For about twenty minutes, they seemed frustrated. Appeared ready to just walk away. But then, the hell with it, those bold heroes decided they were here to steal, so steal they would.
Standing away from the main view of the cameras, using what concealment they could, two of the men started to detonate their smoke grenades. The third man lit firecrackers and started to produce a series of loud bangs.
Once the smoke ’n’ bang operation was well underway. One of the men started to cut some smaller, and relatively minor, Impressionist works from their frames.
It appears that the men hoped to blind the cameras and cause enough chaos that they would be able to smuggle their trophies out in the confusion. And, to be fair, that’s the sort of plan which works well in the movies. The kind of idea which sounds plausible when cooked up over booze and drugs in a grimy Cardiff flat.
And maybe it could work. Maybe, if you tried that kind of thing ten times over, two or three times out of ten you’d succeed.
Or maybe not.
The smoke grenades worked all right, but they worked slowly and didn’t remotely fill the large and high-ceilinged room. A gentle draught wafted most of the smoke through the gallery doors and away. Consequently, the room was never really obscured and – in peaceful Cardiff – no one mistook the firecrackers for gunshots. The CCTV shows an elderly woman tutting and wagging her finger at the three men’s commonplace vandalism.
What’s more, the gallery staff responded by running towards the scene, not away from it. The whole ‘escape in the chaos’ theory quickly became transformed into a ‘get trapped by well-ordered and swift security response’ reality.
Whoops.
Nothing daunted, the three men adapted rapidly. They drew their weapons. Fired two shots to prove their seriousness. Grabbed their paintings and a group of hostages – now known to number only eight, not the sixteen first advertised – then fled down some emergency stairs to the basement. The three paintings they managed to take have, a curator has told us, a market value of perhaps three or four hundred thousand pounds.
Now, of course, the game is to end the siege without bloodshed. Police marksmen are on the scene but, with no lines of sight, they have little to do.
A communications van is acting as command centre and trained negotiators are doing their thing. There are enough people trickling in and out of the van that I can always find someone to tell me what’s going on. Situations like these are instantly resourced to the max – over-resourced, in fact – with the happy result that there’s always someone happy to come over and chat to small pink-and-pistachio detectives.
The gunmen’s first request: a helicopter and ten million pounds in cash.
The negotiators’ first response: yeah, sure. Coming right up.
Three of the hostages are security guards, all male. Four of the five remaining hostages are female, two of whom are elderly, one of them a diabetic. The negotiators want to get both of those two, but especially the diabetic, out of there as soon as possible.
No progress so far.
I’ve been kicking around for almost two hours when Bleddyn Jones arrives on the scene.
He sees me. Is less than thrilled.
‘You’re here,’ he says.
‘I am, yes.’
The conversation starts so scintillatingly, we neither of us have the heart to drag it out, so we do a semi-polite nodding thing, then Jones struts off, to make sure everyone knows how important he is. Before long, he struts back, as it turns out no one cares.
He has a coffee from somewhere. Drinks it.
Says, ‘Nice having a crime where you know who the bloody criminals are. Who they are and what they want.’
I adjust his statement in my head, so it reads, ‘It’s nice having a crime when you have video footage of three of the men involved. And it’s nice knowing what they want, so long as you recognise that what they want is most unlikely to be those three stupid pictures.’
Having adjusted his statement, I agree vigorously.
Meantime, negotiations trickle on.
The gunmen’s second request: a helicopter and five million pounds in cash. Everything to be ready by dawn. Hostages to be executed hourly from six in the morning if things aren’t ready.
The negotiators’ second response: OK, OK, we can talk about that, but first we need to check the hostages are all right.
The gunmen’s response to the response: Uh, OK, but bring pizza.
Pizza.
The pizza request is, classically, the moment in any negotiation when you know you’ve won. The helicopter-and-bagfuls-of-cash idea melting into the dream it always was. The urgency of food and fizzy drinks assuming ever greater importance to those hunkered down in their stone and carpet-tile basement. I’m personally not so sure that this pizza moment is, in fact, The Pizza Moment, but no doubt we’ll soon find out.
A couple of ambulances wait patiently in case of carnage. A tall, good-looking woman doctor stands, slightly impatiently, by the open door of one of them.
More to and fro.
The medical team idea finally gets the go-ahead from a gunman calling himself ‘John’, but in exchange for what is basically a very lengthy order for take-out. Mostly pizza, but also doner kebabs, fried chicken, hamburger, chips and drinks. John is quite specific about which outlets should supply each of those fine foodstuffs. His meticulousness, his detail, reminds me of those Death Row inmates in the US with their last meal wish-lists, their gargantuan appetites.
Some uniforms go off to buy the food.
Nothing happens too fast, of course. Operations like this are all about timing. The purpose is to gradually narrow the gunmen’s range of ambitions, until they want nothing more than a hot shower and a cosy prison cell. Even our worry over medical care is mostly overcooked. Most people will do fine sitting uncomfortably for a few hours or even days. The two elderly hostages are a worry, but even there, the two women are only in their late sixties. They wouldn’t necessarily be more at risk if stuck on a train.
Gradually, a heap of fast food is assembled. Someone’s found a white plastic crate to put it in. Anna Kerrigan, the doctor, has a red nylon equipment bag.
I make myself helpful.
Bring bottled water to the negotiators. Find a techie guy called Steve when there were some problems with the audio recording.
I sidle closer, crabwise, to the heart of the action.
Inside the ambulance, a small nurse sits drinking tea or coffee. She looks down at her sensibly shod feet and does not seem particularly happy. Telling the difference between her and a ray of sunshine: not so hard, I think.
The negotiators are on the line again. Explaining in detail what food they have. The crate it’s contained in. The medical team that’ll be coming.
No surprises. That’s key to this next bit. If the gunmen are expecting a female doctor and a male one arrives instead, the possibility of panic shooting increases exponentially. Same thing with everything. So the negotiator, Mark Wetherby, goes over everything in painful detail, not just once, but two, three, four times.
The crate mists up with the steam of chip fat and pizza grease.
The nurse finishes her drink. She looks pale. Almost ill.
My crabwise sidling is now less a sidle. More a full-on assault.
‘I’ll go,’ I say.
Kerrigan looks at me.
‘And you are?’
‘Detective Sergeant Fiona Griffiths.’
I show my warrant card, to give me the authority that my floaty pink skirt and pistachio-striped top do not supply.
Kerrigan snaps, ‘You’re not medically qualified. I need a nurse.’
‘Really? What are you doing down there? Temperatures, blood pressures. Maybe an insulin shot? It’s not like you need a full range of nursing skills.’
The nurse – the actual one – grabs her chance. With a firmness she’s not previously shown, she says, ‘She can go. I’m not going down there.’
Two against one.
I give Kerrigan my two-against-one smile. Gracious, but with a core of steel.
But this isn’t Kerrigan’s call. Wetherby, the chief negotiator, gets involved. Also Hermione Peters, one of his side-kicks. Bleddyn Jones too, frustrated at the lack of opportunities to meddle, now tries to peddle his meddling for all its worth.
All around me, grown-ups talk about things in grown-up voices.
I say to the nurse, ‘What size shoes do you take?’
Four, like me.
Her scrubs will fit too, partly because we’re much the same size, but also because those scrubs never really fit anyone anyway.
The grown-ups come to a decision, the right one. They concur that the risk of sending a reluctant and frightened nurse into battle is greater than the risk of sending down an unreluctant non-nurse. Also, of course, no one’s employment contract forces them to enter a room full of dangerous morons armed with guns.
The nurse and I swap clothes.
‘I always wanted to be a nurse,’ I say untruthfully, ‘but I wanted one of those little caps. I don’t know why they don’t do them any more.’
The nurse agrees with vigour. We don’t know why they don’t do them any more.
Kerrigan shows me the ear thermometer. How it works.
I say, ‘I know how a thermometer works.’
She shows me the blood pressure cuff. How it works.
That’s slightly more novel but, you know: blood pressure cuffs, rocket science – not so hard to tell the difference there either.
She shows me the insulin pen. Uncap. Push. Discard.
I say, ‘Uncap. Push. Discard.’
Kerrigan says, ‘In the sharps bin. Here.’
She shows me a small sharps bin which is bright yellow and says sharps.
I say, ‘Oh, that’s lucky. It says sharps.’
Kerrigan scowls, but she’d rather go down with someone who’s not frightened.
Wetherby says, ‘And, to be clear, neither of you are armed in any way? No pocket knives. Nothing sharp? No aerosols? No phones. No cameras. Nothing?’
I say no, no, nothing. I’m wearing just one layer of cotton scrubs. Hardly concealment wear.
Kerrigan discards her phone, but says, ‘There are scalpels in the medical bag. Also scissors and spray.’
Those things are communicated to ‘John’, but he’s getting hungry now. Just yeses everything.
Wetherby: ‘The medical team comprises a doctor and a nurse. They’re both women. They will show themselves at the top of the stairs. They will not come down until you specifically instruct them to.’
John: ‘They need to come down with their hands up.’
John: either not-very-good-at-his-job John or remarkably-proficient-at-his-job John.
Eeny-meeny-miny-mo.
Wetherby: ‘They will be carrying a crate of food and a red medical bag, remember. They will need their hands.’
‘OK, but no sudden movements.’
‘They will make no sudden movements.’
Jones tells me, ‘You will take orders from Dr Kerrigan. You will do exactly as she instructs, yes? I don’t want you taking the initiative here. Is that understood?’
I do a sit. Give him my paw. Pant obedience.
Wetherby – slightly surprised by Jones’s heavy-handedness – raises an eyebrow.
Jones says, ‘She can be erratic, this one.’
I woof my assent. Jingle my chain. Roll over and play dead.
Wetherby says, ‘Steady’, but nothing else.
I tell everyone – and this isn’t the first time – that we need to check all possible exit routes. Say the helicopter plan is so ditzy we should regard it as a bluff.
Everyone tells me that all exits have been sealed. They roll their eyes and Jones does his ‘What did I tell you?’ face.
Kerrigan says, ‘Ready?’
‘Yes.’
Kerrigan is taller and stronger than me, so she takes the crate and I take her medical bag, which makes me look like the doctor and Kerrigan like the support staff.
I think of making a merry play on the subject, but don’t.
We walk up the steps to the museum.
TV cameras watch our backs. Ditto the eyes of the few dozen spectators who are still bothering to watch proceedings. Ditto the eyes of the increasingly bored police marksmen.
We enter the museum.
Echoey, empty halls.
Kerrigan has shoes with a bit of a heel and they make really good clicks as she walks. My shoes are soft-soled and make a squashy squeaking sound. When we walk we go click-squash, click-squash, click-squash.
Kerrigan: ‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes.’
We walk on through to the French Impressionists gallery. A gallery that now has three empty frames. I notice that one of the pictures left intact was a Pissarro landscape. Next to it: a nice-looking portrait by Paul Signac. I’m hardly expert, but if I was stealing pictures from this gallery, I’d have taken the Pissarro and the Signac, not the three non-entities that actually vanished.
As we enter the gallery, a posse of firearms officers and an emergency response medical team scurries over to assist. Two buff-looking paramedics help Kerrigan with her crate. I try to look like my red bag is really heavy, but no one rushes over to help me.
The senior firearms officer holds open the fire door at the top of the staircase.
Says, ‘Good luck.’
That sentiment is seconded by a grunt of masculine, gun-jingling assent from the posse.
We go through to the staircase. It’s a double-winder, so we have to go down a few steps, before making the turn onto the landing. At the top, we can be seen from below, so we halt. Put down our stuff and raise our hands.
We can just about see, through the partition below us, a dark-clothed man.
Given where we stand, he can probably only see our feet and maybe a chunk of leg.
The man bends round and down, until he’s bent over, looking up.
We go down a step or two so he can see us better. Make ‘OK to come down?’ faces.
He stops us with a hand. Disappears. Reappears again in front of the glass.
‘You’ve got the food?’ he asks.
He has a gun in his hand. Doesn’t make any big play with it, but that’s the thing about guns. You just have to have them. You don’t need the big play.
Kerrigan says, ‘I’m Dr Kerrigan. This is my nurse, Fiona.’
I do my best nurse face.
‘OK. Come on down. One at a time. You first.’
I’m the ‘you’.
I walk down, slowly.
The big red bag has a shoulder strap, so I let it dangle free and keep my hands out in front of me, like I’m about to catch a giant, invisible beach ball.
Get to the bottom. Put the bag down.
Let the guy search me. Hands right up my leg to the knicker line. Then the other leg. Then my hips, including my crotch. Then the rest of me, including my breasts.
He’s shortish for a guy. Five foot eight or nine. Dark hair, very short. Not broad, but fit. Neck tattoo in blue. Dental hygiene with scope for improvement.
I don’t say anything until he’s finished. When he is, I say, ‘In that bag, there are medical supplies including scalpels, scissors and sprays.’
He tells me to open it. Stands back as I do so.
I show him the bag. Its many-velcroed compartments.
Even the gunman gets bored as he watches me. His gaze keeps drifting upwards to the box of food. Before I’m finished, he tells me to go inside with the hostages. Tells Kerrigan to come on down.
I do as I’m told.
It’s a staff rec room. Easy seating in pale blues and greys. Coffee machine. A vending machine with crisps and things. Someone has obviously tried to smash the glass, but it wasn’t very smashable, so the machine looks dinged and unhappy, but basically intact. Some posters advertise recent exhibitions. Adventures in Archaeology. An Impressionists thing from a few years back. Maps an
d Manuscripts: our hidden past.
Eight hostages, not visibly harmed.
They are bound with packing tape, but not ankles and wrists. Instead, they’re bound one-and-one, in a sort of three-legged-race-type arrangement. So one hostage’s right leg and right arm are taped to the neighbouring hostage’s left leg and left arm.
That strikes me as odd for a moment, until I realise that people, even hostages, need to go to the loo. This one-and-one method gives enough mobility to each couple that they can just about manoeuvre themselves around toileting and that kind of thing, but still makes any escape attempt effectively impossible.
Neat. Almost too neat for the blundering smoke-grenaders who got themselves into this pickle.
The two elderly women are taped together. One of them looks fine, actually. Robust and defiant. Not quite the war generation, but cut from that same durable khaki serge.
Her partner, though, is visibly unwell. Her colour’s bad. Forehead both white and sweaty. She sits with a hand on her chest. Barely responds to my arrival.
Kerrigan joins me.
She looks composed. Coolly professional.
The first gunman is joined by two others. Both bigger. Short hair. More tattoos. The same general mould as the first.
Conveniently, one of them has blond, almost gingery, hair. The other is mouse-brown. I don’t know which one ‘John’ is, but they can be Dark Hair, Ginger and Mousy.
The three of them start to snarf into their food, except that Dark Hair guy tells Mousy that someone has to ‘watch out’.
‘Watch out’ means pointing a pistol at us and looking generally menacing, while still using a left hand to pick chips from their paper wrapping.
Ginger says, ‘Hey, Nursey, there’s not enough vinegar on the chips. Nip out and get some more, would you?’
Mousy laughs and nods and laughs some more, the perfect audience.
Kerrigan introduces herself, to the gunmen but also to the hostages.
‘I’m Dr Anna Kerrigan. This is Fiona. We’re going to examine each of you, especially you, love.’ This last bit to the diabetic who we think may be called Lorraine Biggar. ‘We’ve got supplies here including insulin.’
The Deepest Grave: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series Book 6 (Fiona Griffiths 6) Page 19
