‘Look,’ said Saddam with a broad, gold-toothed grin. ‘It is safe, my friend, I promise you. We load the trucks with perishables. Fresh flowers. Oranges. Lemons. Then they are sealed shut with Transport Internationale Routiere bonds so they get through Customs checkpoints easily.’

‘Yeah?’ Charlie still wasn’t sure. He was thinking that it couldn’t be that easy, could it? And he was beginning to mistrust this smiling little bastard.

‘OK,’ said Saddam patiently. ‘Another route? We fly the product straight from the Rif to the Spanish provinces. Quiet places, small airfields. Easy.’

Although it all sounded tempting, Charlie was still not convinced. Morocco gave him a bad feeling. He thought the souks and medinas were full of thieves and cutthroats and he couldn’t go into raptures about the beauty of the mountains. He was there to do business, that was all, not to go on the ruddy camel rides that dopey Beezer suggested. Fuck the camels. It wasn’t very long before he was regretting his rash plan to leave Terry at home and take Beezer out into the Moroccan wilds with him. Fucking place this was. It was hot and dry and somehow alien. But Saddam taught Charlie a lot about kif. He witnessed the whole process from the reaping, the pressing, the crushing and the oil-making.

After the luxury of the Tangiers hotel, their trip out to Saddam’s home village was a shock. Him and his family of nervous, cowering women made Charlie and Beezer welcome. The food was foul. Sheep’s heads and stuff like that, revolting things. After they’d finally agreed a deal for a couple of tonnes, Charlie fell into a troubled sleep in Saddam’s fly-ridden, charmless little hut of a house, which was set in the middle of a slum area outside Ketama. Charlie couldn’t believe that people really lived like this, pissing in the gutters, dodging swarms of flesh-eating bugs and eating crap. He was uneasy about his poor surroundings. Worried about the way these people looked at him. He was carrying a large amount of money to seal the deal, and Saddam was looking less and less like the civilized, trustworthy acquaintance Charlie’d first met in London’s Mayfair, and more like a lowlife robbing bastard who would happily turn him over and keep the product for himself.