Death of the Courier

By Raymond Bailey

When lecturer Steven Evans drove back to England from his post in Barcelona he wasn’t to know that a drug-smuggling syndicate had packed cocaine into the upholstery and door panels of his car, nor that throughout his journey he was being tracked by two Spanish couriers in a separate vehicle.
After stealing Evans’ car, along with the drugs, from outside his parents’ home in Salisbury, the couriers pass the drugs onto their UK distributors. Unfortunately for them, in the course of the transfer one of the couriers is murdered, his body and the gutted car abandoned in the New Forest.
First to hear of the murder is a secret, anti-drug special police unit, but it is up to Hampshire police, headed by Detective Inspector Sally Winslow, to investigate the crime. Ex-partner D.I. Joel James hampers Winslow’s investigation as he conceals vital information regarding the identity of the surviving courier. Who is he and what happened to him? Is he the key to solving the murder?
Meanwhile, Steve discovers that he is not the first victim from the university to lose his car to the drug trade. Along with Paul Collins, an undercover agent, he discovers that both the victims, and the crime organisers, are colleagues in the university.
Sally Winslow and Joel James manage to renew their fraught relationship and their bosses seem finally to be working together, but can their complex international ‘sting’ operation bring down the drug syndicate and put the principals away for good?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Sep 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784627485

Book preview

71

CHAPTER 1

Asked the right question at the right time and Steve Evans would have told you that on almost every day of his life or at least as far back as he could remember he had always woken up bright and alert with all senses fired up to face the day. He might also have admitted, albeit with less conviction, that he could count on the fingers of one hand the times in his grown-up years when that wasn’t the case; the morning after his graduation ceremony; the first day at university; the day after his friend’s stag night and more reluctantly the day his tent-mate at scout camp had shared a couple of bottles of clear liquid borrowed from his dad’s wine store. No ‘dib-dib’ for a day or two after that.

This morning would most certainly not be the best time to ask the questions. It promised to be the day he might be called upon to add a finger of his other hand to the count as he lay, mid-morning, eyes tightly closed against the bright daylight, trying to protect himself with a raised forearm across his face as if his pulsating headache was forcing its way in from the outside.

He’d been like this since he’d woken up half an hour ago though now at least one of his senses had come back online as his right ear detected the noise of car engines on the street outside whilst from his left came the plaintive chords of a classical Spanish guitar recording; he recognised the piece but couldn’t remember its name.

He allowed the sounds to sink in then risked opening his eyes, only to slam them shut instantaneously as the bright daylight added a fresh shard of pain to his headache though the exposure had been long enough for him to see the high white ceiling and the ornate chandelier hanging from it. Clearly he was not in his own bed in his utilitarian Barcelona campus staff flat.

As the pain subsided he eased himself up onto bent elbows and then through eyelids open like slits looked out over crumpled sheets to find out more about his surroundings. Beyond his feet was an elaborately carved footboard, its dark wood carved in classical Spanish style and matched by a similar one on the single bed alongside his but with sheets neatly arranged, not slept in.

Across the room by the far wall was a huge ‘armario’, its wood and patterns matching the bed heads and to Steve’s befuddled senses looking big enough to house a small car. Old in style the furniture might be but it gave an opulence to the room as did the two floor-to-ceiling windows to his right whilst to the left a part-open door indicated the source of the music and now for the first time he sensed the smell of percolating coffee coming from the room beyond.

Still propped on elbows but with eyes now wide open he cycled his legs pushing the sheets off his body and thighs, his sight dazzled by his garish Union Jack boxer shorts that threatened to power-up his headache all over again though at the same time he couldn’t resist a wry smile of amusement and relief that however he had got into this strange bed and whoever had undressed him, his family jewels had remained shrouded by the Union flag and decorum maintained. Perhaps that was what was meant by a flag of convenience.

He rotated his body slowly lowering each foot in turn to the floor by the bedside, pausing to let the spin of the room catch up with reality, the quietness of the scene suddenly shattered as his foot caught a metal bowl strategically placed by the bedside and sent it skittering across the ceramic floor tiles to fetch up with a resounding crash on hitting the skirting board then still not satisfied by the commotion, bouncing off to gyrate on its upturned rim in ever reducing circles. Thank heaven it had been empty.

In the eerie quiet that followed Steve realised the guitar recording had stopped and after what seemed an age but could barely have been a minute, the stillness was broken by two muffled raps on the part-open bedroom door. He swivelled slowly to face it and hear the taps followed by a woman’s voice from behind it calling tentatively in Spanish

‘Steven. Hola. Buenos dias’ it said, the tone implying questions rather than greetings and then after another pause the disembodied voice was given substance as the attractive head of a dark-haired woman appeared in the open space peering anxiously into the room as her hand held the door partly open.

It was hardly the most auspicious way he had met up with a colleague and certainly he could hardly be said to be dressed for the occasion but his recognition of Rosa was immediate and in a strange way hardly surprised him, she was after all the last person he remembered seeing the previous night and it required no great imagination to realise he was lying on a bed in the spare room of her apartment.

‘Que tal?’ she asked in Spanish but rather than reply in that language as he so easily could have done he chose to ask her a more pressing question in his native English.

‘How did I get here Rosa?’

She didn’t answer his question either. Instead in impeccable English told him she would tell him over coffee but in the meantime there was a clean towel for him in the shower and she nodded in the direction of the door to the en suite bathroom. Rosa withdrew her head from the doorway and started to close the door, only to reappear briefly with a mischievous smile to say ‘Like the shorts Steven, really cool’, then giggled as she shut the door behind her.

It took him a while to get to his feet and feel his way unsteadily into the shower, puzzled by the lights he saw breaking into prisms of colour. His thoughts were clearing and his recollections of the previous night were no longer quite so vague but it was all very strange. He’d had little to drink so what had brought this on; it was as if he had been drugged but then that was impossible, after all he had been out with friends.

He leaned against the walls of the power shower and let the lukewarm water bounce off his bent head and hunched shoulders in a less than gentle stream that seemed to be washing his headache away and clearing the final mists that shrouded last night’s memories.

Now he remembered. It had been the faculty celebration dinner that was designed to bring the semester to a happy conclusion in the Barcelona Faculty of Business and Languages. It was his second, best part of seven months since he was seconded from his UK university post to teach English and UK business systems to Spanish undergraduates and to help with the supervision of his home Southern University students maturing in industrial placements in Barcelona businesses. With fluent Spanish and an easy-going but professional demeanour he had been a natural for the position and he loved it although the semester wasn’t exactly meant to end like this.

He stood there, water cascading over him and now remembered much of yesterday quite clearly. There had been lots of students to say goodbye to, then his own bags to pack in his campus staff apartment; the car to oil and water in preparation for tomorrow’s drive to Andorra and then onto England, looking forward to spending time with Kate.

His reverie was broken by a shudder as his body rebelled against the water that was now running cold and had chilled him through but at least he was beginning to feel more like his normal bright self and some vigorous work with the bath towel brought back the circulation and the mirror reflection gave reassurance as he saw there the healthy face of a twenty-three-year-old with tousled fair hair and only the slightest of egos. In fact it looked the same as yesterday and the day before that so whatever had happened no lasting harm had been done.

The Union Jack boxers had to go back on but he found the rest of his clothes neatly stacked and folded on a bedroom chair, wallet, keys and cell phone on top of them and his blue striped shirt from last night freshly washed, pressed and draped over the chair back.

He dressed quickly before checking his mobile for incoming messages and finding only one sent the previous evening by Kate from Brighton giving him her BA flight number and arrival time in Barcelona. She would arrive early the next morning and he felt a stir of excitement at the thought of that.

Another look in the mirror and fingers thrust through the hair and he felt spritely enough to hurry from the bedroom that Rosa normally kept for guests, through the sitting room that he knew well enough from his visits to Rosa’s dinner and drink parties, an elegant room of blended old and modern furniture. Last time he had been here it was for tapas and mulled wine and a background of the guitar music Rosa so loved and with colleagues he valued.

CHAPTER 2

Rosa sat at the kitchen banquette, hands cupping a steaming mug of coffee and Steve leaned over to kiss each of her cheeks in greeting before sitting down opposite her, his pose reflecting the concern he saw in her face so completely at odds with her usual untroubled expression always enhanced by the most beautiful of glossy black hair and the attractive brown eyes, just the hint of ‘crows feet’ seeming to make them smile even at the most serious of moments.

He had known her for the entire time of his secondment, their time in one another’s company cemented by her role as his mentor, a role that had evolved as they gained mutual respect and affection but which had been enhanced by their feelings never spilling over even into the suggestion of sensuality. That bond was perhaps more easily sustained by her being several years his senior but they had much in common quite apart from their fluency in one another’s languages.

She had a degree in law and business from her native Barcelona but as a new graduate years before had spent a year in Bath with a UK law firm, a year that extended into five when she married a young up-and-coming English barrister in the West Country, only to return to her family home as a young widow after his death in a fog-bound accident on the M4 five years ago.

‘Feeling any better?’ she asked in English. He nodded a couple of times before affirming he was OK except for feeling a little light-headed.

‘The shower really cleared my head but I still don’t remember how I got to your apartment and not back to my own.’

‘What do you remember about last night?’ she asked with an inflection in her voice making him feel guilty of some misdemeanour that had caused embarrassment to both of them and which when the memory did return, he would be thoroughly ashamed of. The only way to deal with such a possibility he felt was to recount what he could recall and to hope that recounting the known would lead him to the presently unremembered or lead her to pick up the story.

He looked across at her and as if protecting himself from an unstated criticism said defensively ‘I can even remember what I ate. Just a couple of abondigas and some patatas bravas with a bottle of Stella so I hardly overdid the alcohol and in any case you know that’s not my style.’

The colour rose in Rosa’s cheeks as she recognised the defensiveness in his response and the deflection of her pointed, almost accusatory question. In all the time they had known one another she had never seen him have more than a couple of glasses of wine even at the most celebratory of occasions.

‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to blame you for what happened Steve but it was all a bit worrying and is still something of a mystery.’

The longer Steve thought about it the more clear the memory of the evening became and as if to confirm his innocence even recounted to Rosa the names of those who were at their table for the evening: Rosa herself, his colleague Charlie Strickland and a Spanish guy from the Faculty legal section and his wife. ‘I remember the paella too but after that it’s all a bit vague.’

They sat quietly with their coffees, absorbing the implications of what Steve had just said, the tenseness dissolving into laughter when almost coincidentally they shrugged their shoulders in identical responses, ‘After that I’m totally lost’ Steve said. ‘Your turn.’

She thought carefully before responding knowing very well what she thought. Rosa had once been in digs with a couple of other students and on a night out together one of their drinks had been spiked. The girls had stayed together so that the drugged girl came to no harm, but the suddenness of the girl’s fall into oblivion, the physical helplessness and then the long deep sleep mirrored Steve’s symptoms perfectly. But who would have done that to Steve Evans and why? She thought it best to leave that one for the moment.

‘Well after the coffee there was just you, me and Charlie left at the table. Lots of the others had gone on to a club but you said you were cutting out because you had a heavy night with the students the night before. Charlie insisted we had a night-cap and got three large drinks from the bar. We were talking about your route back to the UK tomorrow and how long you were going to stay in Andorra on the way.’

Rosa refilled their coffee mugs and then went on ‘We hadn’t even finished our drinks when suddenly you stopped speaking in mid-sentence, just sort of switched off. Your eyes were open but staring down at the table and when we shook you you just didn’t respond. You didn’t look ill, you hadn’t slurred your words; you just froze.’

‘By the time we realised you weren’t going to snap out of it most of the others had gone and Charlie and I had to decide whether to take you to hospital or not. In the end I rang my brother Jorge and he came down in the car to collect us. Charlie and Jorge had to virtually carry you out to the car so we brought you here because you might not have been safe on your own up at your place. This was nearer. They got you into the lift, then undressed you in the bedroom and got you into bed. All I did was come in to see you a couple of times in the night and you were sleeping like a log. No problem.’ Rosa went on, ‘That’s it.’ I know you’re not very keen on Charlie but we couldn’t have managed without him. He even rang this morning to see if you were going to be fit to travel tomorrow. Anyway, thank God you seem OK.’

The sharp insistent buzzing of the wall intercom startled them and Rosa went across and spoke into it before releasing the outer door.

‘It’s Jorge,’ she explained. ‘He’s had to come back for his travel bag; usually he stays with his lady friend when he’s in town but she’s away at present. Heaven knows where he went last night after he helped put you to bed.’

She walked through into the hall and opened the apartment door into the stairwell as Jorge appeared on the second floor landing. He kissed his sister on both cheeks and they spoke quietly to one another before coming into the kitchen.

Steve couldn’t remember him from last night but he stood to shake hands as the three of them laughed when Rosa introduced him as the man who had helped undress him the night before.

‘Que tal?’ he asked Steve by way of greeting and Steve replied in Spanish that he had now fully recovered, although that was not strictly true and went on to thank him for his help.

‘De nada’ he replied meaning it was nothing worth mentioning.

‘Rosa thinks I got someone’s spiked drink last night and that’s what knocked me out’ he told Jorge by way of explanation. ‘Who knows, perhaps I saved some maiden from a fate worse than death’ he quipped and laughed at his own joke but then felt embarrassed when Jorge didn’t smile, the tension rising further when Jorge said unexpectedly ‘Maybe someone wanted you out of the way for a while Steve.’ Without doubt it was a strange thing to say but its impact was all the greater for being said with such seriousness as if he had grounds for believing it or even knowing the truth of it.

Jorge was a tall man for a Catalan and Steve had to look upward to see the expression on his face. He could see the family resemblance with Rosa but there was no humour in the brown eyes, just a tenseness about him that was out of keeping with the moment making his comment seem like a warning.

Steve glanced across at Rosa and saw the puzzled frown on her face as she looked at her brother. Maybe it was the surprise in her face that bred uncertainty in his own mind but he had never seen brother and sister together before so couldn’t judge the nature of their sibling relationship. As he watched Rosa’s puzzlement was replaced by a forced smile and he sensed she thought Jorge might know more than he would ever admit about the sparking-off of last night’s events.

Brother and sister kissed again as Jorge carried his bag out to the stairwell. Once he had gone Rosa came back in and closed the door. Sitting down again at the kitchen table she was clearly embarrassed at his sudden departure and disconcerted at both what he had said and what was implied, feeling obliged to justify his behaviour.

‘He always seems worried by something these days Steve. Never been settled since he left the police four years ago. I don’t think he ever wanted to leave but he always did see everything in black and white, no greys, and he thought he saw his boss in some corrupt activity and tried to stop it but nobody backed him up so he had to go.’

‘What does he do now?’ Steve asked.

‘He works for a security company as a courier. They ship documents and valuables all over Europe so he spends quite a bit of time away. Sometimes I think they are on the fringe of legality but they pay well and he has to do something. He’s off on a ten-day jolly tomorrow but I don’t know where.’

Steve stood up and put his empty coffee mug on the work surface. ‘I’d better be leaving as well Rosa. I’ve got to get my stuff ready to leave in the morning.’

‘I’ll drive you back up to the campus Steve; you still look a bit pale.’

He found his leather jacket on the hall rack and they took the lift down to the basement garage.

‘Is Kate coming to Andorra?’ Rosa asked as she drove out.

‘Yes. I’m picking her up at the airport first thing and then after Andorra she’ll go back to the UK with me.’

In the seven months Steve had been on secondment to Barcelona he had talked to Rosa about this ‘Kate’ he was clearly quite enamoured with. She was in the final year of her degree course in the UK but Rosa had met her when she came to Spain in the middle of the Autumn term. The two women got on well together despite the age gap and Rosa realised Steve was more smitten than he would willingly have admitted. Her own affection for Steve was on a different basis but she could not help a feeling of sadness for herself at the shortness of her own love life five years ago. If she had known someone like Steve in the past few years things might have been different for her but, of course, that was merely a flight of fantasy as she well knew.

She threaded her way through the busy lunchtime traffic and pulled up at the steps to Steve’s apartment block. For a moment the two of them sat quietly considering how to say their farewells before the four week break.

On an impulse she turned to look at him and then, taking her hands from the steering wheel placed them on his cheeks gently turning his head toward her and kissed him softly on the lips. She turned away so he didn’t see the sadness in her eyes and said quietly ‘Hasta la vista Steven. Tell Kate from me she’s a lucky girl.’

CHAPTER 3

By the time his alarm clock sounded next morning Steve already had coffee percolating and was towelling himself down after his shower. Excited as he was, he shaved carefully and looked in the bathroom mirror as he tried fairly successfully to bring some semblance of calculated casualness to his mop of blond curls; he wasn’t displeased with the result and hoped Kate would feel the same.

The distant noise of traffic already streaming into Barcelona was a background to his thoughts but he might well have been less sanguine about the start of the day had he known that the moment his apartment light had come on that morning a telephone call had been made from an apartment opposite and when the responder had said ‘Si?’ the simple message in Catalan was ‘He’s moving,’ and the call cut without further comment from either end.

The call had been to a campus flat no more than fifty metres away where two men who had spent the night there were, like Steve, already up and dressed for the day. They had slept fitfully, one partly dressed on the unmade single bed, the other, who had taken the message, slouched in a reclining chair whilst around them was still the debris left by the student who had occupied the room until the previous day.

There was no conversation as they gathered up the few personal items they had brought in for their single night stay but the silence didn’t concern them. Until yesterday they had never met but since their activities were frequently on the borders or beyond the boundaries of illegality neither encouraged idle personal gossip that might reveal snippets of their lives that could rebound on them. They were hardly going to exchange life stories or even true identities that could if anything went wrong land them in trouble they could do without.

One thing they knew they did hold in common was that they both worked for Seguri SA as ‘couriers’ but only this week they had been paired together for the first time ever for a special courier journey to the UK. Both knew the ramifications of their ‘courier’ role and for Juan it wasn’t the first time Senor Gomez of Seguri had used him in such role to the UK, nor was it the first time he had travelled under the name Juan Rodriguez with the passport to prove it, a transition of identity that would have astonished his sister Rosa who knew him only as Jorge Montoya.

Juan left the apartment first, walking slowly to the three-year-old Mercedes that had been parked there overnight. He wasn’t a particularly tall man and with his anorak hood turned up it gave him an air of portliness that some had interpreted as vulnerability to their cost. This morning in the half-light of dawn his stubbled face, dark eyes and sour expression had a threat about him that few would have challenged and yet that wasn’t how he felt at that moment in time. He felt wary, watchful and uneasy and the light drizzle did nothing to lift his spirits.

He opened the car with his remote and put the maps of France and the New Forest into the glove compartment needing little reminding of the likely route they would follow. Only at the last minute had his boss, Gomez, told him the trip was to be through Andorra and not direct and that might add to the journey by several days which added to his concern. Previous trips had been organised well in advance but this one was different. Not only had he been brought in at the last minute to head the pair of couriers but now his trip with an unknown partner was to be extended by days.

Juan’s partner Paul left the flat after him, checking nothing had been left from their overnight stay, leaving the borrowed keys on the kitchen work surface before pulling the door shut behind him. He followed Juan along the footpath making no attempt to catch him up. There was merit in not being seen together although at this time in the morning there were few about on campus to take notice. The taller of the two by far, the track suit top he was wearing only emphasised the width of his shoulders so even to the most casual of observers the power of his upper body was obvious. His colouring was as fair and north European as Juan’s was dark and Iberian; his upright stance more attractive than challenging, blue eyes more welcoming with their implications of openness and humour that in themselves could be as deceptive as a cobra’s sway.

There was contrast too in their languages. Juan’s Spanish had the harsh staccato of Catalunya influenced by his native Catalan origins whilst Paul’s more flowing style and accent were those derived from a Spanish mother from Madrid and his perfect English from his British banker father, parents who had insisted on a bilingual upbringing when they lived in the capital.

He threw his towel and toiletries onto the back seat alongside his travel bag then buckled-up as Juan eased forward until Steve Evans’s Golf was in sight, unmistakable with its green stripe along the roof and UK number plates. Following was going to be easy money.

As if on cue Steve came out of the rear door of his apartment block and loaded two holdalls into the Golf returning inside only to re-emerge with a black bin bag of belongings that he threw in alongside the others.

Juan watched him with mixed feelings. This was the Golf the ‘couriers’ were to follow but for him it was no longer an impersonal affair. He knew this was Rosa’s colleague and felt concerned for the predicament her friend and colleague was unwittingly becoming involved in. It was only yesterday morning he had seen him at Rosa’s and liked him, straightforward and honest; he didn’t deserve this.

In fact it had been the night before that, the night of the end of semester dinner, when Rosa had phoned to ask for his help that Jorge, unbeknown to her by his acquired identity as Juan Rodriguez had been up here on campus close to this very spot, not waiting for Steve but watching in the darkness as two men worked on the Golf. He knew the men, knew their company, knew what they were doing, but he could only watch and let them go on stashing drug packages in the seats and door cavities of the Golf if he was ever going to help bring the international trading of this drug cartel to an end. When Rosa’s call had come he had crept away and left to help her but he knew then that Steve’s drink hadn’t been spiked accidentally. Oh no. His threat to leave and go home early that night meant that had he done so he might have seen what was happening and that had to be prevented by the traffickers at all costs. The knock-out potion had certainly seen to that and even though Jorge hadn’t been there he had a damned good idea who had administered it.

Moments after Steve got into the driver’s seat the Golf lights came on and the two men in the car behind watched his silhouette as he shrugged into his seat belt then pulled away down the campus drive toward the exit gate. Juan followed forty metres behind and once through the campus gates the two cars built up speed and headed northwards toward the slip-road system that would lead to whichever auto route Steve had chosen to follow toward Andorra and the UK. The couriers were comfortable with that but no sooner had they settled into their seats than their confidence suddenly shattered when, at the entrance to the interchange Steve suddenly signalled a turn that took him across the carriageway bridge instead of onto the north-bound slip and they watched as the Golf headed toward the south-bound road building up speed as it went.

The surrounding drivers cursed, gesticulated and hooted as Juan swung the Mercedes across the busy lanes to get onto the bridge in pursuit, avoiding impaling the car on the metal barriers by only the most minute of margins. He swore roundly in Catalan using up most of the words in that language that Paul understood and only when the bright cosmetic strip of the Golf came into sight again did his heart slow down to somewhere at least approaching normal.

Ten calm minutes followed before the Golf indicators blinked again as Steve moved across into the slow lane and took the Aeroporto slip road and from there through to the airport itself. The relief of the followers was palpable as it became obvious where Steve was going even if not what he was going there for. They parked a couple of rows behind the Golf and watched as he locked the doors and walked casually toward the airport buildings.

Juan broke the silence. ‘You’d better follow him in Paul and see what he’s up to. There’s a chance he might recognise me if I go and that would complicate things; we don’t want that.’

Paul nodded agreement before getting out and walking at his own pace to the automatic doors. At least it was a good omen that Steve had headed for the Arrivals Hall; he wasn’t here to take a flight they didn’t know about. He was here to meet one, but why that was they had no idea.

It wasn’t difficult for Paul to see him. He was sitting facing away from the doors Paul had just entered, his concentration on the ‘Arrivals’ display board, his height and mass of fair hair in marked contrast to the Spaniards around him. When the flight board showed an arrival from Gatwick, Paul saw him saunter toward the stream of newly arriving passengers, his apparent nonchalance out of keeping with his eager scanning of the arrivals until suddenly he surged forward to confront a pretty young woman arrival, herself anxiously scanning the faces in front of her.

There was a moment of wide-eyed mutual recognition as Steve and the girl confronted one another, her trolley temporarily abandoned, their wide smiles reflecting a shared joy as they embraced comprehensively only to pull apart to look again into one another’s faces and then to kiss wholeheartedly.

Paul watched with some amusement and more than a little envy as the pair smiled wordlessly at one another until finally Steve retrieved the temporarily abandoned trolley without taking his eyes from the young woman as she, face alive with pleasure was already talking animatedly, hands fluttering in excited explanation of something or other. The two headed for the cafeteria where Steve sat her at a table whilst he went to the counter for coffee and croissants. Clearly they were going to be here for a while which gave adequate opportunity for Paul to get large coffees and rolls for himself and Juan and take them out to the car.

Juan listened to Paul’s account of the meeting, surprised that Gomez hadn’t known of this added complication. No wonder they were going to be in Andorra for some days but all being well it shouldn’t affect the outcome of the trip, only the duration.

CHAPTER 4

An hour later