The Pickup

This is 100%, absolutely not a true story. No way. Not even a close thing. Not at all. None of these people are real.

I knew a guy.

So many stories start out like this and this one is no different. I knew a guy called Enfield¹. I know, a weird name. His dad was a motorbike nut, hence the name. Enfield was someone I met through a friend when I did a design job for him for one of his Glasgow businesses. A shoe shop.

Enfield and I got on. We came from similar backgrounds and had similar arcs to where we were now, even though Enfield was ten or fifteen years older. Enfield was generous and effusive. He had one of those apartments that looked curated. It was that nice. He operated in a different sphere - hell, a different universe - to me, but that didn’t seem to matter to him. We got on. He liked my work, and it was that simple. Guys have friendships like this. You smoke some weed, get takeout, play video games. Talking is optional.

The other thing that was interesting about Enfield was that he was a bit of a big-time drug dealer.

When I say dealer, what I mean is he sold weight. He sold cocaine to the people who sold it to the people who cut it and sold it to other people who cut it again and sold it in nightclubs around the north of England. He dealt serious weight - big blocks of coke like bricks that were rarely in his possession for more than an hour at a time. The hardest drug he did was weed, and that was only on the weekends.

What I came to realise was that his primary job as a Big-Time Drug Dealer was logistics and creating providence for the money he earned. To do this, he opened lots of cash businesses that put through an extra few thousand here and there and he would get a director payment so the Inland Revenue would be happy. In the end, he was like a management consultant with his own office in the centre of Glasgow, with a secretary, a photocopier and a coffee maker. He used a well-known accountancy firm that was none the wiser that they were in part responsible for laundering money. He employed lots of people who may well have worried that their hairdressers was not doing as well as it should, or that not enough cars were getting serviced in their garage but they needn’t have worried - as long as the coke kept getting shipped in (from Eastern Europe) then balancing the books was easy when you inject thousands of pounds of drug proceeds.

Another hard part was getting the aforementioned weight from delivery to a point of distribution. Whatever way you look at it, you’re going to have a big block of cocaine in the trunk of your car and if you get stopped by the Old Bill and they find it, you are going inside for a long time. For this, Enfield had his ‘Bag Man’ and that man was Colin.

Colin was a wiry little guy from Armagh, who scared the living bejesus out of me. His thick Northern Irish accent (and remember, this was the height of The Troubles²) combined with an extensive criminal record and a veritable Bayeux Tapestry of tattoos and scars gave him an air of genuine menace. There were rumours that he was too full-on for the UVF³, so he had to relocate over the water to do something less…politically charged. I could well believe it. Colin was on a bit of a hair trigger and I guessed that in the business Enfield was in having someone who was not too bothered about getting his hands dirty was useful.

Every time I met Colin (okay, let's be frank here - twice) he seemed to be sizing me up as someone who was stealing the ear of his boss or currying favour and I wondered if he was working out if he could bundle me into the back of a Transit one day and start working on me with electrical cables just to see if I was who I claimed to be. That never happened, but it was a thought that breezed through my mind on more than one occasion.

I was doing some work for Enfield, some poster designs. Back in the day, when design was laying out a bunch of images and typography you chopped up from a photocopy and glued down with Pritt, I had to drop a design off with Enfield for his approval. It was Sunday and I knew he’d be home, so I could get the design approved and then book myself some Mac time (oh yes, you had to book a computer so you could finish your layout in Quark Express) and the use of a scanner. So I decided to swing round his place.

He buzzed me in and I made my way upstairs to his swanky apartment. They say crime doesn’t pay, but they are wrong. His place had floor to ceiling windows that looked over the older part of Glasgow. He had exposed brickwork like the Friends apartment and old movie posters on the wall. He had Dire Straits playing on a Bang & Olufsen record deck and it sounded like they were in the room.

Twin chesterfield sofas were clustered around a table-top video game (Gauntlet if I remember correctly) and I took a seat as I waited for Enfield. He emerged from some other room and offered me a cappuccino - which I readily accepted. I took out my designs and laid them out on top of the video game machine and waited while the sounds of his ludicrously expensive coffee machine chugged out a couple of coffees.

He leaned over the designs, looking them over. Enfield was a real details man and I waited with baited breath whether he would have any changes. He was my first design client and the novelty and outright fear of doing the stuff I was learning for real was still giving me a massive buzz. He nodded his approval and gave me the go ahead to get them ready for print.

My next job would be to lay this out on a computer, get registration marks set up and collect font and asset files together. It was quite stressful but when I would see the odd piece of work around town it gave me butterflies.

Enfield sat down and sipped his coffee as put the designs back in my faux leather folder.

‘Great work, mate - I’ll send you a cheque when they’ve gone to print, okay?’

‘Perfect. Thanks Enfield, it’s a fun project.’ Looking back, it was a shite project and I was underpaid massively for the amount of work I was doing - but what did I know?

‘This is quite awkward,’ said Enfield, ‘but I need to ask a favour.’

I was all ears. Enfield was someone who I saw as a totally legitimate businessman and the coke stuff seemed like a sideline. I was way out on that, but again - what did I know? I was young and dumb, and thought I knew everything. I assumed that he had another design project.

‘Sure, what’s up?’

‘You know that I import ‘product’ every now and again?’ I nodded, all cool, not bothered. Young and dumb. ‘Well, I have to pick some up this evening. Normally me and Colin do it, but Colin is…well he’s not around to help me this time.’

‘Oh. Is he okay?’

‘He’s fine. He got arrested last night, put a guy through a glass window on Renfrew Street. He was very drunk. The other guy is in the Infirmary.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Yeah, well, that has left me a little shorthanded.’

‘So what are you asking me exactly?’

‘So I have to drive to Edinburgh tonight, to do a pickup. Normally it would be next week, but the situation has changed.’

‘Do you want me to look after the flat?’ He looked at me like I was genuinely feeble minded. He might have had a point.

‘I would like some company. You can say no of course.’ I didn’t make the connection that I had a fleeting resemblance to Colin and my presence would give the impression that Colin was with him. I repeat: young and dumb.

My dealings with the world of drugs was strictly limited to scruffy weed dealers and seeing the odd ecstasy pill being exchanged in club queues. I had no real knowledge of hard drugs, how they were bought and sold or even their value.

‘Listen. We drive there, we park in a car park next to another car, they open the boot, chunk in the product, take the money and we drive away. That’s it. Over in 20 seconds. We drive back, buy a bag of chips and forget all about it. I’ve done it countless times. It’s easy.’

I could feel my brain scrunching up trying to process the request. I was young and fearless and this seemed benign and relatively low risk. Besides, Enfield was a client and I really needed this extra income.

‘I will pay you, of course. Three hundred, cash and I will even throw in a block of hash.’ Well that settled it. Money and free drugs: sign me up. I was getting paid more to drive to Edinburgh than he was paying me for my design work.

‘Hey, why not?’

‘Good lad - we can watch the rest of the Rangers game on tele and set off, yeah?’

After half watching game Enfield grabbed a sports bag (it really was a sports bag: a leatherette bag that literally said Sports on the side) we took the lift down to the underground garage to get his car.

Enfield owned a rather glorious brown Jaguar that he kept waxed and polished in his garage. I had not been in it but when I seated myself into the comforting bliss of the soft, leather, heated seat I thought to myself: I must get myself a Jag when I’m older. Enfield stuck some Prodigy on (they were all the rage back then) and we pulled out onto the wet streets of Glasgow so we could join the M8 to Edinburgh.

The drive was uneventful and I think I spend most of my time asking what the various buttons in the car did, playing around with the electric seats (my Dad’s Granada didn’t have those and it was a Ghia) and generally soaking up the sumptuous interior of a Jaguar XJ.

‘We turn off here,’ he swung the car onto an off-ramp and we navigated down to a car-park that was next to the motorway. It was late and there was no one around. Enfield turned off the engine and we waited in silence, just the soft patter of raindrops on the roof of the car to break up the cocooning atmosphere inside. After 5 minutes or so another car turned into the car park and pulled alongside so that its back was aligned with the back of the Jag.

Two men got out, one went to the boot of their car (a Vauxhall Cartlon if memory serves) while the other remained at the driver's side. Enfield and I kept our eyes locked forward. The man took out a sports bag (I neglected to notice whether it had Sports written along the side of it or not) and opened the boot of the Jag. There were a few moments of inactivity and then the two rear doors of the Vauxhall opened and two additional guys got out.

There was a knock on Enfield’s window. He pressed a button and it opened, revealing the face of one of the guys, leaning down.

‘You’re light,’ he sniffed and looked around.

‘This is what we always pay,’ said Enfield, holding the man’s gaze, ‘if the price has changed then you need to tell me in advance.’

‘What now?’ He asked.

One of the men stood in the open. He was casually dressed and his arms were loose by his side. In one of them he held a shotgun, casual like. My balls shrunk into some inner part of anatomy that they were not meant to be.

‘Deal’s off,’ said Enfield and as he closed the window he said: ‘shut the boot, will you?’

The man walked to the back of the car and shut the boot, taking his bag back. Enfield started the Jag and we gracefully pulled back out of the carpark and onto the motorway back to Glasgow. Enfield checked the mirror periodically and then indicated that he wanted to pull into a rest area. He pulled the car to a stop, undid his seatbelt, opened the door and promptly vomited.

After a minute or so, after spitting the last drooly bits that come free when vomiting, he got back in the car and turned the ignition. He flipped the tape in the tape deck and cranked up the volume on the stereo.

‘That was heavy, lets get the fuck out of here,’ and with that we rejoined the motorway and drove back to Glasgow. We didn’t say much on the drive home and I never saw Enfield again.

Probably for the best.

1. It goes without saying that all the names have been changed and some other details because I don’t want to incriminate people. I also would not have a clue how to get in contact with these people if they are - indeed - still with us. With the lifestyle they led I seriously doubt it. IF THEY WERE REAL PEOPLE, that is…

2. The Troubles is the gently descriptive name given to the issues in Northern Ireland pre Good Friday Agreement.

3. Ulster Volunteer Force was a paramilitary loyalist organisation that skirted the edges of criminality and terrorism.