Cynan Jones - Everything I Found on the Beach

Hold’s brain was fireworking. He had the minute sense of being in a fight. “Stick to one thing,” he was saying to himself. “Stick to one thing.”

“There’s no problem,” he said. “I have the package.”

The voice seemed to pause again, breathe in.

“Where are you?” The tone was different. Beckoning.

“I’ll bring you the package.”

The voice gave him instructions. He picked up in some of the voice that it was Liverpudlian.

“I’m closer to the other port,” Hold said.

“You’ll get where you’re told.”

Hold waited. He felt okay but the phone was slippery in his hand.

“By the way, you were seen.”

“Nobody saw me.” Hold pulled himself up. Stick to one thing. Stay on the one thing. No one had seen you. They don’t know where you are. Stick to one thing.

“Is that a risk you want to take?” said the man.

“He’s dead. I’ll bring you the package. Where you said.”

The voice seemed to wait for a very long while.

“You know we know where his family is.” There was a veiled threat in that. “If this is a setup.”

Hold repeated his instructions. Then said, “It’s not a setup.”

The voice waited again. Like it was looking through the phone. Tasting the air at the other end. Waiting.

Then Hold said it: “The money?”

There was just business.

“You’ll get the money.”

The line went dead.

The Scouser put the phone down and sat back in the chair.

“Who are we going to use?” said the big redheaded man. The redhead had that kind of blond-red hair and a firm, round face but his nose was messed all over it. It looked like it had never had a bone in it. He had strange, dog-like eyes almost.

The man in the chair considered and looked down at the phone as if it were a strange thing. He felt little needles of paranoia. He held everything before him, mentally, as if he were holding everything out in front of him in his hands. As if he could see everything. Was somebody inside engineering this? This was the second time parcels had gone missing recently.

He looked out of the window at the gaps in the rows of houses, like gaps in teeth since the war. He thought of bombs falling off target, something from a great height misguided and shattering into the buildings. The luck and the physics of it. What power. It would have been a better time, a clearer time. You wouldn’t have to brew this fear always. You wouldn’t have to keep establishing it.

He felt the needles. Fear is necessary. Fear is an instrument. Fear makes people so much tamer. You just have to strike with great weight at the things people can’t stop themselves caring for.

“Use the Irish,” he said. “Let’s keep this to ourselves.”

The weight of the missing packages was about a kilo. That was a street value of forty thousand and the equivalent, when cut, of a thousand odd hits, maybe more.

To the Scouser it wasn’t so much the cost but what the break in the chain represented. It showed a weakness in the process. It was a supply and demand business and he had to be competitive and commercially minded.

The consignments of drugs moved by a labyrinth of ways, but mostly, for him, were airdropped onto craft in the middle of the sea.

The drugs would be retrieved and fed off to smaller boats that put in to coves and inlets too remote to properly police. Then, passed on to one of his mules, they would come inland.

Broken down into diminishing packages, the drugs spread out, finding passage in unnumbered ways, splitting up from the first conglomerate crop into parts ever smaller, like the filaments of a firework, until the tiny shrapnelled portions landed home in some user to burn out.

Trying to stop this thing was like trying to catch all the pellets from a cartridge. The authorities had only a certain time in which to catch them after the charge was struck before the pattern got too wide and they were gone into whatever bodies they would hit. The important thing was pace, and the missing packets disrupted this.

When the system worked, it was as if the packets were hurled directly from Colombia into the waiting sack of the Scouser’s organization. And that was the word. Organization. This wasn’t the formless violence of the street gangs. It was as organized as any other import business, an efficient setup with slick logistics. There were myriad little clowns out there playing out their hatreds against each other with no particular plan, but that was emotional. This was business. It worked on all the same principles, supply and demand, customer service, superior product, cost effectiveness, and paying the rent.

The Scouser had the restaurant, which could always launder money, could even explain with falsified takings the sudden boosts of income if the Scouser chose, as he sometimes did, to declare them. The webcam business provided another front, and his legitimate employee register made it easier to hide his key men, one highly paid as a computer technician, another as a chef, men more peripheral as waiters, barmen. All paying their stamp, staying off the Social, appearing, on the outside, to be ordinary working citizens.

The webcam girls were perfect couriers. While there were plenty of housewives earning a little extra this way, some of his girls worked on the streets, off the books, and constantly brought in new customers.

The cockle-picking racket he’d started on the Wirral and that had since spread south put him in the perfect position to attract desperate men, and get a look at them physically. To pick his mules. People who were down on their luck, sometimes who shouldn’t be here, people who were expendable, many already with criminal records who would work like red herrings if ever they were arrested, the police following the endless threads of their pasts back to all the wrong places, away from him. Not many dogs could smell cocaine through shellfish either, and from his base, the drugs fractaled out across the country.

It was growing and growing. As long as the organization held, the sky was the limit. He just had to make sure he held it together. And the glue was fear.

Hold got the gun and checked it over and took it apart and cleaned the barrel and re-oiled it, and wiped off the old oil where the cordite had mixed in. He wiped down the silencer and oiled the thread and put the whole gun back together again and again checked it. Then he stood it by the wall.

He went round the trailer with a wooden crate and put all the things he thought might matter into it and set it on the kitchen work surface. He didn’t quite know why he did that. Maybe he didn’t want anyone else trying to decide what would have been important to him. Or maybe he just wanted to reduce himself right down, so there was nothing but the absoluteness of him going to do this. He went out to the van and got his driver’s license and the superstitious five-pound note and put them in the box. What he told himself was that he did this so that all the things he cared about were in one place, so he could take them quickly if he had to.

He went back to the van and took down the rabbits and laid them on the grass then he got the old metal detector from the annex where he had put it and swung it over the rabbits and it registered nothing. There’s no tracking device, he said.

He drove into town and paid a guy at the hardware shop ten pounds to unlock his mobile phone and then he took it back and put in the SIM card from the other phone and checked it worked. He’d asked, “Is it possible to track a SIM card?” and said his mate and him had a bet. “If you’ve got the hardware. Police can,” said the guy.