The Man with No Face

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘Exactly. And the second thing that she pointed out to us is that we can’t look at previously unsolved kidnaps, if any, for pointers about “Annie” Oakley’s case because kidnap is not a serial crime. Just isn’t. The reason for that is that it’s too traumatic for the kidnappers, poor wee things. Killing people you don’t know and before you come to know them is relatively easy, pulling bank jobs becomes a way of life. But abducting someone, holding them against their will for an extended period means that a relationship can’t help but develop between the kidnapper and victim, so Dr Reid told us. She also pointed out that some kidnap victims have in the past kept their heads and deliberately cultivated a relationship with their captors and so brought about a successful outcome from their point of view. Either they’ve been released unharmed and the kidnapper has fled without pressing home their demands, or the kidnappers have gone through to the end, but his or her victim has been released with sufficient information to apprehend the kidnapper: or both. Either way, by building a relationship with the kidnapper, victims have often saved their own lives. And in doing so, they’ve given said” poor wee kidnapper an experience they don’t want to relive.’

  ‘Poor things, as you say.’ Donoghue smiled.

  ‘But it’s a valid elimination point. It meant we didn’t have to spend time trawling the files of unsolved kidnappings looking for parallels.’ Stamp paused. He took a deep breath and glanced out of his office window as a maroon-coloured double-decker of Lothian Transport with a white top, hummed down Newhaven Road towards the red-bricked Ferranti factory. Then the situation took a turn for the worse. You see, by using portable phones the kidnappers had solved the problem about being traced to their location.’

  They could have been phoning from New Zealand.’

  ‘Right. But we were to find that they had worked out that personal phones can be used to solve the other major problem kidnappers have, which is how to have the ransom delivered without it being kept under surveillance. We got a call from “Annie”, midday to her parents’ phone, clear, slow, as if, we thought, reading from a script. The ransom was one million pounds in used notes, in twenty-pound notes. She went on to say that the notes had to be Bank of England notes, Royal Bank of Scotland, Bank of Scotland and Clydesdale Bank notes. So already they had an eye for laundering the money. “Annie” said at the end of her message that we had a week to get the money ready. So we drew from that that the kidnappers felt safe, not at all concerned about being discovered. Their safe house, wherever it was in the world, was a very, very safe house. We took advice, consulted HOLMES, talked to the parents and at the end of the day we decided to collect the money and pay it. We took note of the serial numbers of the notes but otherwise did what they wanted.’

  ‘And waited.’

  ‘Apart from waiting for “Annie“‘s daily call to let us know that she was still alive, that’s all we did.’

  That’s all you could do.’

  Then we got our instructions. The one million pounds was to be placed inside two ex-military canvas kitbags and securely fastened at the opening. The kitbags will be opened immediately and the money transferred into other bags, so do not place tracking devices in the kitbags, nor do anything that may be interpreted as being a means of tracking the money. She said “the drop”, she used that term, will take place in two days’ time. Then the phone went dead. I should say that she’d been phoning her parents’ land line all this time. Then soon after the phone went dead her father’s own mobile started to sing. He answered it and it was “Annie”, who said that all further contact would be to his mobile so he had to keep it with him at all times. They must have got his number from “Annie’s Filofax.’

  ‘Must have,’ Donoghue agreed, but it crossed his mind that torturing the information out of ‘Annie’ Oakley was not impossible, or even unlikely.

  Then we got a call saying that from ten a.m., Mr Oakley had to start travelling on the slow-stopping train from Glasgow Queen Street to Stirling and then do the return journey. And to keep shuttling backwards and forwards carrying his Vodaphone and wait for instructions. We knew then the reason for the kitbags, he was going to have to toss them and the money they contained from a moving train, and one of my officers said as much. There was a silence, the line was still open and then “Annie” said, “Dad, you’re going to have to throw the bags from the train but the train has got to keep going. If the train stops they won’t pick up the bags. Don’t pull the cord. Throw it from the left side as you face the direction of travel.”

  ‘So you had no idea at which point between Stirling and Glasgow the bags were going to be jettisoned? That’s a lot of square miles to cover.’

  ‘Oh, it gets better, or worse, depending on your point of view. Throwing from the left side as you face the direction of travel makes sense, it means throwing it away from the track whichever way you’re going rather than on to the parallel track, so that didn’t surprise us. Anyway, we did what we could to cover the area, we had unmarked cars patrolling, either side of the track, we had guys in camouflage observing the track and its environs from a distance using powerful field glasses, we had guys on the train with Mr Oakley, we had our own radio and mobile phones. So we started travelling shortly after ten a.m. That day was a Friday, I remember I had booked it as leave, the following day was our wedding anniversary and me and my wife had planned a long weekend away to celebrate quietly by ourselves. She” wasn’t pleased when I cancelled but she understood when I explained what was happening and we went away a week or two later. But’ -Stamp shrugged his shoulders—‘you marry a cop…love me, love my dog.’

  ‘I confess I’ve encountered the same problem.’

  ‘I’ll bet you have; it’s the name of the game. Fortunately my wife is an ex-policewoman and so understands what it’s like. Other guys on the squad don’t have it so easy.’

  ‘But to continue…’

  To continue, they must have watched us, because just ten minutes out of Glasgow Queen Street, Oakley’s mobile rang. It was “Annie”. She said, “Thank you, Dad, I’ll phone you later.”’

  ‘Somebody watched Mr Oakley get on the Stirling train, made a phone call from a pay phone on or in the vicinity of the station to whoever was holding “Annie” and she then phoned her father using her mobile.’

  ‘So we assumed. Now the cruel bit comes. We started that journey at ten a.m., at eight p.m. we were still shuttling back and forth…Mr Oakley was in tears, the tension, the strain, the not knowing, the fear for his daughter…no contact…that was the hard bit.’

  ‘Oh my…I can feel for him. I have two children. One a girl.’

  ‘I’ve got two boys. The mad fools want to be policemen. Anyway, at eight p.m., we’re on one of the homeward legs, we’re feeling hungry and weak and dispirited, Scotrail sandwiches and coffee are very good but they can only take you so far, then we got a call on Oakley’s mobile…we’re to leave the train at Queen Street, travel across Glasgow to Central, get the next Intercity to London.’

  ‘So all the surveillance teams were useless.’

  ‘And had been throughout the day, but by that time they were also exhausted, their day’s work was out of them. They had no intention of having Oakley chuck the kitbags from the train as it rattled between Glasgow and Stirling. If they had any reason to make him spend a day doing that it was to make ourselves commit men to the ground between those two towns and then having done that, they whisked Oakley and his kitbags away on an express train.’

  ‘Clever.’

  ‘So we were travelling south on the Intercity. The train we were on was the new stock, air-conditioned, can’t open the door windows by sliding them down, so we knew Oakley could relax for a while. We knew we would have to change to a suburban line at some point, at least that’s what we expected, but we had no idea where we could be sent. They could have been taking us to the south coast of England. At this time dusk was falling and one of the team commented that it was going to be a night drop, and again that made se
nse, it would make it difficult to fix the exact location of the point that we would be chucking the bags out of the train window.’

  ‘Didn’t take chances, did they?’

  ‘You’re telling me. Anyway, one guy had the bright idea, which like all bright ideas is simplicity itself, and that was that since it was going to be dark, or at least dusk because this was summer, that we find something small and dark and heavy enough not to be blown away in the wind or the draught from passing trains that Oakley could conceal in his hands and let fall as he let one of the kitbags fall. So we hunted around, couldn’t find anything and one of my guys suggested we drop one of our radios, it was small and black, wouldn’t travel. There were four of us, we were left with three radios plus a mobile, plus Oakley’s mobile, we could afford it. So we decided to do that.’

  ‘Not many radios at the side of a railway line.’

  ‘Not a lot, no.’ Stamp paused and scratched the side of his head. ‘We crossed the border, that wee stream near Gretna, and then we were called. “Annie” called her dad, told him to get off at Carlisle. Told him to get the next train to Glasgow via Dumfries. You travelled that line?’

  ‘Have not, I confess.’

  ‘Don’t unless you have to. It goes through the back of beyond, and does so slowly. I mean, from Carlisle we crawled back to Gretna, tired locomotive, old rolling stock, with windows in the doors at either end of the carriage which could be opened fully by sliding them down. From Gretna we went to Dumfries and by this time it was dark. It was after Dumfries that we got the instructions to drop the kitbags. It was “Annie” again, she phoned her dad on the mobile. She said, “move to the end of the carriage and open the window on the left side of the train facing the direction of travel. In a minute or two you’ll be going into a long tunnel, chuck the bags out as soon as you’re out of the tunnel.”’

  ‘So you didn’t need to drop the radio.’

  ‘No. The tunnel fixed the position as accurately as we needed it to be fixed. So we followed instructions. Sure enough we went into a tunnel. Oakley pulled down the window and was ready to heave the bags. As soon as we were out he chucked one bag, then the second, uncontrollable tears as he did so. And the train rattled on. It was all as if someone with a mobile phone was watching the train and just two minutes before the train went into the tunnel, phoned whoever was holding “Annie” and told her to phone Mr Oakley with the instructions. We reported the instructions as soon as we received them, and Dumfries and Galloway Police were at the scene quickly—they had a car shadowing the train. It was all that they could spare at such short notice. We had a look at the times that we were logged as reporting the drop and the time the police car was on the scene and there was only a two-minute delay, and I mean a one-hundred-and-twenty-second time window.’

  ‘Fast.’

  The line’s near the main road at that point. The two constables in the car didn’t see anybody, they couldn’t see the bags, but in fairness didn’t look for them. They stayed in the car observing the locus as best they could in the darkness, waiting for a car to start up and headlights to appear.’

  ‘But nothing?’

  ‘Nothing. The tunnel itself is long, about a mile in length. What I now believe happened is that they waited just inside the northern end of the tunnel and picked up the kitbags as they were dropped and then carried them back through the tunnel to a getaway car which was waiting near the southern end. A mile through a railway tunnel is not the sort of journey I’d want to make but if I had a companion, if I had a torch, and if I had the amount of a bottle you could purchase with a million pounds, then I’d do it. If they’d have told us to drop the money at the southern end of the tunnel, they’d have police converging there, if they told us to drop the money in the tunnel, they’d have police at either end of the tunnel.’

  ‘But doing the drop at the northern end of the tunnel had the same effect as having Mr Oakley shuttle backwards and forwards between Edinburgh and Glasgow had had.’

  ‘Exactly my thinking. Lured the police away from the action. These were clever people. Probably still are. Anyway, shortly after the drop “Annie” phoned her father and said, “Thanks, Dad, they’ve got the money.” He burst into tears and said that it was the last time he’d hear his daughter’s voice.’

  ‘And he was right.’

  ‘After this amount of time, yes. We kept in contact for a few weeks but with nothing to report, the contact trailed off. Mr Oakley carried on but something had left him. He was just going through the motions of working. Mrs Oakley went into a deep, very black, depression and had to be hospitalized.’

  ‘Outcome of Enquiries?’

  ‘Not a great deal, as you might imagine, we did house-to-house in villages to the north and south of the tunnel, got nothing in Sanquar and New Cumnock, but something in Carronbridge, Thornhill and Dumfries.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘We worked out from the time that the money was jettisoned, allowing twenty minutes to walk through the tunnel, possibly half an hour, that any getaway car would be driving through population centres just around the time that the pubs would be turning out, and given the nature of the area, closed rural community, a foreign vehicle

  ‘Foreign?’

  ‘I mean foreign to the area.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Any foreign car would be noticed, and we got four people who reported an ex-Royal Mail delivery van heading south, quite fast it seemed, but not dangerously so.’

  ‘Ex-Royal Mail?’

  ‘Blood-red Leyland Sherpa with the Post Office logo removed from the side, only one seat in the cab and a wire mesh and wood partition separating the cab from the cargo area. You can pick them up for a song at motor auctions. They’re popular with jobbing craftsmen and youngsters who want an inexpensive set of wheels.’

  ‘Ah yes, I know the vehicles.’

  ‘One such vehicle was seen heading south within an hour of the ransom being dropped, four separate sightings. One witness in Dumfries said that he’d not seen the vehicle or the driver before, but the driver seemed familiar with the town, gave the impression she knew where she was going.’

  They’d done a dummy run.’

  ‘That would be my guess, though probably at a busy time when a foreign vehicle would not be noticed so easily, on the basis that the best place to hide a tree is in a forest. But it would seem that the getaway was south, to Dumfries, from there it’s a ten-mile dash to Lockerbie and there you join the A74, whereupon ye are lost and gone forever.’

  ‘Oh, we hope not.’ Both men grinned. Then Donoghue continued. ‘You said “she”.’

  ‘One witness described the driver as female with a mane of reddish hair. About forty-five, possibly older, but not younger. No chicken.’

  ‘And what of the money?’

  ‘Laundered over a period of time. And cleverly so. You see, one million pounds in twenty-pound notes amounts to fifty thousand bits of paper. At first nothing happened. Nothing surfaced. Nothing at all.’

  Then?’

  Then came the Glasgow Fair in July. The city shuts down early on Friday and doesn’t open again until Tuesday morning, during which hours the good citizens of the dear green place spend like there’s no tomorrow.’

  ‘One thousand pounds of ransom money surfaced on the Tuesday the banks opened. All as part of the till receipts of licensed premises, newsagents, food shops, so then we knew that that was how they were going to launder the money. Tediously, but utterly safe. By going into a newsagent’s and buying a Herald or Daily Record and perhaps a packet of cigarettes and tendering a twenty-pound note and saying, sorry, you’ve nothing smaller; then taking the newspaper into a pub and buying a slimline tonic with ice and lemon and tendering a twenty-pound note and saying, sorry, you’ve nothing smaller; leaving the newspaper in the bar and then repeating the exercise until you’re awash with liquid. Buying a cup of coffee with a twenty-pound note…buying a handful of groceries…a couple of gallons of petrol for your car…each time you
make a transaction you launder a twenty-pound note and the change is not traceable. So the one thousand pounds we recovered after the Glasgow Fair amounted to five hundred transactions.’

  ‘Busy squirrels.’

  ‘Divided between three people we thought just over one hundred small purchases each, over the period from Friday at sixteen hundred hours when the banks shut, to Tuesday oh-nine hundred hours, when the traders take their cash to the bank. If you put your mind to it, you can do it. I mean, that is an eighty-nine-hour period, allowing for eight hours’ sleep each, twenty-four plus two hours each twenty-four for refreshment, that’s still sixty, nearly seventy man-hours, which means an average of one and a bit transactions each hour, three transactions in a two-hour period. The time taken in the transaction is easy. I would think the problem is that you’d run out of premises, can’t go to the same shop twice and you’d spend much time walking betwixt and between said minor retail outlets. So perhaps an average of three transactions in two hours amounts to a lot of hard graft.’

  ‘It also amounts to a lot of self-discipline and a lot of planning and does point to kidnappers in their middle years.’ Donoghue nodded his head. ‘Younger people would be in a hurry to spend all that dosh and so lead a trail to their door.’

  ‘It also points to kidnappers who have no previous connection with the underworld. There are figures in this city and your city, and every major city in the UK, who would trade one million pounds of dirty, traceable money for untraceable money at twenty-five pence off the pound. And do the transaction over a weekend. The fact that they didn’t do that was another indication that this team had no track.’

  ‘You mentioned three as being the number of the gang?’

  ‘Nothing firm, but it would make sense, it would add up. The footprints of the two people in the shrubs in the Oakleys’ parkland-size garden, who wrested “Annie” out of her vehicle and into the back of the getaway vehicle, which would be driven by a third. Two kitbags for the ransom money, to be carried through the tunnel, one person for each bag, and the getaway vehicle again to be driven by a third person…’