observed strictly the speed limits set for it. The driver would not approach the Customs checks at Dover until the evening of the following day. Lorry movement through the port of Dover was always heaviest on a Sunday night, when the drivers were jockeying to get a good start on the Monday morning on the through routes across Europe. The volume of traffic on the Sunday night sailings dictated that the Customs checks on outgoing cargo were lightest. And the early summer was a good time, also, for the sale of machine parts. The ferries' vehicle decks would be jammed with both commercial and holiday traffic. The chances of the lorry's cargo being searched, of the containers being stripped out right down to the four wooden packing cases, were very slight. The haulage company also took care to check whether there was any form of tail on the consignment. The lorry had been followed away from the warehouse at the loading depot by a car that checked to see whether it was under surveillance. The car varied the distance between itself and the lorry; at times it was a mile back, and then it would speed up and catch the lorry. The purpose of this was to pass the cars travelling in the wake of the lorry, and to look for the tell-tale evidence of men using radios in the cars, or vehicles that were too long in the slow lanes.
It was a wasted exercise.
The Investigation Division had no tail on the lorry.
Not yet six o'clock and she had already had her bath. She was at her dressing table. She could hear him in the next room, working at the final touches. It was the trip out with Bill Parrish that had set him behind. He hadn't told her where they had gone, and she hadn't asked. He might not have told her where he'd been, what he'd done, with Bill Parrish, but at least when he had returned he had peeled out of his work clothes and put on the old jeans and the sweatshirt and headed back to his decorating. He was pretty quiet, had been ever since he'd come back from the north of England, and she was almost sorry for him. More vulnerable than she'd ever known him. She thought he must have been wanting to please her, because he had set out to decorate the spare bedroom. Not that David would ever have admitted to a living soul, let alone his wife, that his case was up the river and no punt. She didn't care what he said. She'd liked coming home from work and finding the flat smelling of paint and wallpaper paste. It was a big change in her experience, that her husband had gone down to the DIY and had managed the best part of a week without referring to Bogota or the Medellin cartel.
'Who am I going to meet there?' she called out.
'A gang of complete morons.'
She yelled, and she was laughing, 'Will it all be shop talk?'
'Absolutely. Blokes all up at the bar, wives sitting down by the band.'
'You'll dance with me?'
'Then you'd better wear boots.'
He came into the bedroom. She could scent the paint on his hands that were on her shoulders. Christ, and she wanted them to be happy. Why couldn't they be happy? In the mirror, his face looked as though the light had gone from him. Her David, the Lane's Keeper, so crushed. It was a fast thought, she won- dered if she didn't prefer him when he was bloody minded and confident and putting the world into its proper order.
He bent and he kissed her neck, and he was hesitant. She took his hands from her shoulders and she put them inside her dressing gown, and she held them tight against her.
'I love you, and I'm just going to dance with you.'
She felt his body shaking against her back and the trembling of his hands.
Past six o'clock, and a Saturday evening, and the magistrate sat at his Bench in a yellow pullover, and his check trousers were hidden under the desk top.
The convening of the court on that day of the week, and at that time of day, guaranteed that the public gallery and the press seats would be empty.
Parrish, in his work suit, stood in the witness box.
'I understand you correctly, Mr Parrish? You have no objection to bail?'
Boot-faced, boot-voiced. 'No objection, sir.'
'In spite of the nature of the charges?'
'I have no objections to bail, sir.'
'And the application for the return of the passport?'
'I have no objection to the passport being returned, sir.'
'You have no fear of the defendant going abroad and not surrendering his bail?'
'No fears, sir.'
'What sort of figure of bail are you suggesting, Mr Parrish?'
'Two sureties, sir. Two thousand pounds each would be my suggestion, sir.'
The magistrate shook his head. It was as though he had now seen everything, heard everything. Day in and day out the police sniped at the magistrates for their willingness to grant bail. There could be many reasons and he was not going to waste time speculating on them. If that's what the Investigation Division wanted, that's what they wanted. What he wanted was to get back to the golf club. He granted bail on two sureties of?2000.
The flight had been delayed, technical problems. The problems were resolved a few minutes after Leroy Winston Manvers and his common-law wife and children boarded the British Airways 747 to Jamaica.
When he'd seen the bird up then Bill Parrish drove home to change for the dance.
The detective thought that Darren Cole was very pale, and his fingers were nicotine stained because that was the only fix he was getting on remand.
He resented being pulled from home on a Saturday evening and told to drive halfway across the county. He wasn't in the mood for hanging about.
'You're coming out, Darren. Tomorrow morning, eight o'clock, you're walking out. The charges against you will not be pressed, but they will be held in reserve. The charges can be reactivated if you should be so silly as to open your dumb little mouth to any scribbler, anyone else for that matter. I wouldn't come home if I were you. You should stay away from my patch.
There are people who know that you grassed and if they know where to find you then they will most certainly come looking.
Take the wife and the kids and take a very long bus ride, Darren, and stay safe. Have you got me, young 'un?'
The detective left the necessary paperwork with the Assistant Governor. He could be phlegmatic. He reckoned that letting out young Darren Cole would save three, four, days of court time. He was not concerned with the morality of letting out a proven narcotics pusher. If his Chief Constable could cope with the morality then there was no way that a detective was going to get out his worry beads.
He would have liked to know why Cole was being given the heave, but he doubted if he ever would.
'Who was it, George?'
Libby Barnes called from her dressing room. She sat in front of the mirror in her underclothes and housecoat, and she worked with the brush at applying the eye shadow.
'It was Piper Mother.'
'On a Saturday evening? Is it something serious?'
'Called about Lucy… I'm not supposed to tell you this, but you've the right to know. I've lost, dear. I wouldn't want you to think that I lost without a fight, but I've lost, and that's the long and the short of it.'
The photograph was in front of his wife, at the right side of the dressing table mirror. A photograph of when Lucy was sixteen, and sweet. A happy teenager in a Corfu cafe.
The photograph had been taken the last time they had been together as a family, before Lucy had started her problem.
'What do you mean, you lost?'
'The boy who pushed to Lucy has been freed from remand in prison. He will not go to trial. The man who supplied the pusher will also not face charges and has been allowed to leave the country. The importer of those drugs, who has been under intense Customs and Excise investigation, will not be arrested… '
'And you've swallowed that?'
'Not lying down… It's for the best, Libby. A trial would have been awful, three trials would have been quite hideous
