They Thought I Was Dead: Sandy’s Story

59 26 September 2011 — Nicos Christoforou

The satnav was showing a distance of just four nautical miles to the RV position: 49°39′00.0"N 3°05′00.0"W.

Less than a minute later, far ahead in the darkness, Nicos, still fighting off seasickness, saw to his relief a faint white dot. It disappeared in the heavy swell then reappeared moments later, a tiny bit brighter, a tiny bit larger.

It vanished again, then appeared again, brighter still.

He flashed the prearranged Morse code signal. Two long flashes; one quick flash; one long flash again. It was the letter Q. A question. Is this you?

Two long flashes followed by three short ones came back. Morse code for the number 7. It was their prearranged signal for Yes!

Then, for belt and braces, he flashed back the code for 1–4. Then received back the code for 2–2, in case any clever dick on a boat out there thought it would be fun to join in the numerical sequence.

Smiling with relief, he switched on the navigation lights and the powerful forward-facing searchlight, thinking, how did they say it in English? Happy days!

Then another Morse-coded message was flashed at him: ‘Port or starboard?’

‘Starboard,’ he messaged back. Then activated the switch for the starboard side fenders to lower.

Two minutes later, the superstructure of a substantially larger boat than the Bolt-Hole — a good hundred-foot long, he guessed — materialized out of the darkness. A powerful beam shone into his eyes, then raked the foredeck. Within moments the boat was alongside and two burly men in black sweaters, jeans and plimsolls had jumped down from it onto Bolt-Hole’s deck, instantly securing ropes around front and rear stanchions.

Moments later, a short rope ladder dropped down over the deck rail. Nicos switched off the engines and, holding the red sail-bag, stepped, unsteadily, out of the wheelhouse, his nausea gone but replaced now by a nervous flutter inside him. He was utterly defenceless, in the middle of the sea, with over a million pounds in cash and, doubtless, some of the nastiest people he had ever dealt with waiting at the top of that ladder.

He looked up at two shadowy figures ten feet above him. Not wanting to risk climbing the ladder with the bag, he shouted at them to lower a line. When they had done so, he looped it through the handle of the Musto bag, securing it with a knot. Then he reached up and grabbed the coarse rope sides of the ladder and began hauling himself up, only too aware of the sea beneath him and the weight of the two boats that would crush him to death instantly if he fell.

The ladder swayed precariously as the boat rolled in the swell, tossing him away and out, like an unwilling acrobat, then a second later slamming him into the side of the hull.

Finally, after a good minute of hard exertion, he drew level with the deck of the Brignell boat and two strong pairs of hands gripped his arms reassuringly and landed him on the deck.

It was an impressive craft, from what he could see of it from here, the bobbing searchlight from Bolt-Hole fleetingly illuminating parts of the deck area. It was all of a hundred feet and probably more, and it had a helipad, on which sat, crab-like, a small dark helicopter.

‘Yer all right?’ a Liverpudlian accent, friendlier than he had anticipated, asked.

‘I’m fine.’

Two men stood in front of him, big guys, bigger than him, wearing sweaters against the chill. One was holding his Musto bag.

‘The boss is waiting for yer.’

‘Saul Brignell?’ Nicos questioned.

‘No, Mr Brignell is still in his suite at HMP Wakefield. His associate, Mr Davis, is looking forward to meeting yer.’

Nicos had only met Saul Brignell once before, at his office in Liverpool, two years before he had been arrested, when he’d first decided to target Jersey as a potential market. Brignell had agreed to supply him with crystal meth, but it had for some while been only a relatively small amount. In the blunt way Brignell had, he’d told Nicos, ‘I’ll be sniffing your bottom for a while. When I’m confident that you’re not a cunt, we’ll start doing proper business. Do we understand each other?’

Tonight was the first time they were doing ‘proper business’. Even though Brignell was in a prison cell. He’d heard rumours about his associate, Crazy Nigel Davis. When you first met him, he would appear all charm, even a little nervous with a twitch. But upset him and you would unleash an out-of-control fury.

The Liverpudlian who had spoken to Nicos, and was now carrying his bag, led the way, with the other right behind him, his boat shoes squeaking on the teak deck. Glancing uneasily at the two men who were still on his own boat, Nicos followed him through double doors, down wide, steep steps into a lounge that was fitted out as a facsimile of an English pub. There was a bar with a row of beer pumps and a row of optics behind. Shelves lined with whiskies, brandies, gins, vodka, rums, Baileys, advocaat and a vast variety of other liqueurs lining the rear wall — all in lipped shelving that would prevent them from falling off in a rough sea.

In front of the bar were several wooden tables, which Nicos could see were fixed to the floor, as were the chairs, and there was cushioned banquette seating to both the right and left, as well as a couple of pinball machines and a jukebox. There was even an authentically fake Persian carpet covering most of the floor.

All that was different to any of a thousand other indifferent pubs was the smell. The smell that used to be a staple of every pub and bar in the land. A smell that Nicos still missed and which brought a smile to his face now, despite his returning nausea from the motion of the boat’s floor beneath his feet.

Standing behind the bar, with a pint of Guinness in one hand, a lit cigarette in the other, and looking every inch mine friendly host, stood a tall, elegant figure, thin as a reed, his right eye winking away like a lighthouse beam.

Nigel Davis wore a slim-fitting open-neck white shirt, with cufflinks sporting large emeralds, a Richard Mille watch of the kind favoured by Formula One drivers, and blue jeans. Spikes of silver hair had been meticulously brushed forward into a short fringe. As he spoke, the whole left-hand side of his face twitched, his eye half closing. ‘Nice to meet you, Nicos,’ he said, speaking slowly, drawing out each word as if he had to give it great thought. ‘Welcome to the Black Lion. Ever been to a pub in the middle of the ocean before?’ His smile turned into another twitch.

‘No,’ Nicos said. ‘I haven’t.’ The man’s phoney friendliness made him uncomfortable.

Davis drew on his cigarette, then tapped the ash into a retro, red Craven-A ashtray on the bar top. ‘You’re very welcome. All those fucking rules back on shore, like the smoking ban, don’t apply. So what can I get you to drink, Nicos? On the house!’ He roared with laughter as if this was the best joke in the world.

Nicos smiled politely. ‘Well, I guess because we’re at sea, maybe a tot of rum?’

Another twitch. ‘You know how much a tot is, Nicos?’ Davis ducked under the bar, produced a half-pint tumbler and pointed to halfway up it. ‘That’s a lot of rum. If you drank a tot, you’d be totally pissed. Great if you were going into battle in a wooden warship where you were likely to have your legs blown off by a cannon ball. Not so great if you were trying to handle the electronics of a modern warship. That’s why the Royal Navy stopped it. July the thirty-first, 1970. That was a shit day for the navy — I was a young rating then, and I remember it.’ He scowled. ‘I often thought I’d like to meet one of them members of the Admiralty Board who made that decision — that I’d like to meet him on a dark night, know what I mean? But I’ll give you a tot, and you can drink it while I count your money — how’s that?’

‘Sounds good,’ Nicos said.

‘Yeah. I’m under strict instructions from Mr Brignell to take very good care of you.’ He crushed out the remains of his cigarette, ducked under the counter and produced a large brandy snifter. Then he reached behind him for one of the bottles of dark rum at the right-hand end of the shelf.

This boat might have been a lot bigger than his, Nicos thought, but it was pitching and rolling every bit as much and his nausea was returning. Maybe the rum would help. He made his way unsteadily to the nearest chair and sat down heavily.

Moments later, Nigel Davis strolled over almost jauntily, like a seasoned sailor, holding the snifter filled near to the brim with dark liquid, which he set down on the table in front of Nicos. ‘Here we go. So no slight on your integrity intended, Mr Christoforou, but I need to be able to tell the boss that you are as honest as he thinks. Are you good with that?’

‘Mr Brignell knows he has no need to question my integrity,’ Nicos replied. ‘But fine, go ahead.’

Davis nodded at the Liverpudlian who had carried down Nicos’s bag. ‘Open it, Jerry.’

Nicos took a closer look at him, as he unzipped the red bag, pulled out the pale blue suitcase inside it and laid it on the floor. Jerry was a classic man-mountain, with a face like beaten metal and lopsided hair, shaven on one side and lank, shiny with gel and jagged on the other.

He popped open the catches of the suitcase and lifted the lid.

All of them looked down at the rows of fifty-pound bank notes, each bunch secured by a red elastic band. The Liverpudlian took the top layer out, counting as he did. ‘Ten thousand... twenty thousand... thirty thousand... forty thousand... fifty thousand... boss.’

Nigel Davis watched approvingly.

The Liverpudlian began on the second layer. ‘Sixty thousand... seventy... eighty... ninety... one hundred... one hundred and ten thousand.’

Then he stopped. For a moment he froze. Then he said, ‘Boss, you’d better take a look at this.’