He attempted to orientate himself and calculated that his vehicle wasn’t too far away. If he walked down the path to the right, crossed the road and carried on straight ahead, his car should be a couple or three rows in. He wished now that he had taken more notice of just exactly where he had parked the car. But, of course, one never does!
Stephen got to his feet and tried to shake off some of the snow from his outer clothing. Unfortunately, he hadn’t noticed that his car keys had fallen from his pocket when he fell and had settled deeply – and probably irretrievably - into the snow.
He continued his journey towards the car, crossed the road and found the first row of cars. He crossed the access road and approached the second row. As luck would have it, he bumped straight into his car. He knew it was his because even though it was covered in snow, the nearside front wheel trim was missing. He cleared the number plate of snow and confirmed, with relief, that this was indeed his Mazda.
He then searched for his keys. But, of course, they weren’t there. He tried the other pocket and then the original once again. No keys. He tried his inner pockets. Nothing. Then he tried the anorak pockets one more time. No bloody keys!
He was puzzled. Where were the keys? He knew he had had them in his hand in his pocket when he left the cinema. Then he remembered. The fall. He must have lost them as he slipped. Now he would now have to go back and retrieve them.
Stephen was beginning to tire badly and, of course, was very cold. However, he needed the keys – there was no other option. He drew breath, summoned all of the determination he could muster and turned back for the cinema pathway. In his haste, he didn’t pay particular attention to the traffic in the car park. Many other cinemagoers were trying to escape from these appalling conditions and cars were snaking and sliding their way out of the parking bays.
Consequently, Stephen didn’t see the large Toyota 4x4 off-road come from his left. Neither did the young mother driving the 4x4 see Stephen - until the last second. But it was too late. The large vehicle struck Stephen just as he turned in reaction to the loud horn blast sounding directly behind him. The 4x4 was sliding uncontrollably towards him and could not avoid a collision.
Both of his shins, just below the knee were instantly broken by the impact and Stephen was propelled forward and then under the car as it slid inexorably toward the row of parked cars opposite his own. He smashed his head as he hit the floor and mercifully, lost consciousness.
There was a loud crash as the Toyota careered into a large Mercedes and ground to a halt with Stephen now fully pinned under the wreckage. At that point, a third vehicle hit the 4x4 from behind and then a fourth car hit the front of the off-road vehicle from the other direction.
Then silence – except for the incessant howling of the wind.
As fortune would have it, all four cars were being driven by mothers who had young children in the rear. All were hoping for a pleasant day at the cinema. However, none would even get home today, let alone watch an entertaining family film.
The car park lanes were now completely blocked with departing traffic and of course – it was every man for himself. Drivers in mobile vehicles were merely intent on escaping. They didn’t give a damn about the crash in front. They weren’t even aware of poor old Stephen MacDougal, who was now bleeding heavily and lying near to death under the 4x4.
***
Olivia and the two children had been waiting for an hour since Stephen had gone for the car. Obviously, she was now gravely worried about him. She rang her son once again and expressed her fears, tearfully.
‘It's alright, mum, I’m on my way. I’ll be there in less than an hour. Just stay where you are. Do not go outside. It's pretty bad, but my Landrover will cope. See you soon,’ he promised with no real conviction.
Olivia’s son put the phone down and quickly dressed for the conditions. He explained the situation to his wife, grabbed his hire-car keys and dashed out of the front door. He climbed into the car after clearing the snow from the front windscreen. It started first time and he carefully and successfully negotiated the driveway. He paused at the gate and looked left – as he would have done in the United States, where he lived and worked. However, he was in Belfast now, where they drive on the left and that fact combined with a side window obscured with snow, contributed to the collision with a gritting lorry which was slowly salting the MacDougal’s road.
No great damage was done, but neither the Landrover nor its driver were going any further that day. Olivia and the children were now on their own.
They waited in vain until 5pm. By that time many of the people waiting in the cinema foyer had left – or at least had tried to leave. The snow had fallen without pause and the scene in the car park outside was chaotic. Stephen MacDougal was not the only person lying dead out there.
The cinema manager and her staff were of little use. They made a small screening room available to the waiting people and supplied free hot drinks and burgers – but these soon ran out. In fact, the staff were just as anxious about their fate as everyone else, and couldn’t rationalise giving cinemagoers any priority. Who could blame them?
About one hundred and fifty people remained in the cinema as night closed in. Olivia’s phone battery had failed and there was no public phone available. A queue had formed at the manager’s office, as she had offered the use of her landline. Olivia eventually reached the front of the queue and was devastated to learn that immediate rescue was not imminent. She was frantic with worry about Stephen and she felt miserably helpless. The children were cold, frightened and tearful. She just didn’t know what to do next.
Her marooned son promised to do all he could to try and rescue them. He advised her to stay put but didn’t recount the true severity of the storm. Naturally, he was distraught at the prospect of losing contact with his children and parents – but what more could he do? The storm was completely overwhelming the province – as it had the mainland. He was as helpless as every other citizen in the country was. There was nothing to do but to wait and hope that the storm abated.
His wait, like Olivia’s and the children, was to be in vain.
Day 2 – Luton Airport, Bedfordshire – 5:00pm
As in all serious situations, there are the victims and then there are the others – the chancers – or if one is generous – the pro-active. Clark Williams BSc JP OBE was one of these.
Mr Williams was a bank manager in a small provincial town in rural Buckinghamshire. He had worked for the Midland Bank until it was taken over by HSBC, and had risen to the position of manager in the early nineties. He was a very good bank manager indeed and his domain ran as smoothly as clockwork. His employers were very happy with his performance and his staff adored him, and most had been with him for many, many years. His hands off approach allowed his deputy to run most of the main functions of the bank, whilst he stood back and only ever got involved in anything unusual or of ultra-importance.
Williams was also a pillar of local society. He had involved himself in various local issues, served as a councillor for several terms, sat as a Magistrate for fifteen years, chaired many charitable foundations, was a leading light in the Masonic Lodge and had been a past Captain at the golf club. He was extremely well known, popular, and could not walk along the high street without meeting a contact or acquaintance – the consummate networker. He was also in demand as treasurer for all and sundry committees and clubs around the town – as most people imagined that there was no one as honest and good as Clark Williams.
He relished his popularity and was as smug a person you could hope to meet, immersing himself in the reflected glory of his good deeds. As a consequence, the bank more or less let him get on with the running of his small branch. Obviously, even though the technology that came with the modern age became more and more pertinent to his long term plans, it didn’t concern Clark Williams – he was ahead of the game.
His private life was little less salubrious. He had been married and divorced twice – not unusu
al these days – yet he'd managed to elicit the sympathy of one and all, since both women had both left him for other, more interesting and attentive men. Williams was a busy man, so his husbandly duties suffered and his wives soon grew impatient. They were both tempted away from the childless marriage by local lotharios, and poor Clark Williams had local society’s full and unreserved sympathy. The wives were duly ostracised in their turn and Williams’ reputation was enhanced.
However, he had paid out a lot in divorce settlements and had lost two houses into the bargain, so was currently occupying a small flat above the bank he managed. He had bought the apartment in 1984, without the knowledge of his then wife and in a completely different name. Most people thought he rented the flat from the bank and Williams did nothing to dissuade them from that view. He in fact paid ‘rent’ to a Phillip Morgan on a monthly basis into an account held at his own branch. Williams was nothing if not an organised man and when he read the ‘Day of the Jackal’ by Frederick Forsyth, he studied the eponymous hero’s efforts to gain a second passport, and therefore the possibility of a second identity. At the time, he had conducted the process as a sort of experiment and had been completely successful. He had sought out and found a graveyard with a headstone showing a baby boy, Phillip Morgan, born in 1950, as Williams was, who died in infancy. He requested a copy of the birth certificate from Somerset House, who obliged without demur. He then completed and forged the necessary passport application and in four weeks, the brand new UK passport dropped onto his doormat.
This enabled him to open a bank account, which of course, he approved himself. He then obtained a couple of credit cards and serviced the account to keep it current and beyond suspicion. He even made a trip to the Costa del Sol one summer to test out the passport – and everything passed without incident. Over the years, he built up a false profile for Mr Morgan and in 1984 bought the flat above the bank in his name. Mr Morgan’s solicitor was in Nottingham – unknown to anyone in Buckinghamshire – and so Williams had created the perfect alter ego.
All of this now came into play on the snowy morning of Monday the sixteenth of December.
Williams had been preparing his ground for many years. In the early nineties he had overseen the implementation of the banks computer system and it occurred to him that there was a way to beat the bank and get back some of the money that his damned ex-wives had squeezed out of him. Williams employed the classic ‘fraction of a penny transfer scam’. He did it in two ways. Firstly, legitimately, he contacted customers and suggested that a great way to give to charity was to allow fractions of a penny interest coming into their accounts via their savings accounts, be diverted to a ‘Charity Account’ held by the bank, controlled by Williams, and these funds could be distributed to deserving concerns around the town. The ploy worked a treat and was duly authorised by head office. Monies were disbursed; everyone donating felt great and didn’t miss the tenths of a penny once a month. In 2000, Clark Williams was rewarded with an OBE for his trouble!
However, what Williams failed to disclose was that he was diverting tenths of a penny from every client savings account and diverting the surplus cash via the Charity Acct into the account of – you’ve guessed it – Phillip Morgan. In all the years, nobody spotted the ploy, nobody suspected anything because Williams exclusively controlled transactions, and nobody gave a damn anyway because over £1m had been donated to charity.
What nobody knew or suspected was that £3,358,734 extra had passed through Mr Morgan’s account, and was now lying in a bank in the Cayman Islands, having travelled through Luxembourg, Switzerland and Vaduz. Williams had made all the transfers personally and had hidden the transactions from any nosey third parties.
It was the perfect scam.
Williams’s departure had been planned for Christmas Eve and his First Class seat on BA was pre-booked to New York from Heathrow. He would close the bank for the Christmas holidays, make his final escape as Phillip Morgan and thus Clark Williams would be gone forever. The fact that his fraud would be eventually discovered worried him not a jot, as he would then be Phillip Morgan. The bank – and the town - could go to hell.
However, as he stared out at the snow on this Monday morning, he realised that a change of plan was quickly required. He had already contacted fifteen of his staff and prevented them from coming in to work. That left twelve who had made it in. He had immediately sent ten home, having obtained permission from head office to close the branch. His deputy and the Chief Cashier were in the bank tidying up loose ends and stocking up the two ATM cash dispensers. Williams had been on the telephone to Easy Jet and Ryan Air trying to book a flight from Luton to either Amsterdam, Frankfurt or Madrid and from there he could connect with New York. He’d been successful and was on the 5.15pm to Frankfurt from Luton which was only a half hour travel distant. If he got the bank closed quickly, he could be at Luton well in time for check-in. He would re-purchase a ticket to New York in Frankfurt – he could certainly afford it!
His deputy knocked on his office door.
‘All done Clark, can we get off now, it's getting pretty bad out there?’
‘Of course, Peter, I’ll lock up and monitor events from here and the flat. I will let you know when you are needed again. Safe journey.’
The two employees shrugged on their winter gear and left the bank slamming the front door behind them which Williams locked after posting a note in a plastic cover which informed the public that the bank was closed due to inclement weather, but that the ATMs were fully operative.
‘At last,’ he thought.
He ran upstairs after setting the security alarms and closed the private interconnecting door. His two suitcases were already packed and his briefcase contained all of the papers pertaining to his new identity along with his computer. Clark Williams’ persona died in that room.
Morgan flew down the private staircase to the reserved car parking at the rear of the bank. He set the alarm, locked the door and posted his ‘old life’ keys through the letterbox. Adios, HSBC. It was 12.05pm.
He stashed the suitcases in the boot of the Landrover – a damned useful vehicle in these conditions – and climbed aboard. He didn’t look back as he drove out of the car park onto the narrow link road, which joined directly to the bypass and the A422. The going was easy enough to begin with as weight of traffic was keeping the carriageways clear. The odd vehicle lay abandoned on the hardshoulder, but they didn’t affect his surge to freedom.
However, his troubles started just after reaching the M1 at junction 13. This was always a bad road for traffic – even in good weather – and today the snow was starting to wreak a bit of havoc. Road works starting at J11 didn’t help matters, and Morgan ground to a halt in the outside lane at 12.40pm. He checked his watch and tried to peer ahead through the snow to see what the hold-up was. The snow continued relentlessly, but after a few minutes the traffic restarted and Morgan checked his Sat Nav. Seventeen miles to run to the turn off at J10, and a total of twenty-four minutes to the airport car park. However, that was at sixty miles per hour and he was crawling along in heavy traffic. Nevertheless, there was plenty of time and he had until 4.15pm to check-in – another three hours.
Unfortunately, circumstances were beginning to overtake him. The traffic stopped again within five miles and then again just before J10, where snow and trapped vehicles enforced a complete standstill. He could get no further, and it was 3.35pm when he finally realised that the motorway was jammed permanently. People were already abandoning their vehicles. He was beginning to grow increasingly nervous.
Morgan considered his options. He was becoming ever more desperate. He was so near - yet so far - from the safety of the airport; he could see the J10 turn-off only metres ahead. He had two choices – walk or drive. If he walked he might freeze to bloody death, and he'd also have to abandon his luggage. It didn’t take him long to make a decision. He started up his Landrover and moved over into the hardshoulder from the inside lane. With relief, he saw it w
as clear all the way to the exit, so he engaged 4WD and trundled on at about five miles per hour. Cars were hooting at him, but he merely disregarded the idiots.
‘Ignore them,’ he thought, ‘let them rot out here, I’ve got a flight to catch.’
He gunned his engine and completed the transit onto the connecting link road to the airport. Then he saw the cause of the hold up. Some fool in a Mondeo had slid across the road and collided with a small Fiat. They both now straddled the carriageway, blocking the traffic, yet other drivers were just sitting patiently for some miracle to happen and the road to clear. Morgan was having none of it. He approached the smaller Fiat and made contact with side of the stricken car with his enormous bumper. He made short work of the vehicle, and pushed it unceremoniously into a ditch bordering the road. This task completed successfully, he set off for the airport leaving a dumbstruck audience in his wake. What he did not see was that three people were still in the Fiat and now lay shaken and injured at the bottom of the ditch. In addition, a police patrol car was also in the line of traffic coming from the other direction, and although it wasn’t able to make chase, the officers noted the number of Morgan’s vehicle and reported it in.
Snow! The Series [Books 1-4] Page 19
