Peter Robinson - Cold Is The Grave

“Apart from copyright infringement, which is hardly a police matter, I wasn’t aware that any laws were being broken. If you expect us to come charging in to Bill Gates’s rescue every time someone pirates a copy of Windows, then you’ve got a very funny idea of what our job really is.”

Granville laughed. “You’re behind the times, Alan. It’s big business these days. If it were simply a matter of copying Windows or the latest Michael Jackson CD for a friend, nobody would bat an eyelid, but we’re talking big operations here. Big money, too.”

“That’s exactly what I’m interested in,” said Banks. “How big?”

“The last raid we carried out we netted about a quarter of a million quid’s worth of stuff.”

Banks whistled. “That big?”

“Tip of the iceberg.”

“So it would be a lucrative business for organized crime, would it?”

“Especially as you lot don’t even seem to think it’s a crime.”

“Point taken. Look, we’ve got a case on right now – it started with a murder – and I’ve been putting two and two together and coming up with a pirating business. I don’t know how big yet. In fact, we don’t know much at all.” Brian’s CD had been the final piece in the puzzle. Seeing its amateurishly produced cover, Banks had thought of the CD case Annie had found at PKF, the CDs she saw at Alex and Carly’s flat, about Gregory Manners’s fingerprints, Barry Clough’s dismissal as a roadie for bootlegging live recordings, and the van worth hijacking, the driver worth killing. They still hadn’t found the van’s contents yet, but Banks would bet a pound to a penny they consisted of equipment for copying CDs, along with any stock and blank discs that happened to have been there. What Banks needed to know from Granville Baird was whether there was enough profit in the pirating business to make it of interest to Clough, the way smuggling was.

“What do you know?” Granville asked.

“A phony company leases small units in rural business parks, operates for a while, then moves on. Make any sense?”

Granville nodded. “I’ve heard rumors of such a setup, yes. And if you had two or three of these operations running at once, around the country, you could be turning over a mill or two a year or more, easy. If you had the proper equipment, of course.”

“Definitely worth his while, then?”

“Whose while?”

“We’re not sure yet. This is just speculation. What sort of things would they pirate?”

“Everything they can get their dirty little hands on. Music, software programs, games, you name it. For the moment, by far the biggest profits are in games. Sony PlayStation stuff, that sort of thing. Everyone’s kid wants the latest computer game, right? We’ve even found pirated stuff on sale that isn’t on the market yet. Some of the Star Wars tie-in games came over from the States before the film even came out here.”

“What about pirated movies?”

“There’s a lot of that, but most of it’s done in the Far East.”

“How do they get the originals? Insiders?”

“Mostly, yes. As far as the movies are concerned, though, sometimes all they have for a master is a hand-held video of the film being shown at a theater full of people. I’ve seen some of the stuff and it’s awful. When it comes to the computer programs and games, though, it’s easy enough for some employee to sneak a disc out, and if he can make a couple of hundred quid from it, all the better. There even used to be a private Web site where, for a membership fee, you got offered a variety of pirated stuff to download, but that’s defunct. Mind you, it’s very much a matter of caveat emptor. Some of it’s a rip-off. We found a lot of games among the last haul that couldn’t be played without complicated bypasses of internal security systems.”

“The manufacturers are wising up, then?”

“Slowly.”

Their food came, and they paused awhile to eat. Banks took a bite of his Yorkshire pudding filled with roast beef and gravy and washed it down with some beer. He looked at Granville, who was drinking mineral water and nibbling at a salad. “What’s up? On a diet?”

Granville frowned. “Annual checkup last month. Doc says my cholesterol’s too high, so I’ve got to cut out booze and fatty foods.”

Banks was surprised. Granville looked healthy enough, played squash and was hardly any heavier than Banks was. “Sorry to hear that.”

“No sweat. You just go right on enjoying yourself until it’s your turn.”

Banks, who felt he had led a charmed life healthwise thus far, despite the bad diet, the cigarettes and the ale, nodded. “It’ll be either that or the prostate, I know. What about distribution?”

“Wherever you can shift it. I’ve even heard stories of the local ice-cream van selling PlayStation games to kids. Gives a whole new meaning to Mr. Softee.”

Banks laughed. That made a lot of sense, he thought as he ate. Clough could use the same distribution network he had set up for the smuggled cigarettes and alcohol – small shopkeepers like Castle Hill Books, to whom DC Winsome Jackman should be talking this afternoon, market stallholders, pubs, clubs, factories. After all, the customers would often be the same people, none of whom thought they were really doing anything wrong in buying the odd packet of smuggled fags or a pirated computer game for their kid’s birthday. Half the cops in the country were smoking contraband cigarettes and drinking smuggled lager. Banks even knew a DI with West Yorkshire who drove to Calais every few weeks and filled up his trunk with booze and cigarettes. He made enough selling them at the station to cover the expenses of his trip and keep himself in the necessities till the next time.

So, why not? people thought. Big deal. They were getting a bargain, Bill Gates already had too much money, and the tax on booze and fags was extortionate. Now the EC had also cut out duty-free purchases between its members. In a way, Banks agreed, the consumers had a point – except that people like Barry Clough were getting rich from them.

He tried to work out how events might have occurred. Clough’s men pay off Charlie Courage, whose ability to sniff out wrongdoing and try for a slice of the pie was legendary, then Charlie sells them out to a rival, who hijacks the van and steals the equipment and stock of pirated CDs to set up somewhere on his own. Only it goes wrong. Clough’s men torture Charlie. Does he give up the hijacker? You bet he does. And what happens to both of them?

“It makes sense,” he said to Granville. “Especially if there’s the kind of money in it you’re saying there is.”

“Take my word for it. There is. And if your man’s really organized, he’ll have multidisc copying writers so he can churn them out by the dozen.”

“That’d be an expensive piece of equipment, I should imagine?”

“Indeed it would. An investment of thousands.”

That answered one question that had been puzzling Banks. If the PKF van had been carrying a few pirated discs, it would have hardly been worth hijacking, not to mention killing Jonathan Fearn. But if it had been carrying industrial-standard multidisc copying equipment, that was another matter entirely. “A very healthy return, I’d imagine, though, if you’ve got the start-up capital,” Banks said.

“Indeed.”

And Clough certainly had the capital to invest. From his gun-restoring racket, the music business, his club, his smuggling operations and whatever other dirty little scams he was involved in, he had plenty of seed money. The problem was how to prove his involvement. It was as Burgess had said about Clough’s smuggling activities: there was plenty of ground for suspicion, but scant evidence of actual guilt. Everything was done through minions and intermediaries, people like Gregory Manners, Jamie Gilbert and Andy Pandy; Clough never got his own hands dirty. His only contact with anything but the profits was entirely circumstantial.