When he got to Thailand he must have aroused suspicion and the Thai border police made him strip off his clothes, then told him to stand on a table and jump off it. The impact on landing caused the bar of gold to drop from his rectum and fall onto the floor with a guilty clank. He told me this story after serving fifteen years in a Thai prison, which he described as inhuman – filthy and diseased and worse than footage he’d seen of battery farming. I am thinking of that man, trying to remember his name, as I pass through the security of Galley Wood prison on my way to see Connor Blake. I am trying not to think about exactly what I am doing. I do not want to arouse suspicions as that man had done. I hope that the breath mint that I have just sucked on will mask any smell for the spaniel that is sniffing about visitors’ ankles. I am concentrating on swallowing carefully, and praying that nobody tries to engage me in conversation. Because in my mouth, between my upper back molars and my cheek, I have four grams of cocaine, and if I am caught with them I am going down: game over.
