CHAPTER 22. IN THE SEARCHLIGHT'S BEAM.
Then the lights came on and you could see for bloody miles. A string of bright lights suspended from the ceiling flooded the interior of the greenhouse. Willard winced and blinked his eyes as his pupils adjusted to the full glare. The two men skidded to a halt and raised their arms as they reached for the sky.
"You too, big man," a voice rasped from up front.
Willard obeyed. Peering over the shoulders of the men in front, Willard saw that the old man, Peachornby's father, was pointing a double-barrelled shotgun at them. At this range, no way could he miss. The barrel was way too short for anything legal. It looked like some 1960s bank robber's sawn-off with both barrels wrapped in black tape.
A roll-up dangled from the old man's lips and wobbled as he spoke. Under the harsh white light, the old man looked like he was the one closest to death – not the three men standing in front of his shotgun. The man still wore his purple fleece and pair of grubby jeans.
"Eight gauge. It'll blow you out of yer shoes," the old man growled, jerking the barrels up. He coughed and spat a wad of phlegm onto the floor. Willard knew that an eight gauge was old-fashioned but more deadly than the more modern twenty gauge.
Now his eyes had got used to the glare, Willard glanced around him. As he'd suspected, the shelving was filled with cannabis plants. Cannabis sativa to give the plant its botanical name. Arranged around the spiky leaved cannabis plants were trays of strongly scented herbs; mostly mint and lavender but others that smelled like curry. A draft wafted air down through grates set in the concrete floor. Willard reckoned that the distinctive marijuana fumes would be sucked into the sewage system where they would be lost in the stench.
What better place to grow heat loving cannabis plants than in a garden centre? The high costs of electricity for heating would be lost amid the general costs of running such a place, especially if the centre also grew other tropical hothouse plants. Very clever, thought Willard. So simple as well. He wondered whether Kenneth or his father had thought up this idea.
His thoughts snapped back to the here and now.
"I know you bunch of muckers, don't I?" the old man said. "You all teamed up or what?"
"No," said the tall, good-looking man with the camera, glancing back at Willard. His accent, although good, was stronger than his friends. "We've never seen him before."
"I have. He's one of your son's lot, Stanley," said the first.
"I remember you two. You're the retard's Polish oppos but now you're gonna take 'im down? Get the loser out of my way?" With that the old man eased his finger off the triggers and raised the shotgun's barrels to the roof panes. He grinned. It was a horrible sight. He lifted his eyes past them and met Willard's gaze. "Only thing is – who are you?"
Willard had to make a decision. These three all knew each other and it was now obvious that they held no love for Peachornby or the BNP. That's why they were taking photos of what was going on down here. All the same, he didn't want to blow his own cover. Time to think fast but hey! That's what he was paid for.
"My name's Willard. Okay, I'm a freelance journalist currently working for the Daily Mirror. The paper asked me to get the low-down on what's going on here so I got a job with the Smashers. And it seems there's more to Peachornby than meets the eye," he said, gesturing to the rows of plants and the steadily dripping hydroponics system.
The old man looked hard at him. Although his face was ravaged by age and illness, his eyes were sharp and seemed to see right through him. "Journalist. Aye, sure you are. Just like I'm the Marquis of Granby. All the same, you can drop the hammer on the retard. Do the town a favour and get him out the way for good."
"Where's your camera?" the handsome young man with the SLR case asked.
Once again, Willard had to think fast. "I'm only on a recce. Just looking about for something newsworthy. Something that would go before page seventeen. I never expected to find..." he said, gesturing at the rows of cannabis plants. And he hadn't, at least until a few hours ago. He'd never have thought someone as dumb as Peachornby could have put together an industrial sized operation like this.
This wasn't some pot-head's tuppeny-ha'penny scam. A few plants in front of a two bar-electric fire. No, this was big. And well thought out. He'd heard of some operations as big or bigger than this. When he was on his firearms course, a couple of Merseyside cops told him about a Scouse scally who'd rented several disused railway tunnels in Cheshire and then stole his leccy direct from the National Grid.
The scally would have got away with it for ages if there hadn't been a big falling out amongst the gang with one of them turning Queen's Evidence. That had been a huge set-up. But if the other two glasshouses were set up the same way then Peachornby's was one of the biggest scams for ages. Lots of brownie points coming his way if he could grab all the credit for shutting it down before one of the big high-ups, like Superintendent Donelan, stole his thunder.
And then there was Peachornby's distribution network. If he had quashed his racial prejudices enough to supply British Asians in Bolton then who else was he dealing with? Yardies? Triads? The Vietnamese? Who knows. Anything was possible.
Willard held the old man's gaze. Ignoring the 1960s sawn-off he said, "this is all down to you, isn't it? There's no way Kenneth could have thought up all of this."
The old man's face broke into a smile. "Of course. And I don't care if you're wearing a wire. All the delays my lawyers'll create, I'll be pushing up the daisies long before this comes to trial. And I've got more than enough put aside to post bail."
Stanley leaned against the shelving, broke open the shotgun and pointed its barrels down at the floor. "We were doing alright until the credit crunch. Not brilliant, like, not with the retard sort of in charge. Not even with me standing over him. But we were more than breaking even and that's all that counts in the end. The bottom line.
"But then my bank – The Bank That Likes To Say Screw You, Amigo – wanted its money back. Foreclosed on the loans, they call it. Probably some computer at head office leaned on my relationship manager. I don't really blame the little bald-headed git. All the same they wanted their money back. All of it. Like I have that kind of dosh sitting about in my desk drawer!"
Stanley hawked up another wad of phlegm and spat. "Well, I wasn't worried then. Plenty of other banks out there. So I put the retard in a suit, made sure his flies were zipped up – the business was sort of in his name by then – and we went round 'em all. No dice. So we tried banks out of town – Lincoln and Nottingham – but they wouldn't deal. Even went online. And by then our credit rating was shot and our bank was making threatenin' noises. If we'd been dealin' with some back street loan-shark our kneecaps would've been long gone.
"Well, I wasn't letting it go at that. No way. For all his big talk, the retard hadn't a clue but of course I'd heard things at trade shows and the like... ways of getting yourself out the hole hydroponically. And I don't mean growing tomatoes. Can't compete with the Spanish on that front anyway..."
"Who set up the distribution network?" Willard asked, before the old man lost the thread of his thoughts. With a bit of luck he could take down several drugs kingpins round the country and not just Peachornby. Those Sergeant's stripes were within his grasp.
"Me at first, of course. But I have to hand it to the retard. When he got it through his thick skull what was going on, he used his contacts through the BNP to shift the product. And I don't just mean his Aryan Brotherhood bunch. When it comes to...," Stanley put on a fake Jamaican accent, "... de ganja, Kenny's an equal opportunity supplier, mon. He sell de green to any bro' wid de foldin', mon. Don't care 'bout de colour of d'eir skin then."
"I thought he hated all non-whites," one of the Poles said, surprised.
"He does," Stanley admitted, losing the accent. "He really believes all that tripe. But money's money. And we soon made enough to pay off our loans, clear our debts. Was hopin' to jack it all in, me, and see out my last years on the Costas. Drink San Miguel lookin' out over the Med."
Stanley coughed again. His lungs weren't used to so much talk. "But then the big C bit. And I wanna leave all this...," he swept his arm round expansively. His hand held the shotgun and even though it was empty the two Poles ducked instinctively. Stanley coughed again, "...leave it all to Nigel. Else the retard will just fu... lose it big time and then all my life's work goes up in smoke. Now we're mostly in the black again, Nigel's got big ideas."
"What sort of ideas? Does he know about this set-up?" Willard asked.
Stanley grinned. "No way. Nigel's clean. If he knew about this, he'd dob us in."
But there was a look on the old man's face that Willard didn't trust. He doubted the extent of Nigel's innocence. However, he'd leave this Nigel character to dangle for the time being; see where the evidence took him.
"You've got enough for the time being," Stanley told them. "Now you three get out of here, put yer heads together an' work on bringin' down the retard for us."
Willard and the two Poles backed down the central aisle, followed by Peachornby senior. At the far end, near to the broken window was the fire exit. As he was the closest, Willard pushed on the bar and let them out into the cold night air.
Outside, it smelled much fresher than in the hothouse and a strong breeze brought salty air from the North Sea with it. Stanley came out last and he shut the fire door behind him. Reversing the shotgun, Stanley swung its stock into a couple more windows. In the almost complete silence of the countryside, the sound of breaking glass was loud; a jarring discordant noise.
"Bloody vandals. Should bring back National Service," Stanley muttered. Shouldering his piece the old man walked down the gap between the glasshouses and made his way back to his office within the main retail unit.
The three men looked at each other.
"What a strange old man," Patryk said, after introducing himself and Lukasz.
"Vicious as a weasel," said Lukasz after a pause.
Willard looked at the two Poles. He wondered how they fit in – what their angle was and what they were after. "We need to talk. Soon," he said giving them his phone number.