No need to be nervous, he told himself yet again. He had all the correct papers and everything had been planned with the military precision he had come to expect of the boss’s organization, after nearly sixteen years of working loyally for him. Well, pretty loyally.

The boss had long ago told him this was always the best time of day to pass through Customs, when the officers would be tired, at their lowest ebb. He glanced at his watch. All being well, he’d be home in two hours. Stuie would still be asleep, but when he woke, boy, would they celebrate!

Oh yes.

He smiled. It was all going to be fine. Please, God.

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.