‘I’ll tell you all about drugs,’ said Glynn, ‘like I tell the youngsters that come to work in the lab. There are three kinds of dangerous drugs. First there is the coca bush, this is what cocaine is made from.’
I said, ‘That isn’t such a problem, cocaine, is it?’
‘Don’t ever think that, man. It just depends where you are. There are about a million and a half addicts in Peru alone. In South America it has been a part of the diet since the Incas used it as a pep pill. You can sniff it into the mucous membrane. The poor swines take it because it mutes their hunger and because it’s the only way they can face hellish hard work in conditions a lot worse than my pigs have. They chew it mixed with ash. You’re right, though, from a European viewpoint it’s one of the lesser problems. The second is what we call cannabis.’
‘Hashish,’ I said.
‘Hashish in the Middle East, kif in Morocco, bhang in Kenya. Called Indian hemp, marijuana …’
I interrupted, ‘These are all the same?’
‘Roughly. It’s easy to grow, the flowers and leaves are made into cigarettes, while the resin is dried into a slab which is smoked in a pipe – that is hashish.’
‘Where is it grown?’ I asked.
‘Almost any damn where. There are some trade routes that come out of Jordan south to Sinai through Negev into Egypt. There’s the route out of Syria to Sharm-el-Sheik, at the tip of Sinai, through Saudi Arabia. And there is the sea route from Tyre to Gaza …’
‘O.K.,’ I said, ‘I get it. Now what about opium?’
‘Well, that’s the third drug. It’s a very different story from the others.’
‘Tell me about opium,’ I said.
The kettle had been singing for five minutes and he turned the wick of the oil lamp up a little to give him light to make tea. I wielded the bent wire toasting-fork and put a dish of Welsh butter nearer to the fire to soften it. Outside the wind moaned around the small windows. ‘Opium,’ said Glynn as he warmed the teapot.
‘Difficult to grow, therefore sought after. The basis of narcotic smuggling, grows anywhere up to a latitude of 56°. The oriental poppy or the common poppy is of no interest to the narcotic trader, only the P.S.L. (the Papavar somniferum Linnaeus) gives opium. They are sown in May for the August crop and in August for the April crop.’
‘It’s like painting the Forth Bridge,’ I said.
‘Yes, it’s year-round employment,’ said Glynn. ‘To get it … you want to know?’
‘Sure.’
‘Little incisions are cut into the green capsules of the poppy before the seeds ripen. White latex appears and you wait ten to fifteen hours for the latex to harden and turn brown. The evening they do this you can smell the aroma for miles.’
‘Are there various strains of poppy?’
‘Yes, from purple-black to white, but I don’t know which strain is the best.’ Glynn made the tea and I traded a thick piece of toast with him.
‘Why do Home Office do sample tests?’
‘Oh, I see what you mean. What we can do is make a fair guess at whereabouts a batch came from, by analysis. But it’s seldom needed; they come packaged with trade marks and even signs saying “Beware of Imitations”. You must know that.’
‘Yes, I have seen some of those packs,’ I admitted. ‘But where is it grown? You haven’t said where.’
‘Chiengrai in Northern Siam is said to be the world trading centre, but whether that is true or not, we can say that it is the Yunnan-Kwang-si area. Or let’s generalize and say Burma, Laos, Siam, and Korea. The Americans say that the Chinese Government support the traffic to undermine U.S. moral fibre. It tends to move towards the U.S.A. anyway, because that’s where it commands the best prices. Mind you, I’ve been talking about illegal cultivation, but Yugoslavia, Greece, Japan, and Bulgaria grow it legally, as well as India, Turkey, and Russia. The U.K. produces forty-five legal kilos a year.’
‘And there’s the processing too?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Glynn, ‘the latex from the P.S.L. poppy isn’t much good as it is. It has to be made into morphine base, and then that has to be made into diacetyl-morphine. Which is what you would call “heroin”, or “H”, or “horse” I believe, in some circles.’
‘Do you need a big place to do that?’
‘It’s the drainage, man,’ Glynn said, ‘that’s the problem. There is a tremendous amount of acetic acid to get rid of. If you start floating it down the public drains it’s likely to excite attention. You know what acetic acid is like?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s the stuff my local supermarket sells as vinegar.’
‘Supermarket,’ said Glynn, pronouncing each syllable separately, ‘yes, they would do that in London.’
We talked on into the lonely Welsh night, eating sandwiches and toast and drinking strong tea with goat’s milk in it.
Dawn crawled red-eyed over the horizon before we finished talking. Glynn dozed in his huge wing armchair. I could get no further with the crossword.
I lifted the latch gently and stepped outside into the damp Welsh mists.
On the horizon bare branches grew across the grey skyline like cracks in a sheet of ice. Foraging around the snow patches rooks fluttered and flopped until my arrival sent them climbing into the moist air, their black wings richly pink in the light.
I thought about my talk with Glynn as my shoes built up a rim of loam. So the green canister had contained traces of crude morphine. I was right about the explosives in my car. Someone wanted to destroy the evidence. Where had it come from, how much had there been, who had moved it, to where? My investigation at Albufeira was no nearer to completion than my crossword, in which I had made STALLION into STARLING. The clue to 19 down was ‘Bright red’. I wrote down BALAS – a red ruby.
‘Bright red,’ I thought; perhaps I should write TOMAS; he had bright red hair which he dyed. Why did he dye it? Was he bright red in the political sense? H.K. said he had fought in Spain. Would H.K. know, and if he did would he tell me the truth? It was alarming that so few people told me the truth. Fought in Spain, I thought. I wonder how many Englishmen fought in Spain? The Home Office keeps a file devoted to Englishmen who fought in Spain. I would ask Jean to study it.