The Madeiran Double Cross

by Sally Spencer

  THE MADEIRAN DOUBLE CROSS

  SALLY SPENCER

  © Sally Spencer 2015

  Sally Spencer has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  PART ONE: HOOK

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  PART TWO: LINE

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  PART THREE: AND SINKER

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  EPILOGUE

  Author’s Note

  The Madeiran Archipelago is a Portuguese autonomous region and sits in splendid isolation in the Atlantic Ocean. It is 323 miles from the coast of Africa, 621 miles from Europe, and 3,345 miles from Washington DC. Madeira’s economy is based on tourism, and the island has over a million visitors a year. It is not a large island (35 miles by 14 miles at its widest point), but the peak of its highest mountain is 6,109 feet above sea level. The local police force has a relatively easy time, since, as the Berlitz Travel Guide to Madeira points out, “islands are rarely conducive to major crime, if only because the getaway is too difficult.”

  PART ONE: HOOK

  August-December 1986

  A good plot, good friends, and full of expectation;

  an excellent plot, very good friends.

  Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part One

  ONE

  Without a sawn-off shotgun in his hand, Frank Mason always felt vulnerable in banks. He knew it was irrational, but every time the door swung open he was half-expecting it to be the Old Bill, come mob-handed to haul him off. And in this particular bank, on this particular day, his normal discomfort was supplemented by a prickly heat which made his armpits itch.

  He craned his neck so that he could see the front of the queue. With maddening slowness, the Portuguese cashier was counting out notes for a bald man with a mole on his head.

  Not much of a cashier.

  Not much of a bank, really.

  No bulletproof glass cages with recessed openings – just long unprotected counters.

  It seemed more like the drapers’ shops he had known as a boy than a place which handled vast amounts of money.

  The small child ahead of him was sniffing and complaining, and as his mother bent down to comfort him, she stabbed Mason’s leg with the point of her parasol. It was either the third or fourth time it had happened – Mason had lost count.

  The woman turned round, brushing her hair, sticky with sweat, under her straw hat.

  “I’m most terribly sorry,” she said. “It’s Justin, you see. He’s normally such a good little boy, but with all this heat …”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Mason said gruffly.

  The woman shrank away, intimidated, but it wasn’t her that he was annoyed with – it was Elsie.

  Elsie, who had suddenly decided, in the middle of the day, that she needed cash to go shopping with.

  Elsie, who, while he was roasting in this oven, would be sunning herself on their hotel balcony.

  The man with the mole had finished his business and the queue shuffled forwards.

  Mason hadn’t wanted to come to Funchal at all. If he’d had his choice, it would have been a Scottish island. They had some marvellous birds there.

  Peregrine falcons, kestrels – even the names were magic.

  At that very moment, he could have had his binoculars raised to his eyes, watching the falcons effortlessly riding the air currents, then swooping and gliding with a grace which would almost make him weep.

  The only birds he’d seen so far on Madeira had been bloody seagulls.

  If he’d had the choice …

  He wondered when he’d stopped having a choice – though, really, he already knew the answer.

  *

  It had been on a sunny afternoon on Hampstead Heath, seventeen years earlier when he’d lost the option of choosing for himself. He had been lying on an old tartan rug, gazing at the sky, feeling at peace. Elsie had raised herself on to one elbow, looked down at him, and said shyly, “Well, what do you think, Frank? Shall we get married?”

  He could have said no back then, but she had looked so young and fragile – so much in need of protection – that instead he’d gone to see her father.

  Ted Sims had received him in the front room of his new house in St John’s Wood. He had stood perfectly still and serious, listening to Frank’s bumbling declaration.

  When Mason had finished, Sims said, “When I took you on, Frank, you were no more than a petty criminal – just like your dad.”

  “I know that, Ted,” Mason had replied, “and I’m very grateful.”

  Sims had smiled, showing off his newly capped teeth. “I’ve never regretted it for a minute, Frank. Do you know why?”

  Mason had shaken his head, although he was no fool and had a fair idea of the answer.

  “Because you’re tough, you’ve got nerves of steel, and you don’t lose your head. We’re taking on jobs now I’d never have contemplated about without you on the team.”

  It was true. The Sims Mob had always been held in wary respect, but since Mason had joined it, its reputation had grown and grown.

  Sims had walked over to Mason, and put his hand on his shoulder in an affectionate, prospective-father-in-law way.

  “So what I’m saying is, even though my Elsie’s still in her teens, if it’s what you both want, then I’ve no objection. But remember, Frank, we’re Catholics.”

  The fingers tightened, digging into muscle and bone. Mason had reminded himself that for all that Sims was pushing fifty and no longer took an active part in the jobs – and despite the stylish clothes his new tailor was dressing him in – he was still a hard man.

  Hard and ruthless – in a way that Frank could never bring himself to be.

  “We Catholics believe that marriage is forever,” Sims continued, “so before you take the big step, think carefully.”

  He should have done – there was a choice – but he hadn’t, because Elsie was pretty and sweet and needed somebody to look after her.

  Needed somebody to look after her!

  That was a joke.

  He’d started to find out just how helpless she was a couple of months before the wedding.

  “I’ve booked the honeymoon, Frank,” she’d said. “Will two weeks in Brighton suit you? Course it will.”

  “Why didn’t you ask me first?”

  She’d smiled, but it hadn’t been the soft smile he’d grown used to. There’d been something of a warning behind it, just the tiniest hint of a threat. For a moment, it was almost as if he were looking at her dad.

  “Don’t you worry your head thinking about planning things,” she’d said. “Let’s both stick to what we’re good at.”

  *

  The bank queue moved forward again, and Mason neatly side-stepped the prodding parasol of the women in front. Another four people dealt with, and he’d be at the front. It would be a relief to get out of the sticky atmosphere, even though the prospect of returning to his wife was far from attractive.

  He’d been thinking of leaving Elsie for years, and the
need had become even more pressing since he got involved with Linda. But there was so much standing in the way. For a start, Ted Sims was still around, and though Frank had never seen what Sims did to his competition – Ted had been too smart to try to push him into helping with that – he had heard the stories and had no desire to be the main participant in the disappearing-kneecap trick.

  Besides, he was not sure that he could manage without Elsie. In the early days it had been Ted who’d worked out all the jobs, but when he left the Sims’ Mob and started up on his own firm, it was Elsie who’d taken over that function. And much as it irked him to admit it, she was brilliant at her part – which left him, at forty-two, as a combat veteran with little experience in planning and strategy.

  But the main problem was money – he couldn’t leave Elsie unless he had enough.

  He had been in the business for over twenty years, pulling one or two bank jobs a year. A fortune had passed through his hands, but all that he had to show for it was a luxury flat (with only eleven years of the lease to run), and a few thousand in the safety deposit box.

  He’d need to pull another job soon, and it was getting harder all the time.

  “Nerves of steel,” Ted had said.

  Well, that was then, in his twenties. He’d already served three years porridge by that time, and had found it a bloody sight easier to take than his early days in the East End. But that was a long way behind him. He’d got used to the better things in life, and the prospect of a long sentence, even with time off for good behaviour, scared him to death. If he went inside now, he’d be an old man by the time he finally saw the light of day again.

  He took out his handkerchief, and mopped his brow – and it wasn’t just the heat in the bank that was making him sweat!

  What he needed, he told himself, was to make one big killing on his own.

  With money in his own pocket, rather than in Elsie’s, he’d be free. He’d persuade Linda to leave that poncy spineless husband of hers – Nigel the Yachtsman! – and they’d be off to Australia or South America, where there were blue wrens, honey eaters and scarlet ibises.

  But could he ever pull a job off without Elsie? He’d had twenty years of being treated as the brawn. Maybe it was true that that was all he was, maybe …

  The man two up in the queue from him did a crab-like scuttle, gurgled loudly as the breath was forced out of his body, and slumped to the ground.

  An epileptic!

  The people in the queue stood in stunned silence for a second, then bullied and pushed each other for the clearest view of the incident. Even the woman in the straw hat was there, Mason noted with disgust, shoving her little kid towards the front.

  Placing his large hands on the nearest shoulders, he cleared a path to the fallen man.

  Nobody was doing anything useful – they were all just standing there and gawking.

  Mason knelt down and turned the man over, so that he was lying on his back. His pupils were dilated, and his face was turning black. Foam was forming at the corners of his mouth.

  “Get me something to cover him with, and pillow for his head,” Mason ordered. “And step back – give the man room to breathe!”

  There was an edge to his voice – an authority – which made the on-lookers obey.

  Mason took out his plastic wallet of traveller’s checks and forced it between the man’s teeth, to make sure that he did not bite his tongue. Someone handed him a blanket and a cushion. He laid the cushion under the man’s head and draped the blanket on top of him and then held him – firmly but gently – through the shaking and juddering.

  It did not take the fit long to run its course. The blackness drained from the victim’s face, the pupils returned to normal.

  “Where …what happ …?”

  “Just lie still,” Mason said soothingly. “Get him a cup of tea, somebody.”

  He looked up to make sure that his instructions were being obeyed. The circle of watchers – made up of customers and bank employees – was keeping a respectful distance. Under Mason’s gaze, one of the clerks detached himself from the group and headed towards the café across the street.

  It was only when the bank officials – having decided that, all the excitement was over – had started to move back to their posts, that Mason realized that all of them – all of them – had come from behind the counter to look at what was happening.

  A minor crisis like this one – and they had abandoned all sense of security!

  And that was when he got the first glimmerings of his idea.

  *

  Mason walked along the sea front. The sun was blazing, but a tangy refreshing breeze blew off the water. His head felt cluttered. It was a bit like having gas at the dentist’s, the moment just before going under, when everything seemed weird and yet, at the same time, was starkly real.

  He stopped in front of the harbour. There must have been well over a hundred boats moored there – fishing boats, small sailing craft, extravagant pleasure cruisers. A group of young people – little more than kids really – were stretched out on one of the decks, absorbing the heat. The girls wore skimpy bikinis; the boys tightly moulded designer-label trunks. From their languid ease, Mason could tell that they had been brought up to expect just this kind of existence.

  “You don’t know what real life’s about, do you?” he asked them silently. “Well, good luck to you – and I hope you never have to find out.”

  The breeze built up, rattling the rigging around the aluminium masts. Seagulls circled and swooped, scavenging for food.

  Bloody ugly birds, he thought – skilful, but not elegant.

  “Like me,” he said to himself.

  He walked on to a promenade kiosk, a hexagonal cast-iron structure, painted green. It reminded him of the bandstand in the park, when he was a kid. He had gone to the band performances as often as he could; not to watch the band, although he envied them their immaculately pressed uniforms and brilliantly white shirts; nor to listen to the music, although sometimes it had been so overpoweringly beautiful that it had managed to cut its way even into his misery. No, he had gone there to look at the other children, out with their parents for the day, their small hands clasped reassuringly in larger adult ones – while he stood alone.

  Mason sat down at a table next to one of the pillars, in the shade of the kiosk roof, and ordered himself a beer. He was just taking his first sip when the policeman appeared from nowhere. The cop was a tall man with blunt, serious features. On his hip was a leather holster. Mason froze for a second, then forced himself to say something.

  “Excuse me, do you speak English?”

  The policeman wheeled round on his heels to look at him.

  “A leetle. Can I help you, senhor?”

  Mason had been testing the water, and now he realized that he didn’t know what to say next.

  “That’s your trouble, Frank,” he told himself furiously. “You don’t think. You don’t plan ahead.”

  “Er … I just wondered if you’d heard the weather forecast.”

  The policeman smiled, and at once the image of a stern, armed guardian of law and order evaporated.

  “Much sun, senhor,” he said. “Always much sun in Agosto.”

  The policeman resumed his saunter.

  Mason, who prided himself on being able to assess cops, had found no hint of suspicion or wariness in the man’s eyes. More than that, he had detected none of the hardness that clung to the boys of the Met like an invisible shield. The Portuguese’s toughness was no more than uniform-deep; he was a glorified traffic warden who would have no idea how to deal with a serious crime.

  Mason turned his back on the sea and looked towards the edge of the town. He had read somewhere that Madeira was a volcanic island, the top of a huge mountain that had thrust its way out of the sea millions of years earlier. That would explain why there was virtually no flat land on the island – why even Funchal itself had been built on the slope leading to a peak.

  He clos
ed his eyes and conjured up a picture of the bank he had just visited and the narrow cobbled streets that lay around it.

  And suddenly, he had The Plan.

  There were details to consider, points to be cleared up, but the broad sweep of it was there, as if it had been nurtured somewhere else and planted, fully grown, in his brain.

  He felt like a fish which had taken the hook, and now had no alternative but to be dragged along by forces far superior to itself.

  He paid for his beer, and set off at a brisk pace back towards the hotel.

  *

  “Bugger it!” Elsie said to herself, as the false eyelash slipped from her tweezers, and wafted down on to the dressing table.

  She picked it up again, and painstakingly re-applied it. She had always taken trouble over her appearance – and it had paid off. She didn’t really look any older than when she'd got married. Well, maybe a little older, but in a good way – more mature, more interesting.

  Frank hadn’t changed much either, she admitted. He was still tall, dark and handsome, with his jet-black hair, broad nose and square chin. They looked good when they were out together.

  Even so, she was bored with him. She didn’t mind him not having a brain. That was one of the reasons why she'd chosen him in the first place. It was just that as she’d got older – more mature – she’d come to want somebody with a bit more … a bit more class.

  The problem was her dad. He might still treat her like his little girl and give way to her on most things.

  But a divorce?

  Never!

  There was a click, and she turned to see Frank standing in the doorway.

  She glanced at her watch, bought straight after the last job – two thousand three hundred quid and worth every penny of it.

  “You took your time in that bank!” she said.

  “I’ve been hiring a car,” Mason explained.

  “You’ve what?”

  “Been hiring a car. It’s nice out. I thought we’d go for a spin.”

  That wasn’t how she’d planned the day at all.