So why arrest Geoff?
And what has British Gas got to do with all this?
The first the cops knew of Geoff that night was when he turned up at the yard an hour after the drugs had been seized. The cops didn’t ask him to come to the yard and they didn’t arrest him in his house. Just before the men and women from the Specialist Crime Directorate swooped on the yard A Hyde Transport driver, Barry Barwell, had arrived back from Manchester.
Sitting in his cab filling out his paperwork he saw a foreign lorry trying to reverse out of its parking space. Seeing it was about to crash into another vehicle, Mr Barwell jumped out and yelled at the driver to stop. He was helping negotiate the reverse a second time when the police arrived. They asked who he was, took a statement and let him go. Mr Barwell called Geoff on his mobile and told him the police were “all over the place” and they wanted to get into the office.
So what did Geoff do? Run a mile, flee to Spain, go into hiding? No. He drove to the yard to let them into the office. When he arrived one officer asked who he was. Several minutes later, another officer arrested him. But why Geoff and not Mr Barwell? Surely not just because Geoff’s Mercedes set him out as a drug smuggler in a way that Mr Barwell’s anorak and work boots did not?
The reason the officer gave for arresting him was that he was the owner of the yard. Except he wasn’t and isn’t. Never has been. It’s not clear exactly who is, but British Gas have some ownership of the freehold, which is in turn let out to a storage and distribution company called Tamchester which runs from the yard. As well as running its own business was there, Tamchester sub-lets part of it to two/three other companies – one of these being Geoff’s.
This distortion – that Geoff was the owner and not a sub-tenant was maintained all the way to the start of the trial. Why would the police continue with this falsehood? Could it have been that downgrading Geoff from “owner” to “sub-tenant” would not have helped convince either the Crown Prosecution Service that the case against Geoff was strong enough to put him in the dock?
The 27-minute interview