What the police did not do next
Misreading the signs
FINDING themselves able to prove Geoff was lying to them about his knowledge of the lorry, the cops did little to investigate whether there was actually any evidence that pointed to his involvement.
Through looking at his mobile phone (which he had helpfully brought with him when he drove back into the lion’s den to be arrested) they would be able to tell who he had been talking to. Maybe there would be some contact between him and the driver? But other than that, nothing. Nothing else to check whether this man without a solicitor is telling the truth when he says he didn’t know there was £77 kilos of cocaine on the lorry.
No interviews with any of the people who worked at the yard where the drugs were unloaded. No attempt to check whether Geoff was telling the truth when he said there was nothing unusual about a foreign lorry being in the yard. [They are in there all the time]. No attempt to look through Geoff’s books to search for any financial irregularities. [A later audit of Geoff’s finances after he was convicted found no money that wasn’t legitimately accounted for]. No meaningful attempt to check out the Mick Barnes lead [Detective Constable Samantha Cailes said she had Googled his name but could not find him. “What would I have asked him anyway?” she said to the jury].
Their investigation was so cursory, their knowledge of the yard so limited, Detective Constable Mark Baxter said in the dock there were no signs in the yard requesting no overnight parking written in three foreign languages – they could be seen in his own surveillance footage.
What makes this all the more surprising is that during Geoff’s interview, the self-same DC Baxter three times appeared to indicate even he didn’t believe Geoff was involved.
Firstly: “Now, whether you knew about the cocaine or whatever, I think you would have known that was something was going on in your yard last night.”
Then later: “Because you might have thought that something was going to be unloaded from that lorry, but you didn’t know what.”
And then: “Now, I’m not saying for one minute that you knew that 77 kilos of cocaine were going to be unloaded from that lorry.”
Even having said all of that, once the cops had established that Geoff had lied about the van driver, their investigation into his innocence lasted about as long as it takes to scroll through the memory of a mobile phone.