‘Photo time,’ says Dark Hair.
Molly and I are made to stand up. Walked three-leggedly to a wall. We’re turned around, facing out into the room.
Mousy holds a gun to my head. Dark Hair takes the picture.
The same thing with Molly.
Multiple pictures of both views. Molly and I hold hands tightly in our packing-tape cuffs, but I feel her shaking, literally shaking, as she stands. For the first time, I think, her stoic calm is collapsing into real shock.
‘You’re OK, Molly,’ I tell her. ‘You’re doing well.’
Then Dark Hair yells for Ginger. (‘Mate,’ he calls, nothing helpful.) Ginger comes in and Dark Hair takes a picture of Molly and me at the same time. Two heads. A gun at each.
I think we’re all thinking of those awful jihadi hostage pictures. The executioner and the axe. The black robes and the hatred.
I wonder what I look like.
Hair unbrushed. Stone-faced. Empty-eyed.
A gun to my head. Its own blank stare equalling my own.
But I don’t know. They don’t show me the images. And then, anyway, Dark Hair shifts to video.
He steadies the picture on Molly and me. They get their, now classic, heads ’n’ guns shot. Then the camera tracks up from us to the clock that hangs on the wall above.
Dark Hair says, for the benefit of the recorder, ‘It’s just gone nine o’clock. At six o’clock in the morning, we execute our first hostage. Then one an hour from there on. You know what our demands are. You know what you have to do.’
He clicks off.
Plays back the video to check it. I assume he’ll upload the thing to YouTube or email it to the BBC. The aim will be to grab the headlines for the ten o’clock news. Pressure the police side into compromise.
I wonder where they’ve got to with the helicopter and cash.
I also note that a helicopter is of no use, unless you’ve also got a couple of hostages on board and can’t help realising that petite, healthy, female hostages are more portable than most other sorts. And if you want to conduct your negotiations through the media, then petite, young, prettyish hostages will get you instant access to the front pages. A gap-toothed six-year-old would be even better but, faute de mieux, I’m the best they’ve got.
We wait, standing, till Dark Hair nods an OK. Then orders us, crackling and shuffling, back to our seats.
Molly’s posture of defiant firmness remains intact, but I can still feel the shaking.
‘You’re OK, Molly,’ I tell her. ‘You’re OK.’
Dark Hair says, ‘Right, it’s nighty night. Anyone need to use the loo?’
A couple of people do. The ‘loo’ in question is just the waste bin at the end of the room. Dark Hair waits with a brisk impatience for them to get back to their seats.
‘OK. It’s lights off till six. You better hope that someone out there is going to play sensible.’
Ginger and Mousy start taping us all into our seats. Ankles and wrists. Keeping us from moving at all now. And Time, to be fair, has upped her game, I notice. All those long, identical seconds have become nicely jumbled up again. Plenty of action and variety.
A bit of gunplay. A bit of threat.
This long dread of night.
The two men tape us in. Dark Hair comes along to check bindings. Tugging at arms, kicking at legs. Not particularly gentle. Not particularly aggressive. Just getting a job done.
But we’re OK. Packaged up like two rows of brown, crackling mummies.
They put tape over our mouths too. Wind it a couple of times round the head, leaving the mouth closed, but the nose free.
Not nice. That doesn’t feel nice at all.
Ginger and Mousy leave.
Dark Hair hangs on the doorpost. Delivers his farewell address.
‘OK, if you move, you die. If you leave this room, you die. If you shout for help, you die. If you piss us off in any way at all, you die. Is that clear enough? Like, completely fucking clear?’
It’s completely fucking clear.
We nod assent. Dark Hair kills the light. Closes the door.
We are left in silence and darkness.
We have eight hours till the first execution.
31
Silence, yes, but one soon interrupted. Rock music again, played as loud as that crappy little CD player will go.
We hostages rustle and itch in our bindings. Try to figure out the best available solution to our discomforts. Head this way or that. Back straight or semi-slouched.
Molly and I still hold hands. Use our eyes to ask each other if we’re OK. Use them to say, yes, fine, never been better.
In the gaps between tracks, I listen into the silence. That silence which is never really silent.
I hear the snores and breathing of my fellow hostages. Their crackling movements. The tick of the clock. Little beeps of distant electronics. The ticks and shifts of the museum as it settles into its night-time temperature.
Something similar is true of this thickened darkness.
It’s dark here, but not pitchy. There’s that part-glazed partition behind my head, and some of the light from the stairwell above filters down to us. I can see the dark shapes of four sleeping shadows opposite me. The clock on the wall. The slow, luminous circuit of its hour- and minute-hands.
The music finishes and starts again.
Finishes and starts.
In the gaps, I listen as hard as I can for the kind of sound that I’m expecting. Maybe hear something. Maybe don’t.
Numismatics. Palaeography. Codicology.
At about half past one in the morning, the music reaches its final track – again – and melts into silence.
A minute goes by.
Five.
Ten.
One of my fellow hostages, mutters through his gag, ‘Thank fuck for that.’
He says that as though the only thing standing between him and a good night’s sleep had been a troublesome neighbour and their late-night party.
I let an hour go by.
Pass it through my hands, second by second. Time Future becoming Time Past.
I spend that whole hour listening as intently as I can. Listening hard into this non-silent silence. Trying to hear any human sound beyond this room.
Hear nothing.
Showtime.
I manoeuvre the world’s tiniest dagger to the front of my mouth.
Pop its little blade through the packing tape, then lean down and start pecking at my bindings.
The shaft of my earring won’t cut anything, but it’ll pierce cellophane tape no problem.
Peck. Peck. Peck.
Make a series of puncture marks. Wiggle my wrist until the damn tape starts to part. Then work back along the length of my arm to the elbow.
Peck. Peck. Peck.
I wake Molly, of course.
She gag-mumbles, ‘They told us not to move, dear.’
That’s Brits for you. Someone in authority tells you to do something and people get all anxious if you take a little initiative.
I gag-mumble back, ‘I’m fine. Don’t worry.’
Peck. Peck. Peck.
The hardest part is the elbow. I sort of thought that once I’d got my hand free, the rest would be simple, but it turns out to be the other way round. But hey ho. I’ve got plenty of time.
I get one arm free, and from there on it’s easy.
I rip my gag off, which hurts a bit but is basically fine. Then free my other arm. Then my legs.
I feel achy and sore and sticky, but I’m in one piece.
In one piece and ready to rumba.
Take some latex gloves from the medical bag. Go to the door.
A couple of gag-voices wish me mumbled good luck. I don’t answer them. Just flash a smile, raise a thumb. Stand listening into that many-toned silence.
Ticks and clicks. A slight shuffling sound, perhaps from above. An electronic thing doing its annoying beepy thing in some far-off office.
Listen for
ten minutes, then ease the door open.
Stand. Listen. Gaze out on a dark corridor.
A corridor that stands wide and empty.
Shoes off, I walk out of the room. Not back up the stairs that brought me here. Not to the merry police officers and their merry little assault brigade. But to the door that intrigued me from the first.
Numismatics, Palaeography and Codicology.
I think I may have some business, soon, with the palaeographers and codicologists of this world, but for now the numismatists have all my attention.
Numismatics. The study of coins.
I stop at that closed door, barefoot in this whispering silence.
Listen hard. Listen for my life.
Hear nothing. Hear no one.
No men. No violent gingers. No snoring. No mutter of low voices. No kicking around in anyone’s sleep. No nothing.
Just this almost darkness. This almost silence.
I take a deep breath. A silent prayer.
Shoot me quickly.
Shoot me dead.
Silver bullets in my head.
Kill me gentle.
Kill me brave.
Arthur’s sword in Arthur’s grave.
Say my prayer and open the door.
32
Open the door and—
No men. No guns. No hail of bullets.
No brief, brief opportunity to reflect that I don’t always know as much as I think I do.
Instead – silence.
Darkness eased by a distant bulb. Those things and an empty corridor and, on my right, a door marked Numismatics Stores – Private. That door would have caught my attention in any case, but does so doubly right now because the door has been jemmied open. A useless lock in a splintered frame.
I enter.
Find a small storeroom. Drawers like safety deposit boxes. Lamps and a workbench.
Those things and also a socking great hole in the wall. A hole big enough to take three men and three crappy paintings that were never really worth this amount of effort. A hole that carves its way out of the museum’s external, but underground, wall and through to a well-made tunnel beyond.
The tunnel snakes beyond the limit of my light. That thing wasn’t constructed overnight. This whole heist must have been planned for months. Carefully planned and perfectly executed.
There was, though, one wrinkle in the men’s plan: the very last part. Tunnelling right up to the museum wall itself: that must have been time-consuming, certainly, but wasn’t much harder than any ordinary digging.
But pushing the tunnel through this two-foot thick foundation wall: that would have taken plenty of time and made plenty of noise.
So: how to do it?
The answer our three heroes came up with was to clear the museum. Remove the security guards. Distract the police. Blather about helicopters and sacks of cash and executions starting at dawn.
Do all that to give themselves the space and time to puncture this final wall in quiet and peace.
When I saw the stone dust, I was fairly sure how this was going to play out. Told Kerrigan what to expect and what my brothers and sisters on the force needed to do. I don’t know whether anyone took any notice of me, but suffice to say that if my colleagues had got the thieves in custody by now, my stockinged explorations of this ticking dimness would already have been cut short.
So our three hostage-takers have flown this muddy nest. Are even now ripping into the first beers of the night and pissing themselves with laughter.
But I don’t mind too much about that, or not for the moment.
After all: I didn’t come here to look. I came here to steal.
The drawers and boxes in this numismatics room are mostly locked, but the real security down here was the lock on the main door. That, and the whole museumful of security above it. These drawer locks are no harder to open than any ordinary filing cabinet and a fair few locks have duly been smashed and drawers opened.
Not pillaged, though, or not systematically. A few pocketfuls taken, I’d guess. But most of what the museum owns is left behind, still intact.
I rifle through the battered drawers, until I find the one I want. Late Roman, Welsh.
A scatter of coins. Unpolished. Dim.
Gold. Silver. Bronze.
I take my latex gloves. Put them on.
If you’re going to steal something, you need to do it properly. They teach you that in the police.
There are twelve gold coins in the drawer. I take four. The same number of silver and bronze. My nurse’s pockets are cut fairly loose, so I slip my thievings into my bra.
It’s late o’clock and I’m exhausted.
I walk back to the hostage room, and stick my head in.
‘All done, folks. I’ll go and get help now.’
Walk up the stairs. Tired as a dog.
Tired as a very tired dog.
That ache in my crotch, where Ginger jabbed me, is a slow bruise. Crusting over into the dimness of an old, unwanted memory.
At the turn of the stair, I call up.
‘This is Detective Sergeant Fiona Griffiths. I’m coming upstairs now and I’d really, really appreciate it, if no one shoots me.’
Keeping my hands well above my head, I ascend slowly to the top.
Eight men. Eight rifle sights. Eight laser beams dancing on my chest.
A buzz of fireflies.
But no one fires.
33
Sunday morning.
Gethin Matthews’s office.
He’s a detective superintendent, which is exactly the rank I’d be if my bosses were stupid enough to promote me, reckless enough to promote me again, then dangerously incompetent enough to do so for a third time. From my bargain basement depths, Matthews appears to live on a kind of Olympus. Remote. Powerful. Possessing thunderbolts.
He says, ‘Help yourself.’
Pushes a tray of baked things at me.
Croissants. Danish pastries. Some muffins already beginning to speckle and shine in their own grease.
I peer at them closely. Like Sherlock Holmes examining footprints. Then, because I’m meant to take something, I take something.
I’m wearing a dress in pale forget-me-not blue, printed with a white fern design, except that my sister would admonish me, because (I’ve learned) it’s not a white-white, it’s more a natural white or a lime white or something else which is very pale but still lacks the snowy brightness of actual white.
Anyway, the point is, I’m wearing a nice dress.
I’m wearing it because it is ten thirty on Sunday morning, because I like the dress, because the weather is warm, because I spent last night taped up as a hostage, and because nothing says, ‘Not dead yet’, like a forget-me-not-blue dress printed all over with sweet not-quite-white ferns.
I’m wearing it for all those reasons, yes, but also this: I’m wearing the dress because it looks too flirty and summery and unprofessional for the office and I want to remind everyone that THIS IS MY DAY OFF and what with debriefings and the like, I didn’t get to bed until almost seven o’clock this morning and was out of that bed less than three hours later so I could be here on Olympus with a tray of rapidly ageing pastries.
I hold my croissant aloft, look at my as-yet-unbecrumbed dress, and say, ‘There aren’t any plates.’
There are, in fact, some plates neatly stacked on a sideboard, and I can see them clearly from where I’m sitting. But I assert my various privileges – young woman in pretty dress, survivor of scary museum siege, person who is a good few hours short of sleep – and pretend I haven’t.
Matthews – Jove-like – gets a plate and passes it over.
I place the croissant daintily on the plate. I’m not sure if I like croissants, but they do look nice. The pale gold of the croissant looks extra-nice against the soft blue of the dress, which is such an amazingly girly thought that I sit for a moment stunned by my own girliness.
Matthews, prompting: ‘So.’
That do
esn’t mean anything, so I counter with, ‘Yes sir,’ which doesn’t mean anything either.
Matthews: ‘This whole tunnel thing. I understand you had an idea something like this might be happening.’
He waves a hand towards the only two other people in the room: Bleddyn Jones and Hermione Peters, Wetherby’s sidekick on the negotiation team.
‘Yes.’
Matthews: ‘So three idiots walk into a museum. It looks like they’ve come to steal a Renoir, only the Renoir isn’t there. They decide to steal some other stuff, except they make a complete pig’s arse of the job in every way you can imagine. You know all this and you decide you’re seeing some top-level criminals engaged in a carefully planned heist.’
‘Well, I wasn’t sure. I mean, it all depends what you think they were stealing.’
Matthews stares.
Jones rubs his face. A ‘here we go again’ look hovers in his beard.
Peters – who can’t have had much sleep either, but looks cool as ice in a grey skirt and crisp white shirt – gives me an encouraging smile. An all-sisters-together one.
Matthews says, ‘Well, they were looking for that Renoir, weren’t they? If they’d got their hands on it, they’d have had a painting worth somewhere north of ten million quid.’
I say, ‘Worth that through an international auction house, yes.’
‘OK, so maybe ten per cent of that. It’s still a haul.’
‘Ten per cent maybe, and only if you know your way around the criminal art market. But if these guys were as moronic as they appeared, they probably didn’t have buyers lined up.’
I don’t mention it, but most of these art-world heists have at least one person working on the inside, providing details of CCTV and that kind of thing. That person would presumably have had access to the museum’s cleaning and restoration programme – those things are hardly secret – in which case you’d have to believe that these guys were world-class either for their stupidity or for their cleverness.
Matthews stares again, but the quality of the stare has altered.
Jones mutters, ‘Look, Fiona.’
We battle away a bit. Me with my antiquities theories. Everyone else with their ‘Look, they were there to take the bloody Renoir’ theories.
The Deepest Grave: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series Book 6 (Fiona Griffiths 6) Page 21
