“Shit,” he cursed.
He’d expected to see pedestrians flee the scene. He’d expected to see a brave one try to interfere. But what Scowcroft had not expected to see was two motorcycles coming at them along the pavement, the riders hidden ominously behind black visors. With gut instinct, Scowcroft knew that the bikers were coming for the contents of the bag.
“Shit!” he repeated, then spat, because years of talking, months of planning, and weeks of practice were about to come undone.
So Alex Scowcroft formulated a new plan. One that any Scowcroft would have made.
He reached beneath his seat and pulled his older brother’s commando dagger from its sheath. Charlotte saw the blade the moment before she saw the incoming bikers, and grasped the implications. She looked to Scowcroft for leadership.
“Would you die for my brother?” he asked her.
She nodded, swallowing the fear in her throat.
“Would you kill for him?”
Her eyes told him that she would.
“Then get out and fight.”
Chapter 2
Scowcroft and Charlotte flew from the van’s doors like fury, adrenaline coursing through their veins.
“Baz!” Scowcroft shouted. “Leave the bag where it is and get over here! We’ve got a problem!”
“Leave the bag?” Charlotte questioned aghast, a ball hammer in her shaking hands.
“They’ll snatch it and go. We need them off those bikes.”
With no sign of the duffel bag, the black-helmeted riders slowed their pace. Scowcroft could feel their gaze now falling on him and his two accomplices from behind the tinted visors.
Barrett came running up beside the others.
“The bag’s by the front-left wheel arch. I can grab it quick, but what about them?” he asked, then took in the sight of Scowcroft’s commando dagger. For a moment, Scowcroft thought Barrett would tell him to put the weapon away. Instead, Barrett drew an identical blade from a sheath on his lower leg.
“Just remember, drive the blade, don’t slice,” Barrett encouraged the younger man, brandishing his own dagger in an attempt to scare off the riders and avoid bloodshed.
It didn’t work.
The bikers had their own weapons—five hundred pounds of metal, and that metal could reach sixty miles per hour in the time it took to close the gap to Scowcroft and his companions.
The bikes revved hard, leaving rubber on the pavement. Side by side, they came forward in a cavalry charge of steel.
Barrett and Charlotte darted left and pressed themselves into the cover of a shallow doorway, but Scowcroft dived for the duffel bag beneath the wheel arch, the bikers aiming for the easy target of his exposed body. They saw the chance to cripple the man as he grasped for his prize, and engines roared louder as throttles were held open.
Then, as his accomplices waited for the dreadful moment of impact, Scowcroft pressed his body down into the tarmac, squeezing himself beneath the car, and flung the duffel bag into the face of the closest rider.
The bikers had taken the bait, and now they paid the price. Traveling at sixty miles per hour, the rider was hit by the light leather bag as if by a baseball bat, whipping his neck and sending both bike and rider skidding across the pavement. With great skill, the fallen rider’s partner was able to avoid entanglement, but it brought him to a stop.
“On him!” Scowcroft shouted, rushing to collect the bag.
Charlotte and Barrett broke from the refuge of the doorway and sprinted towards the second biker. The rider tried to twist on his seat, reaching down for a blade concealed in his boot, but Barrett was quicker and hit the rider with a rugby tackle, his own dagger flying free in the collision. The two men and the bike crashed to the floor, Barrett crying out in pain as his leg became pinned beneath the hot metal of the engine, and grunting in agony again as the rider head butted him with his helmet. As the pouring blood soaked his balaclava, Barrett was forced to remove his mask.
“Charlotte!” he gasped. “My dagger!”
Charlotte looked around desperately for the blade, but when she saw where it was, the discovery caused her to go rigid with panic.
The blade was in the hand of the bag’s courier. Recovered from the initial ambush, the big man was on his knees, aggressively turning the van’s tires into husks of useless rubber.
Without thinking of her own safety, Charlotte charged towards him, but Scowcroft beat her to it and drove his blade into the man’s shoulder. The big man roared in agony and tried to turn his captured dagger towards Scowcroft, but the wound had severed muscle and the arm hung limp and useless by his side. Scowcroft kicked the blade from the man’s hand and followed by planting his steel toecap into the man’s jaw. Barely conscious, the burly man slumped backwards against the van, leaving a smear of blood against the white paneling.
Pinned beneath the bike, Barrett and the rider continued their own struggle, the helmet crashing again into Barrett’s broken nose.
Scowcroft and Charlotte arrived to haul the bike off the pair. Then Barrett pulled himself clear as Charlotte threw herself at the rider, her furious punches wasted against the protection of his helmet and thick jacket.
“Get off him!” Scowcroft called out. Barrett gritted his teeth and dragged Charlotte back by her shoulders, leaving Scowcroft free to push the bike back on top of the sprawling rider.
“I’ve got the bag,” he panted. “But the van’s done.”
Barrett looked over his shoulder, blood bubbling from his shattered nose. A few curious heads were poking out of windows, but most of Hatton Garden’s diamond traders had bolted their doors at the first sign of trouble.
“Get the backpacks out the van,” Scowcroft told them. “Come on, let’s go!”
“There’s no sirens,” Barrett observed as Charlotte handed out the small backpacks, each one unique in design and color. “Where the hell are the coppers?”
“Who cares?” Scowcroft countered. “We got what we came for. Let’s get out of here!”
Without waiting for agreement, Scowcroft made for the nearest alleyway. Charlotte and Barrett followed in his wake, leaving three groaning bodies on the pavement.
Not one of them saw the pinstripe-suited gentleman in the window of Swiss Excellence, a specialist diamond jeweler. If they had, perhaps they would have noticed that the man’s manicured hand was shaking as it picked up a telephone from its cradle. Perhaps they would have assumed that the pinstripe-suited gentleman was finally calling the police.
They’d have been wrong.
“Hello, sir,” the jeweler began, with deference born of fear. “I’m afraid…” He swallowed. “I’m afraid that someone has stolen your diamonds.”
The line clicked dead.
Chapter 3
Detective Inspector Andrew Hill was sitting behind his desk in Scotland Yard.
“Well, technically I’m FaceTiming you from the office,” he told his wife of three weeks. “It’s bloody purgatory, Deb. I’ve got no cases. All my paperwork is done. I’m like the ghost of a young girl who was murdered in a Victorian manor. My soul can’t find peace, and all I have to look forward to is jumping out on you when you use the bathroom.”
“I told you I’d stab you if you do that again.” Deb laughed on the phone’s screen. “Now stop being a melodramatic ass and find something to do. Get working on the business.”
“I’m not allowed to work a second job until I get the redundancy,” Hill grumbled.
“Yes you are.”
“Well, OK, yeah, but it’s frowned upon. I don’t want to rub anyone up the wrong way before I leave. You never know who’s going to be useful for business,” the detective protested through a smile.
“I’m just hearing a lot of gas. Anyway, some of us do have to work. I’ll see you tonight, babe. Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
His call ended, Hill checked his emails and texts for the tenth time that hour. Entering his podcast app, he scrolled through a dozen shows on e
ntrepreneurship and business management. Hitting refresh, Hill searched in vain for a new episode.
“Bloody purgatory,” he groaned under his breath. He reached for his briefcase and opened it, pulling a sheaf of bound papers from within.
These were Hill’s business plans, drawn up over the past two years, and he spent the next hour poring over them, even though every detail was ingrained in his memory. As a regular gym-goer, and former center for the national police rugby team, Hill had been looking for a way to turn his passion for fitness into a career. Two years ago, he’d finally found it.
Hill wanted to create a national chain of gyms, but he also knew that 80 percent of independent gyms failed in their first five years of business. Hill didn’t intend to become one of those failures. Instead, he would buy those that did fold, streamline them, and so grow his own chain of twenty-four-hour, low-cost fitness centers.
All he needed was money.
He had scrimped and saved what he could, but living in central London sapped even a detective inspector’s fifty thousand a year. Deb had insisted on the finest ring and wedding, and soon she’d want a family. Both in their mid-thirties, that day would have to come sooner rather than later, and with it the bills. Always the bloody bills.
So Hill had snatched at the opportunity for voluntary redundancy that the police budget cuts had mandated, and the package would almost give him enough money to buy the first of the failing gyms. It was a small step in what he saw as the beginning of an empire. Having studied the markets and gone over the figures until he saw them in his sleep, Hill was now desperate for the day of his redundancy and the beginning of his new life.
Until then, he was bored. Frustrated and bored. So he went in search of something to occupy him.
He found it in the form of Detective Inspector David Morgan. The Welshman was a drinking partner of Hill’s after a long day or a trying case.
“You look like someone pissed in your tea, Mo,” Hill greeted his friend. “What’s up?”
Morgan was pulling his winter coat over his thick shoulders.
“Got a right stinker of a job, mate. Just about to call it a day for the weekend, and they shaft me with a bloody robbery in Hatton Garden.” Morgan sniffed, gesturing at the notes on his desk.
“Diamonds?” Hill asked with interest.
“Take a look.”
Hill picked up the notes, flicking quickly through.
“So this wasn’t called in by a jeweler’s, and none of them have reported anything stolen?” Hill assessed, eyes narrowing.
“That’s right. The robbery was a snatch and grab on the street. Except it was more like a Royal bloody Rumble than a snatch and grab, by the sounds of it. The witnesses’ details are in there.”
“Who the hell does a street robbery in Hatton Garden?” Hill posed, puzzled. The high-end area was awash with CCTV. “And the uniforms didn’t get there until everyone had vanished?”
“Exactly. Hence why I’ll be in all bloody weekend. This one’s got organized crime written all over it. It should be the NCA’s case, but they won’t touch it unless there’s something tangible. So it looks like I won’t get to watch Wales smash the French.”
“You go, mate. I’ll take the job,” Hill said, shocking the Welshman.
“Bollocks, man, it’s your last week.”
“It’ll be my last week on the planet if I don’t find something to keep me busy. And this has got something to it, I can tell.”
Morgan was unconvinced, so Hill came clean.
“You know what the last case I closed was, don’t you?” he asked his friend.
Morgan knew. Everyone knew. It was one of those stories that circulated around the station like wildfire.
A young woman had been murdered. Hill had been close with the grieving family for weeks, and then had discovered that the blood was on the victim’s husband’s hands. Before the man could be brought into custody, he’d taken his own life. The reason was money—two lives cut short by bankruptcy.
“I don’t want to look back on this job and remember that as my last case,” Hill told him with honesty.
Trying to lighten the mood, Hill put out his hand.
“And twenty quid says I’ll have it wrapped up by the time you get back from watching the French kick your Welsh asses.”
“I suppose I could just sign it back from you next week,” Morgan conceded. “And you can keep your twenty quid when you lose. Rugby’s priceless.”
“Right then. You clear it with the guv and I’ll get on my way to Hatton Garden.”
“Don’t be shopping for Deb while you’re on the clock, mind,” the Welshman laughed.
“Bit out of my price range,” Hill replied, smiling to himself.
Chapter 4
As the tube rattled into King’s Cross Underground station, Scowcroft raised his gaze from the carriage floor and met the eyes of Barrett amongst the other passengers.
This was their fourth and final station on the Underground, the multiple legs taken as a way to lose tails. As part of their escape, the trio had changed clothing in an alleyway with garments pulled from their backpacks. There, Charlotte had done what she could to clean up Barrett’s battered face, but baby wipes and a baseball cap did little to hide the destruction of his nose.
“It’s the London Underground,” Barrett had comforted his accomplices. “No one points fingers or talks to strangers. I’ll be fine.”
Hoping that he was right, they had boarded the westbound train from Chancery Lane to Bond Street. There they’d changed trains and lines for Waterloo, doing the same again to Leicester Square and then taking the Piccadilly line to King’s Cross. Having emerged from the Underground, the thieves once again changed clothing in the mainline train station’s public toilets. In the privacy of the stalls, secondary bags were pulled from within the original backpacks, which were then stuffed inside their replacements. Barrett had suggested that precaution, knowing that disposing of a bag in a train station was likely to raise an alarm in a city wary of terrorism.
Scowcroft stepped out onto the concourse and scanned the faces of those who stood waiting for their trains. He saw nothing that raised his hackles. He looked over his shoulder, seeing Charlotte and Barrett in position behind him. He wasn’t worried if they should lose him in the crowd—they both knew the rendezvous point.
He kept his head down, fitting in amongst dozens of commuters and tourists and looking at the phone in his hand. The screen was locked, but it was the perfect excuse to keep his face from the cameras. Behind him, Charlotte and Barrett did the same.
Scowcroft took an escalator up to the champagne bar. He waited there patiently until his two accomplices appeared on his shoulder. The trio was now complete, and aside from Barrett’s nose, they resembled respectable tourists.
“I’ve got a reservation,” Scowcroft told the young hostess, who smiled at the handsome man in front of her as he gave a false name. “Ashcroft. Sorry I’m a bit late.”
“That’s no problem, Mr. Ashcroft,” the hostess told him, pushing her hair back from her face. “If you’d like to follow, I’ll show you to your table.”
“Thank you,” he replied, wishing for a moment that he truly was an innocent tourist. His fantasy was cut short as he caught sight of the shock on the young woman’s face when she took in Barrett’s shattered nose.
“He’s a cage fighter,” Scowcroft shot in quickly. “We both are, except I’m a lot quicker than him.”
“Not too quick, I hope,” the hostess replied with a smile and swiftly left.
The table was at the English end of the champagne bar, and offered excellent views over the station below—if there was trouble, the thieves would see it coming. They all knew the location of the fire escapes, and their emergency rendezvous at St Pancras Gardens, but this was doing little to calm their fraying nerves as the adrenaline of that morning was being replaced by a bone-crushing weariness.
“Be nice if we could remember why we’re here, instead of y
ou trying to shag anything with a pulse,” Charlotte scolded Scowcroft as they took their seats.
“I know why I’m here,” he shot back, his mood shifting from arousal to anger in a split second. “I’m here because Tony’s my brother. I wasn’t the one who tried to run out on him when he came back like he did.”
Charlotte’s first retort died as an angry choke on her lips. The second was stalled by Barrett’s intervention.
“Easy now, Alex. We’re all here because we love Tony. Doesn’t matter if it’s by blood, marriage, or mates. We’re all here for him.”
“I’m not having her talk to me like that,” the young man grumbled, showing the immaturity behind his confident facade. “You’re not my family,” he told her, the words quiet but resonating.
“I’m his family,” Charlotte hissed. “I’m his family, in a way you can’t even imagine.”
“We’ll see about that when he gets the full story,” Scowcroft told her. “We’ll see who’s family when my brother wakes up.”
Chapter 5
Hill stepped out of the unmarked police BMW and looked at his shoes.
“Good start.” He smiled, his toecap poking into a patch of congealed blood. “Now, where’s the rest of it?” he mused, looking about him.
His eyes were drawn to the deep scratches in the pavement and scraps of rubber in the road, but there was no sign of how either had come about. Save for the patch of blood, there was nothing to indicate that a crime had taken place here only two hours ago.
Hill looked at the case notes Morgan had given him: a uniformed officer had arrived on the scene seventeen minutes after the call from a witness, but the report made no mention of any suspects or vehicles. The officer had initially written off the call-out as a hoax, but a second eyewitness came forward and corroborated the story of a street fight, seemingly over a bag. Hill searched the notes again, hoping he’d somehow missed the photos that the first responding officer should have taken. Finding none, Hill cursed the ineptitude of the constable.
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