by Frank Smith
‘You say you gave them the combination. Who opened the safe?’
‘I did. He made me do it.’
‘Did he tell you to do it?’
‘I told you, they never spoke, not once,’ Grady said, and went on to say that one of the men had hauled him out of his chair and led him to the safe. ‘They had gloves on, leather ones, and the bloke beside me kept smacking the iron bar in the palm of his hand like he was beating a drum. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to, because I had a bloody good idea about what would happen if I refused to cooperate.’
Using hand signals, the leader had made Grady take the cash from the safe and put it in a cloth bag, then he’d held the bag open and pointed to the money on the table and on the floor.
‘The one who had hold of Sharon made it very clear that she would be hurt if I didn’t do what they wanted,’ Grady continued, ‘so I got down on my hands and knees and scooped that money into the bag as fast as I could. I’m not easily scared, but those bastards had me going, and with Sharon there I wasn’t going to take any chances. All I wanted by that time was for the two of us to come out alive.’
When asked for descriptions, neither Grady nor his daughter could come up with anything worth circulating. ‘It was hard to tell with them all dressed in black and the clothes being so baggy and all,’ Grady told Rogers.
The inspector had tried another tack. ‘You’re a fairly big man,’ he said, ‘yet you say you were hauled out of your chair by the man behind you. Was he bigger than you? Was he particularly strong? Did you notice any smell? Tobacco? Aftershave? Body odour? Anything at all?’
‘The way he was using that iron bar, the bugger didn’t need to be strong,’ the landlord growled. ‘One tug on my collar, and I got the message. Sorry, but I can’t tell you more than that – except they had a car waiting.’
‘Colour? Make? Registration?’ Rogers had asked, and was told that neither Grady nor his daughter had actually seen the car; they were too shaken to go to the door until they were sure the men had gone.
Sharon had said it had sounded more like a van to her. ‘Heavier motor, more like my boyfriend’s van.’
Rogers had taken the reference literally and checked on the boyfriend, but he’d been working that night, and had an airtight alibi. Several days later, the burnt-out remains of a van, reported missing the night before the robbery, was found in a gully on a piece of wasteland on the Welsh border. Forensic had it for a week, but found nothing to connect it to the robbery.
Nothing more had been heard of the gang in the months that followed, and the general feeling by midsummer was that the robbery had been a one-off, probably prompted by someone learning that the money taken over the holiday weekend wouldn’t be banked until the following Tuesday. So, with no further activity and with no new evidence to go on, the case was quietly shelved and more or less forgotten.
Until shortly after one o’clock on a Saturday morning in July, when four men, dressed in black, baggy clothes, wearing ski masks, and each carrying a short iron bar, burst into the home of a local solicitor, where he and a small group of business friends were enjoying their weekly poker game. The stakes weren’t large by some standards, but there could be chips worth several hundred pounds on the table at any given time, and the rule of the house was that all bets had to be settled in cash at the end of the evening.
Four men and one woman were at the table: Walter Roach, the host of the weekly card game; Paul Preston, owner of a leasing company dealing in heavy earth-moving equipment; Roy Appleyard, who owned a plumbing business; Alice Nelson, owner-manager of the Broadminster Volvo dealership; and Dr Gerald Warden one of the partners in the Broadminster Medical Clinic.
As before, the gang moved in fast, demonstrating with one swift blow to the front of an antique bookcase that they meant business. Two of them hauled Alice from her seat, slapped tape over her mouth, then sat her down again, while the other two laid their weapons against the neck of Roach and Appleyard as a warning. Once again, not a word was spoken.
Directed by flash cards, the players were told that no one would be hurt if they did as they were told. If they resisted, the woman would be the first to be hurt. To demonstrate, one of the men forced Alice’s hand on to the table, then slammed his weapon down within inches of her fingers. ‘And then,’ Roach told Rogers, ‘they all joined in, slamming their weapons on the table with such force that chips were flying everywhere.
‘It was unnerving,’ he said. ‘Utterly and completely unnerving, which was the intent, of course, because I don’t think any of us doubted that they would carry out their threat if we tried to resist.’
Again by using cards, the players were told to empty their wallets of cash – nothing else – and to drop the money into a cloth bag that was being passed around. Then they were told to turn their pockets inside out, and Alice’s handbag was emptied. The amount alleged to have been taken that night was just short of five thousand pounds.
The phone in the room was ripped from the wall. Mobile phones were taken from Roach and Warden, to be found later by the police in the shrubbery part way down the drive.
‘Still using the cards,’ Roach said, ‘they told us to lie on our faces under the table, and that was the way they left us. I got to the door as fast as I could when I heard a car leave, but they were gone by the time I got there.
‘They were very deliberate in the way they went about things,’ Roach continued. ‘Clearly they knew there was no one else in the house and they wouldn’t be disturbed, and the fact that one of the cards referred to “the woman”, referring to Alice Nelson, tells me they knew exactly who would be there that night.’
It came as no surprise to Rogers, when he asked each player for a description of the thieves, they all said the same thing: the men were all roughly the same height and size, but it was hard to tell because they all wore dark, loose-fitting clothing, and their faces were covered by black ski masks. ‘They even wore black trainers,’ one of the players told him. Under ‘Description’, Rogers had dutifully recorded their statements, but had scrawled TBU in the margin, translated by those who knew him as Totally Bloody Useless.
There could be little doubt that the two robberies had been done by the same gang, but the question was: why now? And why were the robberies more than six months apart?
Other than taking part in the initial door-to-door enquiries, Tregalles, a uniformed Constable at that time, hadn’t been involved in the investigation itself, but reading through the transcripts now it became clear that Rogers suspected an inside job. The fact that the gang had known ahead of time that a woman would be at the table was enough to make the inspector wonder if the robbery had been arranged by one of the players – perhaps someone who had lost a great deal of money and wanted to get it back. But an exhaustive check into their backgrounds failed to show that any of the players were in financial difficulty.
A van, stolen the night before the robbery, and assumed to be the one used by the thieves, was found abandoned in a quiet country lane in the early hours of the following morning. It had been doused in petrol and set on fire. Once again, Forensic had hauled in the charred remains, examined them and issued a report but it, too, in Rogers’ words, was TBU.
Tregalles picked up the Bergman file.
The call to the police by a barely coherent Sam Bergman had come in at 10.09 on a Saturday morning. He told them that his wife, Emily, and George Taylor, a baker from the shop next door, had been killed in his shop.
The first policeman on the scene arrived at 10.18, and he had called immediately for assistance.
Bergman, a jeweller and goldsmith, told police that he and his wife, Emily, always arrived at their shop in Bridge Street at eight thirty each morning except Sunday, in order to vacuum the carpets, clean and polish the display cases, and enter the previous day’s sales in the books. They would also take particularly valuable pieces from the safe for display, and generally get ready for the opening of business at ten o’clock.
At nine thirty, it was Bergman’s habit to leave the shop by the back door, which, he said, his wife always bolted after him, and walk down the lane to the café on the corner, where he would join a number of other businessmen for their morning chat before starting business for the day. At ten o’clock, he would return to the shop, entering by the back door. When asked how he would do that if the door was bolted on the inside, he said he always gave a coded knock so his wife would know it was him, and she would let him in. It was a simple system that had worked for years, he said. As for the burglar alarm, he’d told the inspector that he always switched it off when he and his wife arrived each morning, and he didn’t switch the CCTV camera on until opening time at ten.
Idiot! Rogers had pencilled in beside this statement.
Sam Bergman told Rogers that he had seen nothing untoward in the lane when he had left the shop, and knew nothing about what had taken place until he returned at ten o’clock and saw his wife and George Taylor lying on the floor in a pool of blood. One of the display cases had been smashed, the safe was open, someone had been sick on the floor, and there was a scattering of rings and other items of jewellery trodden into the carpet.
In answer to Rogers’ question as to why George Taylor would have been in the shop, Bergman told him that Taylor sometimes called in and they would walk down to the café on the corner together. He said no one was particularly concerned when Taylor failed to appear for coffee that morning; they simply assumed that the demands of his business wouldn’t allow him to get away, which was sometimes the case.
It was at that point, according to Rogers’ notes, that Bergman had collapsed. Fearing delayed shock, Rogers had called an ambulance and had the jeweller taken to hospital. But Bergman had refused to go until he’d made sure that Loretta Thompson, his part-time assistant, could be contacted and brought in to help determine exactly what had been taken by the thieves. ‘She keeps the records, so she’ll know,’ he told Rogers.
Tregalles flipped through the pages to the formal interview that had taken place in Charter Lane the following Tuesday.
Loretta Thompson and her husband, both chartered accountants, had run a small but successful business from their home for a number of years, but when her husband was killed in a road accident, business had fallen off to the point where Loretta had been forced to look for work to supplement her income.
‘It seems that some of our clients were quite happy with my work while Ted was there,’ she explained, ‘but they weren’t willing to trust a mere woman on her own. My father was a jeweller, so I had some knowledge of the business, and when Emily mentioned that they were spending far too much time on paperwork and keeping track of inventory, I offered my services on a part-time basis, and I’ve been working for the Bergmans now for five years.’
She’d estimated the loss to be about £42,000. About £12,000 of that was in cash, but both Bergman and his wife were goldsmiths by trade, and the rest was made up of sheet gold, gold wire, wafers, and settings, as well as silver bars, rings, bracelets, earrings, pendants, and miscellan-eous precious stones.
‘It is only an estimate,’ she told Rogers, ‘but I’ve been over it carefully, and I don’t think it will be far out. I can give you a more accurate figure when I do a complete inventory, which will have to be done for insurance purposes anyway. It’s a lot of money, but it could have been worse, because they missed some very valuable pieces.’
The gold and silver, Loretta explained, were used by Bergman and his wife in repair and custom work. ‘Mr Bergman does most of the custom-made rings, although he’ll do special orders such as crosses and settings for pendants and brooches from scratch – he’s very good on design – while Mrs Bergman did mostly bracelets and repair work. In fact we are rather low on gold at the moment, but it still amounts to quite a lot of money at today’s prices.’
The crime scene, both in the shop and outside in the alley, were subjected to the closest forensic examination, but there was little to go on in the way of physical evidence: a few black threads caught on the door latch; a partial bloodstained footprint made by someone wearing trainers; and a patch of regurgitated breakfast on the carpet.
Three days later, a dark blue van, reported stolen two days before the robbery, was found, still smouldering, in Collier’s Wood, a reforested area on the site of a strip mine abandoned in the early 1900s.
It was clear from DI Rogers’ notes that he’d been convinced that all three jobs had been done by the same gang of four despite the obvious differences. While others cited the differences, Rogers concentrated on the similarities, such as the vans stolen just before the robberies, and destroyed by fire in remote locations afterwards. And, of course, there were the flash cards, dropped apparently in their hurry to leave after the killings. When shown to those involved in the earlier robberies, they all agreed they were identical to the ones they’d seen. But the clincher, as far as Rogers was concerned, was that the indentations left behind on the tables in the first two robberies, and those on the counter in the jewellery shop, were also identical according to Forensic.
Rogers had been right, Tregalles thought as he closed the file, and now the notes Barry Grant had left behind confirmed it. But if evidence had been hard to find thirteen years ago, what were the chances of finding anything now?
‘Well, what do you make of it, Tregalles?’ Paget asked. ‘It seems to me that DI Rogers was right in linking the three robberies, and the letters left behind by Barry Grant confirms it. As to what actually happened inside the jewellery shop, Grant only knows what he was told, unless, of course, he was lying, and he was inside the shop. On the other hand, it seems unlikely to me that he would lie about that when he was contemplating suicide.’ He frowned. ‘Unless the motive wasn’t robbery at all, but murder.’
‘You’re thinking Mrs Bergman could have been the intended victim?’ Tregalles said. ‘And Taylor just happened to blunder in at the wrong time? Come to that, we don’t know for certain who died first, do we? I mean, Mrs Bergman could have been dead before Taylor came on the scene.’ He shook his head. ‘No, I can’t buy that,’ he said, answering his own question. ‘I can’t see a gang like that doing a contract killing. Not four or five of them, when one man could do the same job and still make it look like a robbery gone wrong.’
‘Well, at least one thing is certain,’ said Paget briskly. ‘We’re not going to resolve anything sitting around here. So, I want you to get things started here first thing tomorrow morning, while I take a run up to Manchester to have a chat with Rogers.’
‘What’s the matter with Marion Alcott?’ Grace asked when they were sitting down to dinner later that evening. ‘Have you heard any more since I talked to you at lunchtime?’
Paget shook his head. ‘Haven’t heard a thing,’ he told her, ‘but I thought I’d give Alcott a ring later on this evening after visiting hours.’
‘Have you ever met his wife?’
‘Just once, and then only briefly.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘Hard to say. I don’t think we exchanged more than half-a-dozen words at the time. She’s small and quite a dainty sort of woman. Not quite what I’d expected Alcott’s wife to be.’
‘Dainty?’ Grace eyed Paget quizzically.
‘Well, small features, small hands. Head came up to my shoulder. I suppose you’d call her petite. She struck me as a quiet, retiring sort of woman.’
‘And you were expecting someone more like the superintendent himself, I suppose?’
‘No, not exactly. I’m not sure what I thought,’ he admitted, ‘but I know I was surprised when I met her.’ He took a sip of wine. ‘Gentle,’ he said quietly. ‘She struck me as a gentle person. I hope she’s going to be all right.’
THREE
David Taylor had his hands in soapy water, trying to scrape away a layer of burnt cheese in the bottom of a saucepan, when the bell rang. He ignored it and continued to scrub. He wasn’t expecting anyone, so it was probably kids. A sm
all gang of them roamed the neighbourhood at night, none of them above the age of eleven or twelve, and they did that sort of thing for fun. The bell rang again insistently. Not kids, then. He dried his hands and went to the top of the stairs. The bell rang again.
‘Coming,’ he shouted as he clattered down the narrow stairway and opened the door. ‘Claire?’ he said, surprised, then frowned. ‘Have I forgotten something?’ He searched his memory. ‘Should I be expecting you?’
Claire smiled and shook her head. David could be a little vague about appointments, but not this time. ‘No, but perhaps I should have telephoned before descending on you,’ she said apologetically as she eyed his rolled-up sleeves. ‘Are you in the middle of something?’
‘Yes, I am as a matter of fact. You any good at scraping burnt cheese off pots?’
‘Is that what I can smell?’
He nodded. ‘Left it on the stove too long. I was playing around with some sketches and completely forgot about it. Anyway, come on up. I’ve opened the windows, so it doesn’t smell too bad up there.’
Claire followed him up the stairs and to the flat above the shop, a ten-by-ten foot living room, galley kitchen, minuscule bathroom, and a bedroom that was little more than an oversized closet.
‘At least I was able to keep the shop,’ he’d told her not long after the divorce. ‘And it’s not as if I spend much time up here. Lucille got the house, which was what she wanted, then sold it when she and Ray decided to move out to Grandview. But it worked out all right, because she split the proceeds with me and we’re still friends.’
David lifted his head and sniffed. ‘It is a bit strong, isn’t it?’ he said hesitantly. ‘Would you rather go down into the shop?’
‘No, this is fine,’ Claire told him. ‘I can stand it if you can, and I shan’t be staying long.’
‘Well, at least take off your coat and sit down. I’m sure you have time for a cup of tea. I could use one myself. Throat’s as dry as a bone.’ He went to the sink and began to fill the electric kettle.
