is Sammy.’ He got out a mugshot for them to look at. Then another. ‘This is also Sammy.’
Paul leaned closer to Anna to see the photographs. ‘Looks like Johnny Depp.’
‘Take a look at this one.’
Sammy Marsh was adept at changing his appearance. Williams kept on passing over one print after another, surveillance shots and mugshots. The man’s hair went from shoulder-length to braids, to cut short, to a pigtail with thin moustache and a small goatee beard. Some pictures even showed his hair dyed blonde.
‘Right little chameleon, isn’t he? He’s only about five foot eight, always very slender, and in the summer he gets tanned. He wears top designer gear and drives flashy cars.’
More photographs showed how many cars Sammy had owned and driven: a Mercedes, Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, beach buggy and various motor bikes. In most of them he was smiling, posing with two or more gorgeous bikini-clad girls. In one of the prints, Sammy could be seen with a group of equally tanned and handsome men, their surfboards stuck into the back seat of a Land Rover.
‘Is one of these men Alan? Paul, what do you think?’
Paul shook his head and passed the photo back to Williams.
‘Sammy’s flat is still owned by him, isn’t it?’ Anna asked.
‘Yes. Well, he rented a number of places, but he actually only owns one. Looks like he left in one hell of a hurry because there was food in the fridge, wet clothes in the washing machine and no sight of him for six months.’
‘Any movement in his bank accounts?’
Williams laughed. ‘Sammy will no doubt have accounts in God knows how many banks or countries, but he primarily dealt in cash. If he was to bank his earnings from drugs he’d have to prove how he was making enough to buy all those flash motors, never mind his flat. He also had heavies watching out for him, but even they have disappeared.’
Williams gathered up the photographs, put them in his briefcase and then took out a single sheet of paper.
‘Here’s a list of the names he used. He’d often keep his Christian name, but it’s sometimes Sammy Miles, Sammy Myers, Sammy Lines . . . we found four passpor ts in his flat all with different names – brilliant forgeries and they must have cost a packet.’
Anna sat back, watching Williams getting more tense and angry.
‘Can I ask you something?’ she said.
‘That’s what I am here for, Detective Travis.’
‘Sammy, you have said, was smalltime, had numerous arrests for drug-dealing; he serves short sentences, then gets released and goes straight back to doing exactly what he had been doing before his imprisonment, right?’
‘Correct. But he was mostly charged with possession. He was never caught with either money from drugs or actually dealing.’
