When Charlie finally came home and Nula broke the news about no more kids to him, he seemed to take it well. Although he petted his daughter and cooed at her, Nula could sense his disappointment. But more and more he piled his time into the business. Charlie was busy spreading his net wider. Leaving Nula at home with little Milly and with Terry in place to watch over them, Charlie took off again. Ketama this time, high in the Rif mountains of Morocco, to shake hands with a fresh supplier. He didn’t listen to Terry’s objections about him needing his wingman alongside him.
‘You got family too,’ Charlie told him, slapping him on the back before he left for the airport. ‘So you know. You watch things here. You watch Nula and the kid, I don’t trust no one else to do that. Beezer’s going to come with me on this trip.’
Terry said: ‘I’m sorry as fuck about Nula not being able to have any more, mate.’ He was thinking that Beezer would be as much use as a chocolate teapot if things got lairy. Poor idiot didn’t know his arse from a hole in the ground.
Charlie shrugged. Only Terry could have mentioned personal matters to him and not got a bunch of fives for his trouble. ‘These things happen. It would have been so much better if it’d been a boy. How can a bloody girl take over in the business we’re in? But what the hell. It is what it is.’
‘I’ll keep a tight eye on things here,’ Terry promised him.
‘Stay up at the house, will you? Nula gets nervous at night. It’s a big place.’
‘Sure. If you want,’ said Terry. He didn’t think Jill was going to be too delighted with this plan, and he wasn’t either, but if that was how Charlie wanted it, then that’s how it would be.
Charlie didn’t like Morocco, but this was good business, he sussed that straight away. Cannabis crops supported more than a million families up in the mountains. They called it kif and it was their saviour in a land far too harsh for growing olives or wheat.
‘Two thousand tonnes of good kif brings the country two billion a year on the black market,’ Saddam, his contact, told him.
Charlie was stunned by the sheer scale of it. Everywhere you looked, as far as the eye could see, were cannabis plantations. He haggled with Saddam over a good price, and wrangled over the difficulties of exporting their product while at lunch in a five-star Tangiers hotel.
Saddam said transport would be no problem. ‘We can stash the kif in the lorries coming out of some of our friendly warehouses.’
‘Ain’t that risky?’
‘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.
At ten o’clock in the evening, Charlie gave in to his jittery feelings. He roused Beezer, who could sleep on a damned clothesline, the idiot, and was already snoring away peacefully while Charlie’s nerves were jangling at every slight sound he heard. Together they legged it out of the village and to a hotel up the road that refused locals entry. Then Charlie felt safe. He started chatting to the staff in the hotel about his contact, and the word was that Saddam was a bad lot and had probably been planning to rob Charlie and his companion and murder them in the night, so keeping both Charlie’s money and peddling the hashish on to the next unwary traveller.
‘Oh really?’ said Charlie, fuming.
At four next morning, Charlie and Beezer returned to Saddam’s place and grabbed the thieving bastard. He cried and pleaded his innocence as Charlie told him all he’d heard.
‘No! I swear it’s not true!’
‘Fucking liar.’
Together Charlie and Beezer dragged him out from the village, into the dunes. Beezer knocked Saddam down and then Charlie fell on him and grabbed his throat. Inch by inch, the light vanished from Saddam’s eyes as Charlie throttled him. Finally, he was still.
Charlie stood up, still quivering with fury.
‘Cunt!’ he swore and kicked the corpse.
They hid the body away, burying it deep in the sands. At nine o’clock that same morning, Charlie contacted one of the tribal elders Saddam had introduced him to, and he got his deal made. He paid up, and a taster pack of two hundred and fifty kilogrammes of prime kif was on its way back to England. Feeling glad to be still in one piece, Charlie gave Beezer the nod and they both headed home.