Danny Stanton sat on a train speeding towards Folkestone. It wasn’t so much his car that he was concerned about. It contained a few packs of gear and that was about it: nothing to worry about. It wasn’t even that he knew that Bobby Bailey was dead; news travelled fast at the fair if you knew who to ask. The loser meant nothing to him. It was more his own involvement as a courier that concerned him, and what had happened to that girl who’d turned up where he’d last seen Bobby.
His plan was simple: run away.
He’d made the journey several times, only this time he didn’t have a return ticket. He’d take the Eurotunnel to Paris and then a bus to Athens, where he’d board a boat to Kos. He’d been left the villa in a will years ago; some old auntie with no other kin had named him as sole heir. It was about the best place he could think of to hide. He could stay there, away from the internet, away from the UK Border Force, and away from his Manchester source, for a few weeks, perhaps even more, then he could move on again.
He’d only gone up there to pass on some pills, but the young dumb kid had brought a carload of partygoers, to show off. He wouldn’t have believed it had he not seen it with his own eyes. He’d told Bobby to get the hell out of there and leave them to it, but Bobby couldn’t take his eyes off the girls: girls young enough to be illegal, with flesh hanging out all over the joint, willing and open to hard drug use. Danny had rolled his eyes; it was a recipe for disaster.
That was when he’d called Bella. He was too fucked to drive, especially over Whinlatter Pass, so he’d walked, and met her somewhere below the treeline. They’d smoked for a good hour or so, as well as drinking the beer she’d brought with her. Bella was old school: she liked a serious-grade joint, a good pint and a hard shag. She was Danny’s kind of girl, and he hooked up with her whenever he could.
The last thing he’d expected was to be the centre of a manhunt when he woke up in her bed three days later. He’d screwed up, and he knew he’d have to pay; he just wasn’t ready yet. His three mobile phones had been broken into pieces and distributed between bins across London as he made his way from Euston to St Pancras. He kept the drugs he had left; he wasn’t that paranoid, and there were fewer border controls between Britain and Greece than Christmases he’d spent with his mother.
He’d told Bella he’d take her to the States, and she’d believed him, ready to go anywhere with him. He felt a bit of a bastard, but it was the only way to plant any sort of disinformation for the police. It would buy him time. It would take them ages to get Bella to talk.
He’d changed gigs before, and he was growing bored of the Lake District anyway; it was full of small-timers like Bobby Bailey, too keen to inject the stuff themselves to bother to keep half an eye open. He should have stayed in Manchester, but that was another closed door, for much the same reason, though none of it had been his fault. He’d chosen the wrong friends, and he knew he was better off on his own. He’d toyed with the idea of getting clean before: not clean as in obeying the law, but as in sober. He’d known a few guys who’d done it and swore by it. Some of them had turned into born-again hippies and that wasn’t his bag, but the idea of not needing it when he woke up was appealing, and he predicted that he’d have to abstain for the foreseeable future anyway, so it was a good opportunity to try. They said it was tough, giving up, but how hard could it be?
As the train emerged from the tunnel in France, Danny felt like a new man: he was embarking on the adventure of a lifetime, and he should have done it years ago.
Danny Stanton’s only problem was that he’d underestimated the power of digital surveillance and international cooperation. CCTV footage of him buying his train ticket from Oxenholme to Euston was passed to Kelly within a matter of hours; from there, she knew he’d either go to ground in London or abroad. When they found him purchasing a ticket from St Pancras to Paris with the same card he’d used in Oxenholme, their task became even easier.
Europe wasn’t that far away, and his details were passed as a matter of course to all borders, as far as Britain’s diplomatic relations allowed, including France, Italy and Greece: the exact route of his bus trip. He was apprehended in Lyons before he even had the chance to browse his Greek guidebook. Before the sun set on Boxing Day, he would be on his way back to the UK.