The Sweeney 01

by Ian Kennedy-Martin

  The Broker phoned Purcell at the Curzon House Hotel and spoke two sentences. ‘Read the front page of the Evening Standard. I’ll be with you in an hour.’ He replaced the phone.

  It was 10.40 pm. Purcell rang room-service. Do you happen to have a copy of the Evening Standard left?’

  They did.

  An attractive little Spanish girl brought up the newspaper. Purcell looked at the front page and forgot about the attractive girl. She left the room without the tip of ten pence that he’d placed handily on the table.

  TOP IRA MEN KILLED IN M4 CRASH. There was a photograph of a Ford Zodiac sliced in half by a nearside upright of a motorway bridge. Other debris from the car were spread across the road. Ambulance men and several police were in the photo.

  Purcell rang room-service again. He had been on the point of going to bed. He now ordered a pot of coffee.

  The Broker turned up almost exactly an hour from his phone call. Purcell offered him the last cup of coffee in the pot.

  ‘We’ve lost our leader, Declan Murray. And John Murphy and Joey O’Horgan.’

  Purcell shrugged. ‘So we jack it in and fuck off?’

  The Broker tried a sip of warm coffee. Purcell had a feeling the Broker was holding something back.

  ‘Look, some of these lad’s, as you know are just professional blaggers, have no connection with the IRA.’

  ‘Out with it,’ Purcell said softly.

  ‘Look, it seems like you’ve done some good drafting work on this job. And now suddenly the man who was both our boss and a terrible frightening man has gone from us-’

  Purcell reached inside his jacket and pulled the Smith and Wesson from the shoulder holster in one movement and pointed it at the Broker’s head. ‘Lay it on the line,’ he ordered.

  The Broker shrugged. ‘Okay. We held something back from you. On Declan Murray’s instructions. There’s a man called Ewing, an American, a Peeler, in London, looking for you. Declan sent two of his boys out after him. They disappeared. Nothing heard of them since.’

  Purcell was quiet a moment, then said aloud, but really talking to himself: ‘Could be a cop from back home. I ran into some trouble Stateside, Mr Kavanagh. They maybe sent someone across.’

  ‘So what I’m saying is, I think Declan Murray should’ve told you.’

  ‘You’re not saying that at all. You’re pissing around, stalling, while I stick a gun on you. And what you’re not talking about is this job. I want to talk about it right now.’

  He put the gun back in its holster. He knew Kavanagh was carrying a gun. He knew there was a high chance that after he made his proposition Kavanagh would go for his gun. Purcell reckoned he’d have his Smith and Wesson handed and fired first. ‘See here, Mr Kavanagh, he said it slowly, distinctly, as if he didn’t want the Broker to miss a word, ‘there’s a job set up and ready to go. And it’s a better looking job because the man we were to give the money to is dead. Now I’ve been working out something for the last hour since I read that newspaper. It goes like this. There’s a better way to pull this heist than the way we’ve been discussing up to now. But it means definitely sacrificing limbs or lives. What d’you think?’

  The Broker was quiet. Purcell took the silence for part approval. ‘Let me tell you what we have to do, Mr Kavanagh. We have to find four guys, four new guys, urgently. Can that be done?’

  The Broker was nodding.

  ‘Now to the point. I’ve worked hard on this project, so have you. Fuck all these other people, I want half the proceeds. You can have the other half.’

  Purcell was sitting on the edge of his seat, every muscle flexed and ready to go for his gun, as soon as the Broker dived for his. But the Broker sat back in his chair, nodding slowly.

  Purcell was pleased. He’d found what he’d come to London to search for on this job — a partner.

  Regan took his problems home with him, went to bed with them, in his mother’s little room, lay awake with them, and watched the cold dawn come up over Hammersmith. And he slowly dismissed all the other problems that had dominated the hours before bed as he began to concentrate on the major problem, which was not really about some bank job, but about a person, himself. He had reached the crisis of his whole career. A crisis not about Ewing or asbestos gloves but about a certain ambitious young Sergeant, George Carter, a creature invented, educated and perfected by Jack Regan, who was out to finish him by grabbing his case. There were few plums around larger than the Purcell-Declan Murray connection. If Carter got away with it, within days the top brass would be saying: ‘Sod that for a lark — Detective Inspector Regan’s slipping. Sergeant Carter solved his case and if Carter’s better than Regan, let’s promote him to Regan’s status. And who’s selected to give Regan an efficiency-improving boot up the arse, and/or marching orders?’

  It would be marching orders. Not because of anything that the brass at the Yard felt. It would be Regan’s own decision to resign. For a simple reason. As long as he was getting results, he could bend the rules. He could say to the chiefs of Flying Squad who ran it as a team effort: ‘Bugger your wonderful team. I’m on a disappearing trick. Next time you see me I’ll have the evidence, and the villains under arrest.’ He could only do that while he was on top of the heap. Now it looked as if Carter was going to shoulder him off. There was another element to be considered. Regan had made a lot of enemies in his years on the Squad. Enemies were not important until their enemy became vulnerable. Regan studied the dawn filtering on to the flat grey palette of London skyline. There are a lot of people around who’d like my balls, he thought. Many.

  The bedside table drawer contained a life-support system. Bottle of fifty Dexedrin and a bottle of Mogadon. He took out the bottle of Mogadon, opened it, and took two.

  It was true that the investigation had reached the stage now where all the phenomena needed to solve it were probably there, and despite nearly a day without sleep he should be at his desk at the Yard. On the other hand, despite the histrionics in Carter’s and Ewing’s report about ‘immediate action’ etcetera, there was no doubt that nothing was going to happen tonight at 300 East- cheap because it was now four am in the morning. So it would not be happening tonight, Sunday night. Perhaps tomorrow night.

  Regan, flat on his back in the big brass bed, mind starting to slow now, but annoyingly returning with a jerk each time he hit the point of sleep. It was that bastard report. Something wrong with it. Carter, aided and abetted in anonymity by Ewing, the kraut-baller and mick-breaker. Lieutenant Ewing, his remorseless quest for that unknown quantity, James Purcell. Purcell, America’s Mr. Big in the Planning Department, comes to London to knock over a bank. Doesn’t sound right. Now, if he’d come to London to knock over a dozen banks…

  Detective Inspector Jack Regan sat bolt upright in bed as if a steam hammer had hit him in the stomach.

  He did eventually get to sleep. About six o’clock Monday morning, to the tune of pigeons, starlings, and the chink of milk bottles on doorsteps. And muffled female screams from a newly married young couple two flats above who seemed to be on the job day and night. Regan approved of balling irrespective of race, creed, or time of day, provided neither party was a screamer. He loathed screaming birds, and blokes, and he’d landed a right coloratura two floors too near, and above.

  When he’d realized what was wrong with Carter’s report at four am, he’d pulled himself out of bed, made tea, put it down the sink because there was no milk, and made black coffee. Then he’d made notes.

  The notes were incomprehensible except to him. But the last note, about the timing, was clear. There was no way it could happen on this overcast Monday morning with low clouds up there spoiling for rain. So there was no point in staying up any longer. He had popped another Mogadon, and smashed himself down on the bed, and gone to sleep immediately.

  At seven am the phone rang. It was a sergeant assigned to Bomb Squad whose name he’d never heard, who gave him the news in a few brief sentences. Regan was so astounded that he aske
d the man to give the message again and slowly.

  ‘I have been asked by Chief Inspector Patchin, officer in charge of a combined Bomb Squad and Flying Squad operation, to inform you that a raid took place on the New York Bank and Trust Company at 300 Eastcheap two hours ago. The information we have is that there was a shoot-out and there are no survivors among the bank raiders. There have been two fatalities to policemen. Your presence is required at that address.’ The young sergeant then asked if he required car and driver.

  Regan told the sergeant to phone Len and tell him to meet his guvnor at the Eastcheap address. He put the phone down.

  He threw back the bed-covers and sat for a moment on the edge of the bed. The news was totally beyond his comprehension.

  A crowd of about three hundred had materialized on the damp streets of the City morning. Porters from large office blocks, night watchmen, workers from the Tubes and railway, and others, the occupants of City apartments who’d been shattered out of their sleep by the gunfire round the bank. Regan pulled his battered Jaguar up on to the low kerb at the west end of Eastcheap opposite the Tube Station, and about three hundred yards from the bank. As he climbed out of the car, he knew everything was wrong because of the double police cordon at the far end of the street.

  He’d made one call to the switchboard sergeant at Squad — the only bloke who had probably heard, officially or unofficially, all the calls. Yes, the two security guards were abducted outside their office in South Audley Street, the police had followed the gang to Eastcheap, and the complete motorized operation of a hundred police had been on the spot within eight minutes. Regan strode across the first police cordon. The police only organized two cordons in an incident like this if they wanted to keep the press and others of the curious well away.

  The first cordon, set up about fifty yards from the bank and in a semicircle around it, consisted of about eighty of the Special Patrol, all armed and glowering at the crowd which was still gathering in an odd kind of festive mood on the two pavements of the street. Regan went to the nearest Special Patrolman and identified himself. The man waved him away. Regan started forward. The man shouted at him sharply and gestured him back.

  Regan unleashed a stream of invective telling the man in no uncertain terms that he was a policeman. The copper demanded identification. Probably for the only time in his life, Regan had none. He had left the apartment in a hurry, without his wallet. He made his way furiously down the outside of the police column which blocked the street

  He spotted Carter. Carter saw him and waved him through the first line of policemen.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘A mess. Two of our lot killed.’

  ‘What about Purcell? The Provos?’

  Carter shrugged and muttered something which Regan didn’t catch because of the noise of two ambulances’ bells clanging, arriving in the street simultaneously. Carter headed off to intercept the ambulances.

  Regan strode on and through the second line of regular police and in though the wide doors of the bank.

  There were fifty people inside. Maynon, Patchin, Flying Squad men. Bomb Squad men, some heavyweight Yard brass, the sort that came out of the woodwork whenever a police officer got killed, doctors, sharpshooters, ambulance men, police photographers, the ashen faced bank Vice President Mr Harben, other bank personnel, all swelling, voices and movements back and forth across the marbled floor smeared with blood and spent shells. The two dead policemen had been laid out on stretchers with their faces covered by newspapers. The others lay where they had fallen.

  They were all dead, the IRA Provos. Regan walked slowly from one body to the other, ticking off their faces against the photographs appended to Carter’s report. Nobody, none of the high confused and histrionic voices of the mob in the bank spoke to him. He continued the round of dead bodies. The brothers, Tim and Tony Noonan, lay within a yard of each other on the floor on the inside of the bank counter. Tom George Martin, the SNP bloke, had been cut down on the marble stairs leading down to the bank vaults. Traynor, who looked as if he was about fifteen years of age, propped in a window ledge, a Colt automatic at his feet. The window had been blown out by the same blast of firing that had almost cut the boy’s body in half.

  Regan’s eyes left the bodies and looked uncomprehendingly into the faces of the babbling police and officials. How could it have happened? How could these people have conspired in their madness to manufacture such a slaughter? How was it possible? All dead. Not one arrest. A massacre.

  He stumbled on, and found the body of Cathy Traynor, her throat and chest ripped open by heavy calibre fire. He went down the stairs into the vaults. They hadn’t even had the chance to assemble their thermic lance equipment before the gun battle began. More bodies. One propped face to the wall. He turned it over, to check the identity, breaking the most important rule in the book: photographers first before a body is moved. But he didn’t care about rules any more.

  He straightened up. The idiots upstairs babbling and shouting. Carter, Maynon, Haskins babbling. What the fuck were they talking about, why the hell were they blundering around here when the three people who really mattered were missing? Where was Lieutenant Ewing? Where was the one they called the Broker? Where was Purcell? Regan knew. And Regan also knew that Maynon, Haskins and bird-brain Carter didn’t, had no idea that this whole thing was a plant, a set-up. Ewing had once said it, he was going to set himself up as a clay-pigeon. This was a diversion. The real birds had flown to the real addresses.

  He stepped slowly up the stairs and walked, almost staggered, out of the bank.

  Nausea hit him. He’d seen death many times before. It wasn’t the general slaughter, or the particular execution of the girl, it was the pointlessness of it — the fact that Patchin, Maynon, all of them had been conned. Conned into a bloody massacre. That was hard to take. He staggered along, still steeped in Mogadon. He’d had exactly one hour’s sleep.

  The cold air of the City hit into him. Someone was speaking to him as his stride hit the fresh grit of the street surface. It was Carter, asking him questions, giving him explanations — which were all now unanswerable and beyond relevance. He pushed through the first line of policemen. Carter kept after him, gripped his sleeve. Regan stopped, shouted some obscenities close into the sergeant’s face. He saw Carter back off, surprised. But then Regan was moving again, through the second line of police, through the crowd behind it, who shouted more questions at him — they’d seen him come out of the bank. He put a hand up to fend off their queries and their voices. Then he broke into a trot, he felt his gut begin to heave. But he made it to Len in the Consul without being sick.

  ‘Len, don’t say anything, turn off the engine. Listen to me. Just let me talk. That fuck-up over the road, a diversion. The IRA imported the best draughtsman in the world, not to plan a heist on that American bank in London, but to rob all of them. Except that one. To rob every American bank that shared the same security system, in one fast operation. They have in common a security system which operates a timing device for opening their safes at nine am every morning.’

  Len started a slow head shake to protest he wasn’t following. But Regan was really talking to himself. ‘The time now is seven twenty-five. The time on the clock above the safe in that bank over there, reads ten-fifteen. In other words, an hour and a quarter ago it would have been possible to open the bank safe without thermic lances or anything, if you knew the combination.’

  Len now elevating his eyes to the ceiling of the car, not understanding a word. ‘I don’t get this, guv.’

  Regan’s eyes still on the street, still studying the chaos of police and ambulances around the bank. ‘What’s important is that I understood it at six o’clock this morning, though I didn’t realize they could get at the time mechanism of the clock. I think Lieutenant Ewing understood that earlier.’ He handed a yellow page to Len. ‘I ripped this out of Yellow Pages (Central). It’s a list of banks. I’ve underlined all those I think are American.
Len, we have to get round those addresses faster than you’ve ever driven a car before. Understand?’

  Len nodded.