by GB Williams
Looking to the rest of the group, she had a limited view of what they had and what they were doing, but it was clear that more than just money had been taken. In fact, Mr Blue seemed more interested in the stuff that wasn’t cash. When Mr White looked up, she had to ask the question weighing on her mind.
‘Why kill Charlie?’
‘He made himself a liability.’
‘How?’
Mr White pinned her with a hard glare. ‘He tried to shoot me.’
‘With what you knew were blanks.’ Teddington watched Mr White closely. He wasn’t as in control as he wanted people to think.
‘It’s your fault.’ The answer came from Mr Blue. ‘He wanted to get away with you, but no money. Nothing to link him to the robbery and both of you free to turn Queen’s evidence. That wasn’t happening.’
‘What if I swore to keep my mouth shut?’
Mr Blue laughed.
Mr White answered, ‘I wouldn’t trust that or you. Too many people know who you are and that you were in that bank.’
‘We can’t have a prison officer blabbing to the law.’
She turned to the man who’d added that. Mr Orange. ‘Oh, like you’d have a say in anything. What is the point of you anyway? What did you do to earn your share of the pot?’
His nostrils flared as he twisted to level a gun at her head.
‘Put it down,’ Mr Blue muttered.
She watched Mr Orange’s chin move, compressing his lips, the breathing through his nose audible.
‘Martin!’
Orange put the gun down and turned to Mr Blue.
‘She’s still with us because she’s the most dangerous to us, which is what makes her potentially the most useful. But she’s not going to live long enough to draw another breath outside this house. Once we’re done here, when we’re ready to leave and there are no cops to get past, I’ll kill her.’
‘There you go,’ the woman sneered across, ‘you’re next.’
‘Oh just get on with it, then.’ Even Teddington was surprised by her snap. ‘Cut all this crappy foreplay and kill me.’
31
Siddig’s question ran around Piper’s head. What’s Charlie Bell got to do with this?
‘Everything,’ he answered after Broughton closed the door on his way out. ‘How well do you remember Bell?’
‘Hardly at all,’ Siddig answered honestly. ‘He was already on remand when I started. I do remember that plenty of people here refused to believe that he killed Phillip Mansel-Jones. At first, they praised him to the skies, saying what a great officer he was, then when he testified that he had killed the man in self-defence, there were still a lot of questions about why he’d been in Mansel-Jones’s house anyway.’
Questions that Piper knew the answer to, but which had never been answered satisfactorily as far as the official records were concerned. As Siddig discussed her observations, the doubts crept into Piper’s mind again, that hated voice in the back of his mind that questioned what kind of copper withheld evidence and knowingly allowed an accused man to lie under oath.
The kind that knows the difference between right and justice.
‘Thank you, Constable. One last question. Did you encounter either Bell or Mrs Teddington when they were here last year?’
She shook her head. ‘I was on duty, but had no contact.’
Good. Piper leaned forward. ‘Did you see either of them?’
A slight frown on her forehead, Siddig leant towards her senior officer. ‘No. Nor did they see me.’
Piper nodded, contemplating the woman before him.
‘Why do it, though?’
It was impossible to form an answer to that question as there were so many different possibilities. He focused on Siddig. ‘Can you clarify the question?’
‘Why hit the bank today? Was there a significance in the timing?’
Piper smiled. He had known the significance, but Siddig was the first to actually ask the question out right. ‘Presswick, the bank manager, reported that an unusually large amount of cash was being run through the bank today.’
Siddig frowned. ‘How unusually large?’
‘Apparently it’s not unusual for the branch to hold one hundred thousand.’
‘Really?’ Siddig blushed at her own interruption. ‘Sorry, sir, but that seems like an awful lot of cash for what’s a fairly small branch.’
Piper shrugged. ‘Perhaps it is, but that’s what Presswick said, so I have to take it at face value.’
‘So having a hundred thousand is reason enough to hit the bank today.’
‘Possibly it would be,’ Piper interrupted her, ‘but that’s what usually goes through. Today, it was half a million.’
For a moment Siddig stared at him, loose-jawed. ‘That’s a better reason.’
Piper huffed a laugh. ‘Five times better. And it may not be the only reason. The money was for one of the many businesses owned by Rhys Mansel-Jones. Also, a number of personal security boxes were opened up and emptied.’
‘Let me guess,’ Siddig said, ‘One of the boxes was held by Mansel-Jones.’
‘Two of them, actually.’
For a moment she starred at the wall over Piper’s head. He knew there was nothing much there but an old policy poster and last season’s football league chart. He waited, interested to know what Siddig came up with.
‘Why wasn’t there more security today for that much money?’
‘Again, according to Presswick, the money wasn’t supposed to be there long enough to bother. It’s sad to say half a million isn’t as much bulk as you might think. As those men demonstrated, it could easily be carried in five holdalls, with plenty of space for whatever was in those security boxes. So, it was delivered from their normal armoured vehicle this morning and it was supposed to be collected this afternoon. All done quietly and without fuss. Extra security would have led to unwanted questions and attention.’
‘Do you know the time of the delivery and planned collection?’
‘Eleven and two respectively.’
Siddig frowned. ‘That’s a tight window of opportunity. So someone had to know what the arrangements were, because the raid happened just after one.’
‘Five past, to be exact.’ Piper like to be exact. He liked that Siddig was thinking through the possibilities.
‘So was the organiser someone from the bank, or someone from Mansel-Jones’ own team?’
‘Good question.’
Siddig had her arms crossed, her index finger tapping on her arm. ‘What about the bank employees? The ones off-duty as well as the three inside?’
Piper nodded. ‘Checks on all employees and ex-employees were kicked off as soon as the raid started.’ He’d had to wait until then to avoid tipping the gang off. Charlie knew Lincoln was planning the raid, but he didn’t know where Lincoln was getting his information.
‘Your file said Simon Lincoln was in import-export. I did a little digging and he had a lot of dealings with Mansel-Jones’ companies.’
Taking the initiative. Piper liked that; Siddig reminded him of Charlie when he started. He smiled at her. ‘True, but dig a little more and you’ll find even Sheldrake’s been known to take a photo op with Mansel-Jones, and she’s not guilty of anything.’ That he could see. ‘Rhys Mansel-Jones is a legitimately successful businessman. He’s even been chairman of the local Chamber of Commerce. A lot of people in the area have a lot of dealings with him and his companies.’
‘What about the client Presswick was seeing?’
‘What about her?’
‘Well, her appointment ensured Presswick’s presence. Could there be a link?’
‘Presswick would have been there anyway.’
‘Oh.’ Siddig looked suddenly deflated.
‘But you show good instincts.’ He noticed that that finger was tapping faster again.
‘She was one of the hostages taken, wasn’t she?’
‘She was.’
‘What if she’s not a hostage?’
Smart girl. ‘It is beginning to look that way. The name we were given was Beth Arden. The only Beth Arden in a fifteen-mile radius is sixty-seven and a resident of the St Mary’s Hospice Care facility. Not surprisingly, she was in the home all day.’
Siddig sighed. ‘Another dead end.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Piper advised. ‘One of the lines of enquiry to follow in the aftermath of all this, is who got hold of her identity? It could be a relative of hers or of someone else in the facility. It could be one of the staff or one of the various therapists that come in to give palliative care.’
Siddig shoved her hands into her trouser pockets. ‘Technically, Mansel-Jones hadn’t come for the cash so it’s still the bank’s liability, but the raid’s still going to inconvenience Mansel-Jones. After all, he wanted that cash for something.’
Was she going to the same conclusion he had? ‘So?’
‘So, if the focus was Mansel-Jones, that fits rather neatly with Bell’s apparent hate for that family.’
Not the conclusion he was looking for.
‘But isn’t it just a little too neat?’
Piper tried not to react. ‘Go on.’
Her dark eyes swivelled up to his—no disguising the intelligence there. ‘We know that at least one of the men in that bank was hiding his identity, and you said earlier that Lincoln had threatened to implicate Bell if he refused to help them. Maybe this is all just a little too convenient. We’ve missed something. Misdirection.’
His lips may have twitched, but Piper controlled the smile. He liked her way of thinking. ‘Siddig, I’m going to risk trusting you.’
She looked a little uncertain. ‘Thank you, sir, but I’d like to think that’s not a risk.’
‘So would I. Which is why I’m doing it. There’s one possibility you didn’t mention, probably because not many people knew about it. There’s one more potential source of information for when that money would be in the bank.’
‘Who?’
‘Us.’
For a moment Siddig just stared. ‘Why would we know?’
‘Normally we wouldn’t, but because it was an unusual amount of cash, and because there wasn’t to be any extra security at the branch, Presswick reported that it would be there to our Major Crimes Team “just in case”.’
‘Doesn’t that put us in a tricky situation, given that we knew there was going to be a raid?’
Damn it, she had to notice that, didn’t she? ‘We didn’t know about the money until the end of last week. We didn’t know where the raid would be until today. If it comes out that we had surveillance on the bank before the raid started, I’ll claim it was part of the preventative measures we planned after the notification.’
She nodded, and licked her lips before she spoke again. ‘Okay, but are you really saying what I think you’re saying?’
Again, Piper nodded. ‘I believe someone in this station is a turncoat.’
32
Piper shivered in the open warehouse with the evening wind cutting through him. The light was fading, so the SOCOs had erected harsh temporary lamps to spotlight areas of interest. The generator sound was already grating on Piper’s nerves as he looked at the shell of the van they’d supplied to the bank robbers. They’d torched the bloody thing, so DNA was going to be hard to get. Some latent prints might have survived, but it was unlikely. The blaggers had all worn nitrile gloves, except the two hostages. Possibly one. Didn’t stop the SOCOs crawling all over the van like albino bugs.
On the other side of the warehouse, the floor had been swept and tape-marked with the dimensions of a building. He’d been over and recognised the layout of the Invicta Bank: the measurements were an exact match. So this was where the gang had rehearsed.
DS Harker was acting as scene manager. She stepped up beside Piper. ‘It’s a mess, sir.’
‘Yeah,’ he agreed with the understatement. It had been a miracle the burning van hadn’t brought the whole warehouse down with it. Piper frowned over the various marks in the dirt covering the floor. ‘What do you reckon that is?’
Harker looked. ‘Tyre tracks.’
‘No.’ Piper pointed this time. ‘That scuff there.’ He moved off, Harker in tow until he reached the yellow and black tape keeping them back. The tape surrounded an area of disturbance separate from the tyre marks. ‘Has all this been photographed?’ It had yellow tags and a long rule beside a handprint.
As Harker checked her notes, Piper wondered whether she really looked too young to be doing this job or whether he was just getting too old.
‘Yes, sir,’ she said with certainty, ‘images twenty-seven through thirty-nine. We think either one of them fell down or was knocked off his feet. The handprint and the boot marks suggest he got back up.’
‘A fight?’
Harker considered the floor. ‘Single blow,’ she stated. ‘Insufficient scuffs in alternate directions to indicate a multi-body altercation.’
God, has she swallowed a bloody dictionary?
Piper held in check the myriad reactions to the image. ‘So someone took his lumps then just got back up.’
‘Pretty much,’ Harker agreed.
‘Must have been a hell of a punch, the body seems to have skidded a few inches.’
‘Somewhere between four to eight inches, depending how tall the man was.’
‘How tall do you think he was?’
Harker puffed out her cheeks. ‘Difficult to say. The only thing we know about him is large hands and size eleven boots. But the two footprints we found suggest a narrow stride, so we can’t be certain, but I’d say “tall”. And yes, that is about as scientific as I’m prepared to get.’
Piper nodded. A tall man got knocked down, someone separate or separating from the group. A single punch. If it was a punch. Piper felt his breath juddering. What if he’d been shot? There was no blood and no body, but that wasn’t a guarantee. Charlie was an ornery bugger: what if he’d got up, staggered away. He could be seriously hurt, dying in a ditch for all Piper knew. Only he didn’t dare show that. For a moment Piper stared up at the blank tin roof and asked any God that might be above him to give him the strength to sort this mess out. He turned to Harker. ‘You find anything else, let me know.’
33
Staring up at a corrugated sky, Charlie had heard the van disappear into the distance, taking Ari away from him. He hadn’t wanted to move. Ever. He hadn’t even wanted to breathe. It hurt. All the same, he was extremely grateful for the pain. Pain meant he was alive and he was overly aware that he very nearly hadn’t been.
When Lincoln had pointed that gun at him, he’d believed he was a dead man. Thank God Piper’d had the presence of mind to insist he wear a bulletproof vest throughout the operation. Of course, the vest wasn’t quite the protection the public thought it was. Yes, the breastplate had stopped the bullet, but not before the force of it had deformed the plate, punching his sternum with enough force to knock him off his feet. Then again, if Lincoln had gone for a head shot, it wouldn’t have been any use at all.
As he’d fallen, the sound of the fire in the van had drowned out all else.
Knowing the white van would be tracked, Charlie lay still only as long as it took the others to drive away. The instant that the sound of the engine disappeared, he groaned as he forced himself to his feet. As quickly as he could, he grabbed the pistol he’d dropped, and threw it into the van, into the fire, before staggering away. He was lucky he moved when he did—the heat reached the fuel tank and turned it into a fireball, setting off the blanks. Pausing at the edge of the building, he released the side straps of the vest, unable to control his groans. The pressure eased but the pain remained, restricting his breathing. He remembered Ari saying that her corset acted like binding on the ribs, actually protecting her from any severe damage Grimshaw might have inflicted. Perhaps he should have left the vest done up. Too late now.
He staggered in pain along the edge of the building then walked, slowly and carefully to the
nearest bus stop. He had just enough cash to pay for the two buses home, though he had to get off two stops earlier than he would have liked, because that was where his money ran out. Every bump in the road was a jolt of pain, every breath was torture, but he made it home, using the key he’d hidden in the nearby graveyard to get in.
Getting the key had been the trickiest part. He’d slipped it under the flower holder on one of the graves. He’d picked one where the flowers were wilting rather than dead, in hope that whoever cared enough to leave flowers wouldn’t be back too soon. The movement of kneeling and picking the key up forced air from his lungs. He’d had to stay there for a few minutes to get his breath back and control his racing heart before he could get to his feet again.
Back in the flat, the temptation was simply to crash on the bed, but he couldn’t. Sweat from his exertions had warred against the glue used to stick the latex to his forehead. In places, the prosthesis was beginning to separate from his skin. In the bathroom mirror, he saw the top edge had largely peeled away. Given the dark make-up, he looked like Frankenstein’s Asian Monster.
He used scissors to remove his jumper and cried out in blessed relief when he released the weight of Kevlar from his shoulders and chest. He looked at the deformation of the breast plate and shuddered.
What he saw in the mirror was no more reassuring. A purple bloom of bruising flowering on his upper and mid-chest. There was an area of dense trauma on the inside edge of his left pectoral—directly above his heart. Either Lincoln had got extremely lucky or was a better shot than he’d given the man credit for. He knew that area would muscle-scar—when the swelling disappeared, he would have a permanent dent in that spot.
Breathing carefully, he reached up to pull at the latex mask. He wasn’t sure what hurt most, the reluctant glue or the effort of holding his arms up. He needed a solvent. The only thing he had was a superglue remover that had come with the glue.
