The Sanction by Mark Sennen

Author:Mark Sennen [Sennen, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788639811
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

The Border Force didn’t hang around and the next morning an email with several attachments dropped into Holm’s inbox. Javed stood by his shoulder as he opened one of the spreadsheets.

‘Jesus,’ Holm said as myriad lines of data scrolled on his screen. ‘Cornish was spot on. Needle in a haystack. I don’t see how we can find anything.’

‘Three months’ worth of container movements,’ Javed said. ‘Ten thousand containers a day, so that’s close to a million separate entries across all the spreadsheets.’

‘This is a nightmare.’ Holm took in the top few rows. Toys from China. Car parts from Hungary. Textiles from Vietnam. ‘We’ll be here until my retirement before we can make sense of this.’

‘Not at all. We’ll pull all the records into one file. Remove the ones unrelated to SeaPak and use a bit of programming to identify any anomalies. Write a formula or a macro or something.’

‘Hey?’

‘Do you mind, sir?’ Javed gestured at Holm’s seat. ‘If I could sit down and have a look. Perhaps this time you could get the coffees?’

For a moment Holm thought about saying he wasn’t anyone’s dogsbody, but then he looked at the rows and rows of figures on the screen. Clicking a mouse button was at the top end of his technical ability; formulas and macros were a foreign language. A coffee and a cake might be just the thing.

He went to the canteen where he bought two coffees and a couple of pastries and returned to his office to find Javed leaning back in the chair, working on his nails with his clippers.

‘We’ve hit gold, sir,’ Javed said, looking overly smug with himself as he gestured at the screen. ‘Took me all of five minutes.’

Holm sighed. He didn’t know if he was pleased or disappointed. ‘Show me.’

‘First, I extracted the SeaPak data. Then I de-duped the port destinations and the ship names, then—’

‘You what?’

‘Removed duplicates so there were only unique port and ship names as the end points and carriers for the containers.’

‘Right.’

‘Then I began to write a formula intending to pull out data for use in a graph. However, I pretty soon found an error.’ Javed pointed to the screen. ‘Look at this container. SPKZ300176. The SPK is the owner identifier – in this case SeaPak. The Z specifies the container type product code, the six-figure number is the container identifier. This particular container pops up in May, June and July. It produces the same error in my formula too.’

Holm shook his head. ‘Which is?’

‘The start point and the end point are identical. Look, the container was loaded onto the boat in Felixstowe. The boat is the Excelsior and she makes regular trips between Rotterdam and Felixstowe. However, according to the records the container wasn’t offloaded in Rotterdam, but rather came back to Felixstowe. It never left the ship.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘In short, it means the container went from the UK and travelled to the Netherlands, but because it wasn’t disembarked, to all intents and purposes it never left English soil.

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