The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman by Stephen Leather

for drink. I’d eaten a full plate of pasta and lined my stomach with milk and twice in the Gents I’d forced my fingers down my throat and thrown up as much of the whisky as I could. My head was swimming by the end of the evening but I was still on my feet. McKinley was impressed. So was I.
            I told him I was a dealer, motors, stolen goods, drugs, anything I could make money from. I told him I needed extra muscle, I told him I could do with a driver. What about me? he asked, giving me a friendly nudge in the ribs and shooting me three feet along the bar, I’ve got muscle and I can drive. Like a lamb to the slaughter.
            I told him I’d pay him £300 a week and he took my hand in his giant paw, looked me in the bloodshot eyes and thanked me from the bottom of his heart. I’d never regret it, he said, and apart from a few near misses in the Granada he’d been right. I had installed him in a cheap hotel around the corner from my flat and paid his bill one month in advance. Now he was a constant companion, though the main problem was finding him enough to do.
            To back up my cover story I got him to drive me to various hotels (business meetings), casinos (poker games) and restaurants (can’t tell you what’s going on, Get-Up, but it’s big), and more often than not I’d leave him outside in the car while I had a quiet drink or a meal alone.
            Once I left him waiting outside the Hilton for four hours while I slipped out the back way and wandered around the shops in Oxford Street looking for a present for David. It was important for Get-Up to think that I was wheeling and dealing, though putting on an act was a hell of a lot more tiring than the real thing.
            Gradually I spoke to him about his past, about the work he did for Laing, the people he’d met, the places he’d been to, teasing out the information I needed like a splinter from a septic thumb, careful not to arouse his suspicions, never pressing too hard, changing tack if it looked as if I was touching a sore place.
            The information was obviously old, he’d been in prison for seven years after all. A few of the names he mentioned had passed on or gone inside, but most were still in business, one had recently been featured in one of the more sensational tabloids under the headline ‘Drugs King In Sex Bribe Shocker’.
            I told Get-Up that one of my major interests was dealing in drugs, particularly hard drugs, north of the border, but that I’d run into problems with a supplier up in Glasgow and was lying low in London until tempers had cooled.
            The probing usually took place late at night in pubs or clubs after a great deal of drinking and several self-induced Technicolor yawns. I was starting to get anorexic, but Laing’s involvement in the drugs world was falling into place. Background that I couldn’t get from McKinley I managed to dig up in the Daily Express cuttings library.
    *
    British customs officers seize more than a hundred million pounds’ worth of drugs each year – it breaks down into something like forty-six million pounds of cannabis, forty-eight million pounds of heroin and seven million pounds of cocaine, and that’s just the tip of a mind-blowing iceberg. There are less than three hundred Customs and Excise officers and about twelve hundred policemen working on drugs and their batting average is roughly one for one – one smuggler arrested for each officer per year. And that’s with the help of CEDRIC, a £1.2 million computer based on a couple of Honeywell DPS 8/20s which is even more sophisticated than the hardware used by MI5. It’s hidden away in a nondescript building in Shoeburyness, near Southend, and it replaced the old card index system which was scrapped in the spring of 1983.
            Its top secret data base can cross-check all information collated by the various anti-drug agencies.
            Suppose a one-eyed midget with a