Джеффри Арчер - Cat O'Nine Tales

Over the next month he was shown around several properties in Sleaford, accompanied by a young lady from one of the local estate agents. Sally McKenzie was puzzled how a lorry driver could possibly afford the type of properties she was offering him.

Doug eventually settled on a little cottage on the outskirts of Sleaford. Sally was even more surprised when he put down the deposit in cash, and shocked when he asked her out on a date.

Six months later Sally moved in with Doug, although it still worried her that she couldn’t work out where all the money was coming from.

Doug’s sudden wealth created other problems that he hadn’t anticipated. What do you do with £25,000 in cash each week, when you can’t open a bank account, or pay a monthly cheque into a building society? The basement flat on Hinton Road had been replaced with a cottage in the country. The second-hand fork-lift truck had been traded in for a sixteen-wheel Mercedes lorry. The annual holiday at a bed and breakfast in Blackpool had been upgraded to a rented villa in the Algarve. The Portuguese seemed quite happy to accept cash, whatever the currency.

On their second visit to the Algarve a year later, Doug fell on one knee, proposed to Sally and presented her with a diamond engagement ring the size of an acorn: traditional sort of chap, Doug.

Several people, not least his young wife, remained puzzled as to how Doug could possibly afford such a lifestyle while only earning £25,000 a year. ‘Cash bonuses for overtime,’ was all he came up with whenever Sally asked. This surprised Mrs Haslett because she knew that her husband only worked a couple of days a week. And she might never have found out the truth if someone else hadn’t taken an interest.

Mark Cainen, an ambitious young assistant officer with HM Customs, decided the time had come to check exactly what Doug was importing, after a nark tipped him off it might not just be bananas.

When Doug was returning from one of his weekly trips to Marseilles, Mr Cainen asked him to pull over and park his lorry in the customs shed. Doug climbed down from the cab and handed over his worksheet to the officer. Bananas were the only entry on the manifest: fifty crates of them. The young customs official set about opening the crates one by one, and by the time he’d reached the thirty-sixth, was beginning to wonder if he had been given a bum steer; that opinion changed when he opened the forty-first crate, which was packed tightly with cigarettes — Marlboro, Benson & Hedges, Silk Cut and Players. By the time Mr Cainen had opened the fiftieth crate, he had placed an estimated street value on the contraband of over £200,000.

‘I had no idea what was in those crates,’ Doug assured his wife, and she believed him. He repeated the same story to his defence team, who wanted to believe him, and for a third time, to the jury, who didn’t. Doug’s defence silk reminded his lordship that this was Mr Haslett’s first offence and his wife was expecting a baby. The judge listened in stony silence, and sent Doug down for four years.

Doug spent his first week in Lincoln high-security prison, but once he’d completed an induction form and was able to place a tick in all the right boxes — no drugs, no violence, no previous offences — he was quickly transferred to an open prison.

At North Sea Camp, Doug, as I’ve already explained, opted to work in the library. The alternatives were the pig farm, the kitchen, the stores or cleaning out the lavatories. Doug quickly discovered that despite there being over four hundred residents in the prison, as librarian he was on to a cushy number. His income fell from £25,000 a week to £12.50, of which he spent £10 on phone cards so that he could keep in touch with his pregnant wife.

Doug rang Sally twice a week — you can only phone out when you’re in prison, no one can call you — to promise his wife repeatedly that once he was released, he would never get into trouble with the law again. Sally was reassured by this news.

In Doug’s absence, and despite being heavily pregnant, Sally was still holding down her job at the estate agent’s, and had even managed to hire out Doug’s lorry for the period of time he would be away. However, Doug wasn’t telling his wife the whole story. While other prisoners were being sent in Playboy, Readers’ Wives and the Sun , Doug was receiving Haulage Weekly and Exchange & Mart for his bedside reading.

He was browsing through Haulage Weekly when he found exactly what he was looking for: a second-hand, left-hand-drive, forty-ton, American Peterbilt lorry, which was being offered for sale at a knock-down price. Doug took a long time — but then he had a long time — considering the vehicle’s added extras. While he sat alone in the library, he began to draw diagrams on the back of the magazine. He then used a ruler to measure the exact size of a box of Marlboro. He realized that the cash return might be smaller this time, but at least he wouldn’t be caught.

Among the problems of earning £25,000 a week, and not having to pay tax, is that after being released from prison you are expected to settle for a job that only offers you £25,000 a year before tax; a common enough dilemma for most criminals, especially drug dealers.

With less than a month of his sentence to serve, Doug phoned his wife and asked her to sell his top-of-the-range Mercedes truck, in part exchange for the massive second-hand eighteen-wheel Peterbilt lorry that he’d seen advertised in Haulage Weekly.

When Sally first saw the truck, she couldn’t understand why her husband wanted to exchange his magnificent vehicle for such a monstrosity She accepted his explanation that he would be able to drive from Sleaford to Marseilles without having to stop for refuelling.

‘But it’s a left-hand drive.’

‘Don’t forget,’ Doug reminded her, ‘the longest section of the journey is from Calais to Marseilles.’

Doug turned out to be a model prisoner, so ended up serving only half of his four-year sentence.

On the day of his release, his wife and eighteen-month-old daughter Kelly were waiting for him at the prison gates. Sally drove them back to Sleaford in her old Vauxhall. On arrival, Doug was pleased to find the second-hand pantechnicon parked in the field next to their little cottage.

‘But why haven’t you sold my old Merc?’ he asked.

‘Haven’t had a decent offer,’ Sally admitted, ‘so I hired it out for another year. At least that way it’s showing us a small return.’ Doug nodded. He was pleased to find that both vehicles were spotless, and after an inspection of the engines, discovered they were also in good nick.

Doug went back to work the following morning. He repeatedly assured Sally that he would never make the same mistake twice. He filled up his lorry with sprouts and peas from a local farmer, before setting out on his journey to Marseilles. He then returned to England with a full load of bananas. A suspicious, recently promoted Mark Cainen regularly pulled Doug over so that he could carry out a spot-check to find out what he was bringing back from Marseilles. But however many crates he prised open, they were always filled with bananas. The officer remained unconvinced, but couldn’t work out what Doug was up to.

‘Give me a break,’ said Doug, when Mr Cainen pulled him over yet again in Dover. ‘Can’t you see that I’ve turned over a new leaf?’ The customs officer didn’t give him a break because he was convinced it was a tobacco leaf, even if he couldn’t prove it.

Doug’s new system was working like a dream, and although he was now only clearing £10,000 a week, at least this time he couldn’t be caught. Sally kept all the books up to date for both lorries so that Doug’s tax returns were always filled in correctly and paid on time, and any new EU regulations were complied with. However, Doug didn’t brief his wife on the details of his new untaxed benefit scheme.