Cat O'Nine Tales and Other Stories - Jeffrey Archer [54]
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 check into a building society? The basement flat on Hinton Road had been replaced with a cottage in the country. The secondhand 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 narc 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 defense team, who wanted to believe him, and for a third time, to the jury, who didn’t. Doug’s defense silk reminded his lordship that this was Mr. Haslett’s first offense 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 offenses—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 agents, 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 secondhand, left-hand-drive, forty-ton, American Peterbilt lorry, which was being offered for sale at a knock-down price. Doug took