A Frequent Peal of Bells

by Ted Tayler

  Aleks Bogdani stole cars and learned to pick locks before his voice broke. When he was twenty, he studied people. He studied the habits and mannerisms of men who worked in banking and precious stones. Six years ago, he sought people with a range of skills he could use. Tanush and Goga were adept with alarms, cracking safes, tunnelling and following orders. The team was small but efficient. Nowhere was secure when this trio set to work.

  The message they sent Tyrone came from Hatton Garden, a street and commercial centre in the Holborn district of Camden. The area was famous around the globe as London's jewellery quarter and the centre of the UK diamond trade.

  Today, three hundred businesses trade here in the jewellery industry and over fifty shops representing the largest jewellery retailers. Businesses like De Beers, the international family of companies which dominate the international diamond trade. De Beers HQ lay behind the main Hatton Garden shopping street. Underneath the whole district lay an extensive underground infrastructure of vaults, tunnels, offices and workshops.

  During business hours, which ended at five today, men in broad-brimmed hats scurried along the street with satchels securely attached to their wrists. Armoured cars cruised next to the pavements, Couriers with armed escorts hurried between vehicles and doorways. Clients from every nation of the world populated the streets and shops while they were open.

  Aleks appreciated that at night the gems got locked away in safes and underground vaults. The concentration of wealth in that small patch of the capital’s real estate was of epic proportions. He had promised Tyrone O’Riordan he would deliver forty million pounds worth of gems tomorrow.

  The Albanian gang leader spent weeks of surveillance in Hatton Garden. The knowledge he gained since he turned twenty allowed him to merge seamlessly into the environment. Aleks visited the area every day at different times, noting anything that helped or hindered the planning he carried out once business closed for the day.

  Staff, clients, and security guards became accustomed to seeing him around the place. In the final week of planning, he was happy he had gained their acceptance as a mensch, a person of integrity and honour. It was time to open a safe deposit account in the target bank. As he stood inside the vault, Aleks was confident he now possessed the knowledge he needed to carry out his audacious plan. That evening he called Tanush and Goga.

  The three men met only twice after that first call. They had never been caught by the police in their native country, and they didn’t intend that to change. The fewer occasions they were spotted together the better. Too often, criminals became tagged as known associates and if an eyewitness identified one gang member, the others were arrested as a matter of course. When Bogdani explained the comprehensive disguises Tanush and Goga relaxed. This would be a piece of cake.

  At the first meeting in Goga’s flat in Maida Vale, Aleks showed them diagrams of the bank. They had cost him twenty thousand pounds. The ex-employee of the firm that produced them had now retired and played golf every day in the Algarve. Aleks assured his friends he knew the man’s address. If something went wrong, he would never see a golf course again.

  The men studied the diagrams and commented on the initial draft plans. Aleks bowed to their superior knowledge in the areas of their specialist subjects and made the necessary adjustments. When Aleks and Zamir wished their friend goodnight, the tinkering was complete. They were ready to pull off a daring robbery that would send shock-waves through the city of London.

  That night when he got home, Aleks contacted Tyrone O’Riordan. He offered to provide the Grid with a forty million payday. Tyrone was keen to impress his mother. Aleks heard the excitement in the young man’s voice. Tyrone wanted to more than double that sum. He asked whether he could see the plans for the jewel robbery. The night they visited Tyrone’s penthouse apartment was the final time the three gang members gathered together to run through the plans.

  Tyrone proposed a second job, a bank robbery to break the record for the largest haul ever on British soil. He wanted to demonstrate the Grid’s power; to show they could steal what they wanted whenever they wished.

  Aleks, Zamir, and Januz came to Britain to make their fortune. As they descended to the ground floor in the lift after meeting Tyrone, Aleks assured his friends the Grid would only see the amounts it expected. Whatever they amassed on top would be theirs alone. He had heard Tyrone’s threats, but they meant little to an Albanian gangster. Life was a risk. If Tyrone wanted a fight, he would get one and Aleks was confident they could defeat whatever Tyrone threw at them.

  Two days ago, Aleks finished the surveillance and planning on the bank robbery. They waited to be invited to the penthouse once more to answer questions from the young Irishman. In the meantime, they looked forward to a lucrative weekend.

  At five o’clock on Saturday, the businesses closed for the weekend. There was no trading on a Sunday. Doors locked, shutters rolled into place, and alarm systems were activated. At six o’clock, the gang broke through one of the bank’s entrances. Zamir neutralised the alarm system once they got inside the bank.

  Then they breached the reinforced cement wall to the room with the safe-deposit boxes. As soon as the interior of the vault was visible, he sent the text message to Tyrone. It would be a while before they stood inside the vault and began work. Aleks was happy the hard part was complete.

  The boxes stood on the right-hand side of the room, directly opposite the hole. Januz worked steadily enlarging the gap until they could crawl through. Above them, London life continued with its usual rattle and hum. If you wanted peace and quiet, you needed to go to the countryside. Very few Londoner’s took any notice of noise, above or below ground. Somebody always worked somewhere, and the weekend was often the best time to get repair and maintenance jobs done.

  That had been the attraction of this job to Aleks Bogdani. The sheer simplicity. In the years since he arrived from Tirana, big-time robberies had gone out of favour. Burglaries on the scale of this enterprise were so rare the police had reduced numbers of officers they allocated to solving them. In the diamond district, security was light years ahead of what you expect for a family home. But when the threat of a break-in diminishes to be almost non-existent, people get lazy.

  Aleks knew false alarms were common. He witnessed them every day during his surveillance period. Over the years the threat level diminished, and police officers’ ability to respond followed suit. He knew the protocol. When an intruder alarm was activated, the local security personnel should carry out a cursory check. If they believed a break-in had occurred, they phoned the police. If not, they carried on with their normal duties.

  The interrupted alarm call would have been received by the police. They graded the call and determined whether to respond. If they received a second call from security, then they sent in the cavalry. It didn’t take a genius to work out that with the volume of false alarms the system recorded, the local security was lax in its cursory checks.

  As for the police, they needed to consider the background of competing for urgent calls and available resources. Add in the frequency of false activations of the alarms across the diamond quarter, and police attendance became a low priority. This was why the odd squawk from an alarm, or the muffled sound of a drill, didn’t generate panic. The world kept spinning on its axis. It was probably nothing.

  “You’re the largest, Zamir,” said Januz, “try crawling through the hole.”

  It was tight, but the big man made it. The tools were handed through to him, and then Aleks and Januz joined him. They stood and gazed at the ten rows of sixteen boxes that faced them.

  “How do we know where to start?” asked Zamir.

  “Ignore number 114,” said Aleks, “that’s mine. I’ll open it at the end.”

  Aleks started in the middle, his colleagues moved to either end. One by one, boxes were levered open. Their contents emptied onto a side table on the far wall. When the surface was littered with cash, bags, ring boxes, securities documents, deeds
and letters they stopped.

  “Now we throw the rubbish into a sack,” said Aleks. “Open every velvet bag and box. Fill the plastic containers and stack them in the backpacks. As soon as we clear this table, we open more boxes and fill it again.”

  The second round of boxes took longer than the first. They grew weary. There seemed to be so many boxes that only contained coins and documents. They couldn’t predict which boxes to leave well alone. Zamir asked Aleks whether this would be as lucrative a haul as they hoped.

  “We persevere,” he said, “the next box you open might be full of diamonds.”

  As they picked through the items on the tabletop Januz found a bag containing a fabulous necklace.

  “Wow, what might this be worth?” he asked.

  “In a Mayfair shop it retails at five million,” said Aleks. “When we take it to a fence, we might get ten per cent of that. If it’s that good, somebody will have owned it before. It will be recognised. That thing will be more trouble than it’s worth. Throw it in with the rubbish. We need items we can convert to cash without the hassle.”

  Zamir soon discovered Aleks had been right to persevere. He opened a velvet bag that felt different from the others. He tipped the contents into a plastic container. The bag of uncut diamonds was the boost they needed. Januz grabbed a similarly marked bag and opened it. They had struck the mother lode. Aleks joined in the hunt for more of the same bags. They found seven in total.

  “We must keep going,” he said, “I know we’re tired. These disguises are hot, and the air in here isn’t great, and I don’t think we’ve got forty million yet.”

  He checked his watch. It was ten hours since they entered the street above them. He wanted to be out of this place before noon.

  “Come on, Zamir. Don’t stand there looking at the backpacks. We’ll count the cash soon. If we reach the limit, then we discard it and only collect gold and diamonds.”

  “Surely, cash is best?” asked Januz.

  “You’re not thinking, Januz,” said Aleks. “We will only be able to carry a maximum of fifty kilos on our backs. The diamonds will be the highest value per kilo we collect. The contents of those seven velvet bags could be worth twenty-five million. We concentrate on finding more of these.”

  Twenty more boxes were emptied, and their contents split between the keep and the discard pile. Nobody found any more uncut diamonds, but there was no shortage of gems and cash.

  “Now we count the cash, Zamir,” said Aleks, “only fifty English notes, and one hundred euros. The five hundred notes are too risky, the police think they’re associated with organised crime.”

  Zamir and Januz looked at Aleks. He grinned from ear to ear. They counted the cash as instructed. They had over eight million pounds, plus two million euros, and split the amounts across the three knapsacks.

  Aleks lifted one, it was heavier than he hoped. The other two were lighter, but not by much. Zamir was strong, he could cope with this one.

  “There’s time to open a further twenty,” he said, “pick them at random. We might get lucky, who knows? We don’t have time for any more than that, and we’ll struggle to carry the stuff out. Ditch the cash, just go for gems.”

  “It would be madness to go to this trouble and then get stopped by the police because we’re bent double with the strain of our haul,” said Januz.

  All three men laughed, despite the tension of the moment.

  After a short rest, they opened random boxes. Aleks opened box number 114 and retrieved the cash he had stashed there when he opened his account. Januz found gold coins, rings and bracelets. Zamir came across dusty old wills and compromising pictures of a young actress.

  “We could blackmail her,” he said to Aleks.

  “Think again,” said Aleks, “the pictures are black and white. She retired years ago and wouldn’t pay us a bean. If we published these photos, it would do her a favour. Remind people how attractive she was in the old days. Ditch them. The police can enjoy looking at them when they investigate this theft.”

  They opened the eighty-fifth box. They sorted through the contents, and the items were boxed or ditched. Aleks added more plastic containers to the two lighter bags.

  “Zamir, can you manage this one?” he asked.

  The big man lifted it from the floor and slung it over his shoulders. He staggered forward two steps and then grinned.

  “Only kidding,” he said, “I’ll be fine.”

  “Okay,” said Aleks, “let’s take a few minutes clearing this mess. Wipe every surface. We wore gloves most of the time, but we handled bags and necklaces that went into the sacks. We must take them and dispose of them before we leave.”

  Ten minutes later they crawled through the tunnel pushing the knapsacks in front. Zamir went back inside the vault and grabbed the rubbish sacks. With the knapsacks on their backs, the three men returned to the door where they entered eighteen hours earlier. It was a quarter to twelve.

  Aleks opened the door an inch. He couldn’t see anyone. He saw what they needed,

  “Waste bins, twenty yards up the lane, Januz,” he said, “throw the sacks in there and set everything alight. We’re heading in the opposite direction back to the car. Don’t run to catch us. We’ll wait for you.”

  Aleks and Zamir left the building and strolled along the lane to the corner. They spotted a few pedestrians, and vehicles on the move, but nobody paid any attention to two Jewish gentlemen in this part of town. They reached the car and got inside. Januz appeared at the end of the lane. A police car cruised past and stopped twenty yards further up the road.

  “Don’t panic,” pleaded Zamir, as he watched his friend glance over his shoulder at the car. He continued his slow walk. The two officers were out of the car now. One talked on his walkie-talkie. Had he received a message concerning them? Januz slid into the back seat and puffed out his cheeks.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  The policemen reached the entrance to the lane.

  “Did anyone see you ditch the sacks?” asked Aleks.

  “The place was deserted. The waste bin was smoking well when I left.”

  Aleks started the car and moved away.

  “Somebody reported the smoke. That explains the call. We’re still alright. Let’s get back to my place and recount the cash.”

  “Aren’t you going to tell the boss we’ve finished the job?” asked Zamir.

  “Are you kidding?” asked Aleks, “that’s why I wanted to get away early. I’ll call when I have a good idea what we’ve got here. He’ll get his share. We’ll hang on to as much cash as we can without raising his suspicions.”

  They had executed the plan to perfection. The business owners and the police were unaware of a problem. The robbery wouldn’t be discovered until Monday morning. When staff arrived, they would find the vault had been compromised. Eighty-five of the one hundred and sixty safe-deposit boxes opened. Cash and velvet bags scattered on the floor.

  It suggested to the police that a small team had been involved. Although they had time on their hands to break into the remaining boxes, they reached the limit of what they could carry. For those who stored documents, deeds, love letters, and risqué photos in the vault there was nothing but heartache. The police had found a burning waste bin at the far end of the lane, its contents were irretrievable.

  As for the five million pounds necklace, Januz had rescued that before throwing the sacks into the bin. It was in the inside pocket of his jacket.

  CHAPTER 10

  Monday, 13th October 2014

  Tyrone O’Riordan finally heard from Aleks Bogdani at midnight last night. The success of the robbery was great news. One down and one to go. Tyrone couldn’t wait to ring his mother with the news. He wasn’t sure what time she got up now she was a lady of leisure. He waited until half-past nine.

  “Good morning, Mum,” he said, “and how are you this fine morning?”

  “Have you seen the news?” she snapped.

  “Why,
what’s the matter?”

  “That jewellery robbery you mentioned is all over the news. It’s causing a right stink.”

  “Have they said how much they took?” he asked.

  “Too early to tell,” said Colleen, “they’ve got to check which safe-deposits were opened, and who owned them. Not everyone will be honest about what they stored in the vault. I bet the taxman would be keen to find out.”

  “Do they have any idea who was responsible?”

  “The police plan to question the bank’s employees and security guards. The burglars knew their way around. They aren’t sure how many people were involved, but they were professionals with sophisticated equipment. Listening to the police inspector being interviewed on TV, they believe the robbers had help from someone on the inside to break into the vault. Two questions they want to be answered, why the security personnel didn’t realise something was going on and was there a brief spell when an alarm sounded?”

  “I wish I’d got up earlier to watch it now,” laughed Tyrone, “what’s happening there now?”

  “There are people outside the bank. They’re eager to learn which boxes got opened.”

  “I heard from the leader of the gang late last night. Everything went to plan. They got in and out without being seen. We should hit forty million, no bother. I’m meeting with Aleks at noon. He’s made an appointment to deliver the cash. We’ll get that paid into the Grid’s accounts.”

  “How much cash was there?” asked Colleen.

  “Eight million, four hundred thousand,” replied Tyrone.

  “Is that it? Where’s the rest coming from?”

  “Diamonds, uncut and cut. We need to sell those on the quiet. Gold bracelets, rings and chains. They will melt those for scrap value. The sooner the actual ornament disappears the better. Unless someone is daft enough to try to cheat us, we’ll scrape up to forty million. When they finish the bank job, you’ll see the hundred million I promised.”