Blood Money (19 page)

“I just wish we could have said goodbye, I love you so much.”

But the words he most wants to hear remain unsaid. The voice inside his head ceases, but in truth she stopped speaking from the moment she collapsed on the side of the road. Though he has imagined her answers, they were only the responses his own mind predicted she would have given if she were still alive. They weren't Rebecca's words; they were just a projection created from his knowledge of her.

Alexis and his murderous bodyguard must pay for their crimes.

Opening his eyes, he suddenly sees things with intense clarity. From this point on, either Alexis will prove unstoppable and John will get himself killed, or he'll find some way to overcome everything he seems to be up against. If Vasilakos really does have ears and eyes everywhere, he'll know soon enough that a new game has commenced.

*

Late in the afternoon, John returns to Ark House and the first thing he notices is that that the forensics team have taken down their tent and the police cordon tape has been removed. All that remains is a yellow ‘Police Incident' sign, appealing for witnesses to come forward.

“Shit, I'd actually been there so I know for a fact that there hadn't been any fucking witnesses! What is the point? Normal policing methods just aren't going to work against these guys.”

And once the stupid yellow sign has been removed in a couple of weeks time this tiny corner of Finsbury Park will once again return to normal and Rebecca's death will all but be forgotten. How ironic that a brilliant analytical statistician should herself become little more than a statistic of London crime.

Once inside his flat, John feels for the flash drive in his pocket and in doing so he remembers the risks taken in order to gather the data now stored on it. Unused to creeping about and evading his fellow policemen he audibly sighs with relief that he's got through this morning's mission without incident. Turning-on his laptop he pushes home the memory stick into an available port.

Having always found it easier to read stuff from paper rather than directly off a monitor screen he chooses to load-up the printer with A4 sheets and prints out each file in turn, methodically stapling each report in the top left corner. Once everything stored on the stick has been printed-out he lies back on the leather sofa and begins to read.

Immigration and Customs records show Alexis has the same pattern of travelling in and out of the country each week via City of London Airport, entering the UK on a Monday morning at or just before 7am, and always leaving for Monaco each Thursday afternoon at around 4pm. Eddie usually (but not always) appears to accompany him and this may prove to be a very useful piece of information. Sticking to a routine like clockwork often proves crucially important to anyone wishing to set a trap. Then thinking back to the attempted assassination or kidnapping or whatever it was in Birchin Lane, John realises that he's not the first of Vasilakos's enemies to have grasped this point.

John next reads through an account in 2005 when Mr Edward Slater was charged with GBH. A knife was found at the scene and witnesses came forward to say that following an argument in a pub, a 20 year old man named Christopher Rodwell, who had been drinking in the bar for several hours had followed Eddie outside and had threatened him with a blade. Paramedics who later attended the scene took Rodwell to hospital with serious head injuries including broken teeth and a fractured nose. He'd also received two broken ribs (L8 and L9) and so was hospitalized overnight. Eddie admitted having hit Mr Rodwell just twice, once to the body and once to the face but claimed to have acted out of self defence, preventing the man from inflicting serious injury. The GBH was classed as lawful as Eddie had been acting in self defence. He was released and all charges were dropped.

From the interview that he and Bill had only recently performed at 60 Lombard Street, they had inadvertently added quite a lot of information about Eddie onto the police files. The transcript he himself had helped prepare contains a considerable amount of highly relevant information.

Eddie is 33 years old, and yet doesn't appear to have set down any permanent roots anywhere. He currently rents an apartment in Hill Street, Mayfair, located just a few streets way from Alexis's own address. John stops to surf the internet on the residences in that part of London and finds typical rents in the area (even for a modest flat) to be £750 – £1,000 per week. It therefore follows that Alexis must be paying him handsomely and that in turn reinforces the point that Eddie must be very good at what he does.

It's been eight years since Eddie left the army. For the first two years he'd been registered as a ‘Close Protection' agent working in Iraq. Since then he'd been employed at Kronos and from that point on he stopped being registered to a bodyguard agency. Seems that Eddie likes it free-lance and prefers to keep his personal details as private as possible. Finding out exactly why he'd left the British Army at the relatively young age of 25 wouldn't be easy. The country's armed forces are notoriously guarded about allowing outsiders to see their servicemen's personnel records. Any effort to make direct inquiries into Eddie's details, including the circumstances of his discharge, would likely result in Eddie getting to hear that someone had been trying to dig into his past. Definitely better to leave that stone unturned.

John stops reading the reports momentarily and considers the chances and circumstances required to allow Alexis and Eddie to cross paths. Two people at different extremes of society who join up to begin a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship. You can't exactly advertise to find a boss who gives you opportunity to torture and kill with impunity. Neither can a boss easily recruit someone whose job description is to be ‘a discrete but ruthless psychopathic killer.'

John now begins reading about Alexis Vasilakos, starting with the interview transcript that had been made just last week. A Greek national and a resident of Monaco, Alexis's address when in London is the presidential penthouse suite in the ‘Mayfair Astoria' in Stratton Street, just south of the famous Berkeley Square. It must be very convenient to have Eddie living so close-by should there be any ‘problems' requiring his assistance. Hitting the internet, Eddie is shocked to see just how luxurious the hotel's accommodation actually is. Clearly, he hadn't understood just how elegant a penthouse could be until he sees the pictures on the hotel's website. The outlay for living in such luxury must be eye-wateringly steep and certainly no normal person could possibly contemplate parting with so much money on a weekly basis. John closes his eyes and pictures Alexis in residence, being waited on hand and foot, with no domestic chores or hassles to concern him. Courteous and attentive hotel staff on hand to see to his every whim, yet having to take whatever abuse he throws at them without complaint. Fed, pampered and cosseted in an environment totally removed from everyday realities. Christ, the son-of-a-bitch must be absolutely swimming in money.

In terms of criminal records, Alexis has nothing on him apart from a string of driving offences including twice having been banned from driving and in fact it appears that the most recent ban is still currently in force. It doesn't come as much of a surprise that in each reported offence Alexis had been driving some variety of supercar. The more he learns about the Greek the less astonished he is about the extravagant lifestyle that seems to define the man.

In 1998, Alexis had been arrested after his Lamborghini Diablo spun out of control crashing into four vehicles. The smash occurred in Lowndes Square in Knightsbridge. The car had been registered to Mr Vasilakos just 3 weeks earlier and had only 76 kilometres on the clock. No one was injured in the crash which happened in the early hours of the 12th August. Appearing at Isleworth Crown Court on September 13th on a charge of dangerous driving he was acquitted after his lawyer convinced the CPS to drop the case based on a plea that he'd fainted at the wheel. His personal physician provided evidence that this fainting was both genuine (as a result of a heart problem) and because the medical complaint had only been discovered afterwards it had therefore been unforeseeable. Since the accident, he had been on prescribed drugs to prevent a re-occurrence. Therefore he did not receive an automatic licence suspension or a criminal record but was nevertheless given 6 penalty points.

Then in 2001, whilst driving an Aston Martin V12 Vantage, he was arrested for dangerous driving whilst under the influence following a road traffic collision in Piccadilly. In court, his lawyer had again been successful in getting the most serious charges dropped, this time because he claimed that following the accident he had taken a drink of brandy from a hip flask and that he had been below the limit at the time of the alleged offence. The defendant was witnessed to have done this at the scene of the accident by bystanders that the lawyer was able to bring forward. His lawyer had convinced the judge that had the post-crash alcohol not been consumed then Alexis would have otherwise passed the breath test. The circumstances of Alexis's case were strikingly similar to other incidents he knew of where rich celebrities employ a lawyer who's cunning enough to exploit some technicality backed-up with dubious witness testimony.

Reading on, John is unsurprised at the details of a couple of further driving offences that occurred soon after. In 2006 Alexis had been stopped by a police officer from the Met Police Traffic Unit and suspecting that he'd been drinking the officer had ‘breathalysed' Alexis and found him to be well over the legal limit of 35mg of alcohol per 100ml of breath. He was then taken to the nearest police station and charged. He was later disqualified from driving for twelve months and fined the maximum amount of £5000. Finally just last year, Alexis was caught doing 70mph in a 30mph zone at 3am in the morning in central London, and was banned again. This time his car had been a Ferrari Enzo. Since that second driving ban, Alexis had not apparently had a car licensed in his name. Instead, as John now knows, he seemed to have accepted that it might be better to leave the driving to someone else, and is being chauffeured around by his bodyguard, Eddie Slater.

John knows he's saved the best to last, the hushed-up crime report from twenty years ago that his partner Bill Warren had mentioned just before they interviewed Alexis and Eddie the previous week.

The report contains an annotated floor-plan of the bank's basement to help define where the criminals had broken through, and a smaller scale schematic indicating the relative positions of the PSB's basement, the road, pavements and the pub cellar across the road. Dimensions had been added by hand to indicate the distances involved in making the tunnel.

Setting the drawings to one side for the moment, John begins to read through the details of the incident as described in the case notes.

It appeared to have started as an opportunistic venture some six months prior to the break-in at the bank. A retirement had opened-up a vacancy at the Lamb and Lion public house for a new licensee. Woodhalls Brewery advertised for a new resident landlord and Mr David Pocock was one of several applicants. Despite having apparently only managed one pub to date the brewery were nevertheless impressed with his enthusiasm. Following a cursory check of his references Mr Pocock was hired for the position. During the subsequent investigations, Bill Warren had discovered that David Pocock had had a very ‘chequered past' indeed, which included him having several aliases and a number of connections to organised crime. Shortly after taking up the licence, Pocock's gang of associates moved in and began making their excavations from the beer cellar. They tunnelled underneath the road to get directly below the PSB's enormous bank vault. None of the tenants from the neighbouring buildings had heard any noisy activities, so it seemed likely the tunnelling work must have been done by hand. An impressive feat to dig along some ten feet below the road surface, shoring-up the tunnel with stout planking and acrow-props to prevent cave-ins. It had been measured to be some 50 ft in length, boring gradually downwards to get directly under the floor of the vault. Abandoned in the tunnel had been breathing apparatus and a powerful device known as a ‘Thermic Lance'. This high temperature cutting torch had been used during the final stages to cut upwards through the vault floor which consisted of three foot of highly reinforced and especially durable concrete.

Unbeknownst to the raiders, the design of the vault included having the reinforced steel within the concrete structure wired into the alarm system. The Bank Manager had come in to work that Saturday morning had been undisturbed for some three hours without hearing anything suspicious when the alarm connected to vault was triggered. He entered and managed to frighten off the raiders before the hole was large enough for them to get through. He then put in a call to Bishopsgate Station, insisting he would talk only to someone senior in CID. Bill Warren and Tom Rogers were sent across to attend even though the bank manager was refusing to say anything more than that there'd been a disturbance that needed their utmost discretion.

By the time the policemen entered the vault the would-be thieves had long since fled. Further delays were caused by the hole in the floor not being large enough for the policemen to get down. When eventually they gained access they found the tunnel led to the pub across the road. The raiders had left sufficient evidence behind in the cellar for the police to identify them but it was later discovered that they'd managed to escape to Spain.

With nothing stolen and no arrests made, the PSB asked the police to make their investigations as low-key as possible, and succeeded in keeping the matter out of the papers. The vault was discretely repaired and the bank even paid for the pub cellar to be cleared of all the rubble, bricking the hole back up again and returning everything to full working order. The bank used their own trusted contract labourers to ensure total discretion was maintained, and somehow the brewery management had been persuaded to keep the matter a secret too.