Find Them Dead

2 Monday 26 November

At 4.30 a.m., Clive Johnson sat in his uniform dark shirt, with epaulettes and black tie, in the snug, glass-fronted office overlooking the cavernous, draughty Customs shed at Sussex’s Newhaven Port. The Border Force officer was sipping horrible coffee and thinking about the beer festival at the Horsham Drill Hall next Saturday — the one light at the end of the tunnel of a long, dull week of almost fruitless night shifts and big disappointment among his team, so far.

An average height, stout man of fifty-three, with a friendly face topped by thinning hair, Johnson wore large glasses which helped mask the lenses he needed for his poor eyesight, steadily deteriorating from macular degeneration. Coincidentally and helpfully, his wife owned a Specsavers franchise in Burgess Hill. So far he’d kept his condition from his colleagues, but he knew to his dismay that it would be only a year or two, as the ophthalmologist — who worked for his wife — had informed him, before he would have to give up this job he had come to love, despite its frequent unsociable hours.

Rain lashed down outside, and a Force 7, gusting 8/9, was blowing. One of the sniffer dogs barked incessantly in the handler’s van at the far end of the building, as if it sensed the team’s anticipation that maybe, after a week of waiting on high alert, acting on a tip-off from a trusted intel source, this might be their night. Although ‘trusted’ was a questionable term. Intelligence reports were notoriously unreliable and often vague. It had indicated that a substantial importation of Class-A drugs was expected through this port imminently, concealed in a vehicle, possibly a high-value one, and coming in on a night ferry this week. Which was why tonight, as for the past six days, they had a much larger contingent of officers than usual present here at Newhaven, backed up by Sussex Police detectives and an Armed Response Unit waiting on standby. All of them growing bored but hopeful.

The roll-on, roll-off Côte D’Albâtre had just docked after its four-hour voyage and was now disgorging its cargo of lorries, vans and cars. And there was one particular vehicle on its manifest emailed earlier from the Dieppe port authority that especially interested Clive.

Apart from real ale, his other passion was classic cars, and he was a regular attendee at as many gatherings of these around the country as he could get to. He never missed the Goodwood events, in particular the Festival of Speed and the Revival, and he had an encyclopaedic knowledge of pretty much every car built between 1930 and 1990, from its engine capacity to performance figures and kerb weight. There was a serious beaut arriving off this ferry, one he could not wait to see. Bust or no bust, it would at least be the highlight of his week.

One problem for the officers was in the definition of ‘high value’ vehicle. The source of the report was unable to be any more specific. Dozens of cars came under that category. They’d been pulling over and searching many vehicles that might match the description, including a rare Corvette, to date without any success. All they’d found so far was a tiny amount of recreational cannabis and a Volvo estate with a cheeky number of cigarettes on board — several thousand — all for his personal consumption, the driver had said. On further questioning he’d turned out to be a pub landlord, making his weekly run, turning a nice profit and depriving HMRC and thus the British Exchequer of relatively small but worthwhile amounts of cash. They’d impounded the Volvo and its cargo, but it was small fry, not what they were really interested in. Not what they were all waiting for.

As the week had worn on, faith in the intel was fading along with their morale. If tonight came up goose egg too, Clive would be losing most of his back-up.

The first vehicle off the ferry to enter the Customs shed was a camper van with an elderly, tired-looking couple up front. Clive spoke into his radio, giving instructions to the two officers down on the floor. ‘Stop the camper, ask them where they’ve been, then let them on their way.’

Body language was one of Clive Johnson’s skills. He could always spot a nervous driver. These people were just plain tired, they weren’t concealing anything. Nor was the equally weary-looking businessman in an Audi A6 with German plates who followed. All the same, to deliberately make his target nervous if he was behind in the queue of cars, he ordered two officers to pull the Audi driver over and question him, too. The same applied to another elderly couple in a small Nissan, and a young couple in an MX5. The lorries would follow later. Some of these would be picked out at random and taken through the X-ray gantry, to see if there were any illegal immigrants hidden among their cargo.

Clive had heard the period between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. called the dead hours. The time before dawn when many terminally ill people passed away. The time when most folk were at their lowest point. Most, maybe, but not him, oh no. Just like an owl, he hunted best at night. Clive had never set out to be a front-facing Customs officer because he had never been particularly confident with other people in that way, too much small talk and pretence. He used to prefer back-room solitude and anonymity, the company of tables, facts and figures and statistics. When he’d originally joined Customs and Excise, before it was renamed Border Force, it had been because of his fascination — and expertise — with weights and measures. He had an excellent memory which had served him well as an analyst in the department before he had, rather reluctantly, accepted a move a few years ago to become a frontline officer, after his superiors had seen in him a talent for spotting anything suspicious.

Over these past seven years he had proved their judgement right. None of his colleagues understood how he did it, but his ability to detect a smuggler was almost instinctive.

And all his instincts told him that the driver of the approaching Range Rover towing an enclosed car trailer unit looked wrong. Nervous.

Nervous as hell.

He radioed his two officers on the floor.