The truth was that the overcrowding problem in all our prisons was getting steadily worse, and only a major shake-up of the judicial system, combined with real government action, could offer any hope of alleviating the situation. Too many assholes on the benches were handing out ridiculously harsh sentences to keep the politicians and electorate happy, and it was clogging up the overstrained system. Unless a lot more funding was allocated and more facilities built and staffed properly, it could only get worse.
I’d never been surprised that Shay wouldn’t join the force. As long as he could make sure that he wasn’t responsible for putting anyone but the very worst offenders away, he could live at peace with himself. He’d always refused to touch assignments he didn’t like the smell of. Even his ‘boring’ cybercrime cases mattered enough not to trouble his conscience. Swindling thousands of people might not be murder, but the knock-on effect of what financial disaster did to many of the victims was certainly significant enough to tip his moral scales in favour of action. As for the money laundering operations he’d exposed, there was no question that his work on those had led to the arrests of some major players who definitely deserved whatever they had coming.
But stupid, money-hungry kids like Cory Phelps? Yes, obviously, smuggling arms was no minor matter, but he’d just been a dumb little accessory accepting a bribe, probably genuinely unaware of the real contents of the illicit cargo. How did the punishment fit the crime in his case? What kind of reform process had Phelps undergone? He was just another statistic, one of many lawbreakers who simply didn’t belong in a place like Pentonville.
God! I hated it when shit like this turned up. I knew exactly where my cousin’s thinking would be taking him. This always happened when the deficiencies of the judicial system were shoved under his nose. Yes, whoever killed Damien Price needed to be put away where they couldn’t do any further harm or destroy any more lives, but Shay was absolutely right about the government just wanting to sweep all their dirty, unconscionable cost-cutting under the carpet.
My cousin must have been cross-checking Brian Jordan’s and Cory Phelps’ work histories while I was reading and thinking. “Our two guys were shipmates for about three years, on and off. They served together on a few different ships.”
“What’s Phelps been doing since he got out?” I asked.
“He was unemployed for a couple of years, then moved up to Aberdeen and got a job with Locke Imports. You’re familiar with Malcolm Locke, right?”
I was. Mr Locke had been investigated several times by the North East Division, without success. Apart from his perfectly legitimate business dealings, Malcolm Locke was also suspected of being a successful wholesale buyer and distributor of cannabis products. He never dealt in any of the more profitable Class A substances, though, not as far as we could tell. With a multi-tiered network of underlings shifting his stock for him all the way down to street level, it didn’t matter how many of his lower-level personnel the police swept up. So far, he’d been careful enough to remain untouchable.
“Daniels said they’d taken Jordan on in Cadiz,” I commented.
“And he’s made a lot of short runs to Spain over the past few years too. Handy for the sherry triangle. I wonder if Angus MacLeod uses any sherry casks at his distillery?”
It was definitely worth looking into. We already knew he had Rioja casks from Spain, anyway. I tried to put myself in Locke’s shoes. Why risk losing a big shipment of hundreds of kilos when you could easily split up a bulk order into lots of smaller ones? Losing twenty or thirty kilos here and there was a much lower risk, and there had been a lot of large seizures around Europe over the past few years. In fact, thinking about it, with the number of distilleries importing Spanish casks regularly, that could easily add up to a very large quantity of hashish coming in. Shay finished his tea and twisted round to look at me.
“It wouldn’t be hard to hide a few little packages in a shipment of casks. And if their product was properly wrapped, all the dogs would get was a strong whiff of sherry. Did you know that the casks are always sent over with a good few litres still in them, to prevent them from drying up? And that’s apart from all the wine the wood has already soaked up. Because I didn’t until I looked it up.”
Nor had I. I was thinking it over.
“They’d have to have a man in the distillery, to recover the packages, and maybe sometimes slip them into the right orders. Then whoever picked them up could remove them before delivering the whisky.”
“They could also put them into any order they were sending out by courier service, if the courier was theirs too,” Shay pointed out. Yeah, that made it a lot more efficient. I didn’t think many distilleries operated like Angus MacLeod’s little place. We looked at each other, both wondering how big an operation this might be.
“We’re just speculating,” I cautioned.
“We are,” Shay agreed. “But at least there aren’t many people at MacLeod’s place to look into. And none of that explains why either Phelps or Jordan would feel any need to eliminate Damien Price. Nearly everyone who visits the distillery must take a few snapshots. I think Vanessa Price would have known if something had been bothering her husband too, so it’s unlikely he witnessed anything odd.” He made a couple of good points there. I was also wondering, now, if Aaron Whittaker’s apparent embarrassment at having so little
