1 week Ago
One day in October 2024, Chris Swales, 54, a smoked-salmon producer with a confident demeanour and a stubbled jaw, stood at the gates of an industrial estate in east London staking out the units. There were teenagers loitering about, knackered cars, XL Bullies; everyone seemed to have more than one phone. It didn't seem like the sort of place where nine pallets of frozen fish would be delivered, but – he checked the address he had noted down from the courier – this was the place.
A couple of months earlier, Swales couldn't have imagined that he'd be sniffing around Walthamstow on the hunt for £37,000 in missing produce, yet here he was. In August, he'd received an email – subject: "Collaboration" – from a man named Patrick Moulin, who claimed to be the buyer for Match, a French supermarket. Moulin was looking for an ongoing supplier of smoked salmon and hoped that Swales's company, the Chapel & Swan Smokehouse in Exning, Suffolk, would provide it.
The orders were big. Not crazy big, but big enough to make Swales reconfigure the production schedule of his 10-person team to meet it. Over the following weeks they worked "hammer and tongs", loading up the produce in batches to be frozen and stored at a depot in Grimsby until the total order was completed.
Soon enough, Swales was notified that it had been collected and the appropriate paperwork signed. Two weeks later, Swales was still waiting to receive payment. He chased, but when Moulin requested he take payment on receipt of the second batch of smoked salmon – worth another £55,000 – Swales put his foot down: "I was never going to say yes to that.
" The line went cold. Calls to Moulin now went unanswered. So Swales phoned Match directly and asked to be put through to their buyer.
No, a woman on the other end of the line told him, no one by the name of Moulin here. Swales felt a sense of panic rising. He was determined to find out where the goods went, so the next morning he hopped in his car and sped to London.
...
Will Coldwell.
