Red Crystal (15 page)

Fridays were always difficult for parking in the centre of town, and Mrs Ackroyd peered anxiously through the windscreen as she manoeuvred the Morris into the car park. But it was all right. There was a space and quite near the entrance too. She turned off the ignition and looked at the time. One minute to ten. Perfect. She did like to be punctual on these occasions.

There were butterflies in her stomach. But she was quite used to that. Her boss, Mr Wilson, the financial director of Bradbury’s, always apologized for asking her to make these trips, but in truth she rather enjoyed them. It gave her a thrill to carry so much money. And it wasn’t as if she had to do it every week. Four of them, all trusted employees, took it in turns. They also tried to vary the timing as much as possible, but with two hundred wage packets to prepare – and a hundred and twenty of those before the end of the day shift at four – one couldn’t leave it too late.

She patted the grey curls to her head and, picking up a voluminous shopping bag, got out of the car. The bank was only just across the High Street. As she went in Mr Chesil, the assistant manager, looked up and nodded to her. He met her at the last window and they exchanged greetings through the glass screen. She handed over the withdrawal cheque. As always, the bank had been notified of the exact amount by telephone the previous day, so the money would already be prepared in tidy parcels.

As she folded up the shopping bag and pushed it under the screen, Mrs Ackroyd said, ‘How’s the football going, Mr Chesil?’ She knew that the assistant manager was very keen on the game and played for the bank’s regional team.

‘Very well, thank you,’ he replied. ‘We won last Saturday.’ He disappeared into an inner sanctum where he always put the money into the bag.

Five minutes later he reappeared and, taking a cursory glance around the bank, went to the door which connected the banking and public sections. He emerged and handed the bag to Mrs Ackroyd, saying, ‘Yes, we’re playing Barclays tomorrow. Should be a good match.’

‘Hope you win,’ she said cheerily. ‘According to the weather people you should have a good day for it.’ She waited expectantly for a suitably light response that would mark the end of the conversation.

But the poor man suddenly looked quite ill. His face had gone deathly white and his eyes seemed to be popping out of their sockets.

His gaze was fixed on something over her shoulder. Feeling the first flutter of anxiety Mrs Ackroyd began to turn.

She cried out in alarm.

Something cold and hard was jabbing into her neck, preventing her from looking round.

She cried out. Another jab and she found herself staggering sideways.

Shocked, she turned at last, and gasped.

A figure stood before her, dressed entirely in black. A devil-mask hid the face, except for the eyes which glinted darkly through the slits. The figure moved, and Mrs Ackroyd suddenly realized what had jabbed her. An enormous great gun.

Her knees went weak and she had to lean against the wall. As she told the policeman later, everything after that was a complete blur. Although she
did
remember to grasp the shopping bag.

The assistant manager knew what he should do. He should get to the alarm button. But the black figure was advancing on him and he froze. The long thin neck of the gun met his ribs and he gave a small cry.

The figure was holding up something in front of his eyes. A message. He blinked rapidly and read it. Nodding, he stepped slowly into the banking section and, with the black figure a short pace behind him, went into the manager’s office. A few moments later, he and the manager were standing helplessly beside the safe.

Out of the corner of his eye Chesil saw that all four of the tellers were in their seats. He felt a glimmer of hope. By now one of them was bound to have pressed a foot alarm. Almost immediately he realized he was mistaken. The tellers were sitting well back from the tills, out of reach of the alarms. He saw why. The barrel of a second gun was visible above the glass screen, pointing down at them. Even as he watched, the tellers were leaving their seats to lie face down on the floor. Only one remained in her seat. Keeping a cautious eye on the gun, she began to open the tills and stack the cash neatly on to the counter.

The manager showed no hesitation in opening the safe which, everyone later agreed, was the most sensible thing to do. As the manager piled the money into a large sack the assistant manager made an unhappy mental calculation. Fifteen thousand-odd in the safe plus seven in the tills: twenty-two thousand. Then he remembered Mrs Ackroyd’s bagful and thanked God they hadn’t got hold of that. It contained over ten thousand pounds.

But a minute later he realized that this hope, like the first, was premature. He heard Mrs Ackroyd’s voice crying hysterically, ‘Take it! Take it!’

The first gunman appeared with the shopping bag and threw it on the floor next to the two sacks of money beside the safe.

Suddenly there was a commotion and, almost sick with fright, Chesil craned his neck to see what was happening. Framed in the main doorway was a customer whom he recognized as a cantankerous ex-colonel. The old man was haranguing the second gunman, shouting, ‘Put that thing down
immediately
!’

Dear God, thought the assistant manager, this is no time for British heroics.

Suddenly a voice rang out. ‘Shut up or I kill you!’

There was a dull thud and a shower of glass. The assistant manager jumped with fright. He looked up, terrified, but the colonel was still standing there, alive but shocked. The old man lay down on the floor beside the other customers.

The first gunman, hovering nervously at the connecting door, spun back to face the manager. He held up another written message. The manager nodded furiously. With a thud of fear, Chesil realized the gunman was motioning to him. He was to pick up the money and take it towards the back of the bank. They knew about the rear door then. Of course.

With shaking fingers he unlocked the heavily secured back door and carried the sacks out into the alleyway. There was a delivery van waiting there. He got a brief glimpse of someone in the driver’s seat before the gunmen hurried him round to the rear doors, which were already open.

Just before he was forced to climb into the back of the van he made a mental note of the registration number. But it didn’t do any good. The van was found abandoned two hours later, not half a mile from the layby where the assistant manager himself was discovered, trussed hand and foot, his trousers unceremoniously tied round his ankles.

Gabriele pushed her foot down and watched the speed of the Vitesse climb to over a hundred. But there was no exhilaration in it and, with an effort, she reconciled herself to a long boring drive to London. She felt unexpectedly depressed. The tension of the last few hours had vanished, leaving her drained and strangely dissatisfied.

Max sat silently beside her, shaking his head now and then at some confusing inner thoughts. In the back Giorgio was cleaning the Skorpion, clicking the magazine in and out, whistling contentedly.

Gabriele tried to concentrate her thoughts. She was feeling a letdown after the action, certainly, but there were other, more concrete doubts nagging at the back of her mind. Had they made any mistakes? She went through the raid, detail by detail, looking for deviations from the plan.

There was the shot Giorgio had fired. But no one had been hurt.

And – what?

Giorgio had said something.

She looked at him in the driving mirror. ‘What did you say – in the bank?’ she demanded.

‘What – to the old man?’ He laughed. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘Try.’

He sighed loudly and there was a long pause. Eventually he replied, ‘I said, “Shut up or I kill you”.’

Gabriele thought: I
knew
there was something. She tried to control her anger. ‘
Exactly
like that?’

She saw Giorgio shrug. He said heavily, ‘Yes, like that. So?’

‘You could have spoken proper English. You sound – like an Italian waiter!’

Giorgio let out an exclamation of disgust and lay back. Max shifted uneasily in his seat.

Gabriele turned the problem of the words over and over in her mind. One moment they seemed like a horrendous mistake, the next she convinced herself they meant nothing. In all the confusion, no one would have noticed the precise words. Anyway, what if they had? Where would it lead? No, she was worrying too much.

All things considered, her meticulous planning had paid off. She allowed herself some satisfaction. It was the first raid. There would be many more, and each would be just as successful.

They hit the M1 at last, and she accelerated again. She smiled, her optimism returning, and said, ‘We’ll go out and have a good meal tonight.’

Max eyed her uncertainly. Good food was wasted on him. Not that she’d planned to include him anyway. ‘You’ll go back to your new place,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you some money. We’ll speak on the phone in a few days.’

Max nodded. Ever since her return he had been doglike in his devotion. He was riddled with guilt about Stephie and pathetically grateful for any opportunity to do something to strike back.

Giorgio was a different matter. He was more difficult to please. But money would make him happy. For a while. Then she would dangle the plan of the next action in front of him, and he too would follow her unquestioningly.

She glanced in the mirror and stiffened. There was a white Rover some distance behind, approaching fast. She slowed down until the Vitesse was doing a safe seventy and moved into the middle lane.

The police car approached and slowly overtook. The men inside did not even glance at her.

‘All right,’ said Inspector Morrow wearily, ‘let’s go through it again, shall we?’

The bank manager and his assistant shifted in their seats and waited obediently.

The inspector tapped his fingers on the interview-room table. ‘An exceptional amount of cash in the bank. The accounts lady from Bradbury’s with ten thousand in a shopping bag. And no security guards.’

There was a silence. Put like that it didn’t reflect too well on anyone, especially the bank.

‘Tell me,’ the inspector continued, ‘do Bradbury’s always get little grey-haired ladies to carry large amounts of cash for them?’

‘They have always used their staff,’ said the manager defensively.

Morrow shook his head. He’d been in Cheshire CID for fifteen years and it never failed to amaze him how stupid people were with their money. He said, ‘Bradbury’s tell me they use four different people and vary the times when they collect. Is that true?’

The manager nodded.

‘You didn’t actually
see
the gunman take the bag from Mrs Ackroyd?’

‘No,’ the manager said firmly. ‘We were by the safe. The customers lying on the floor had the best view …’

‘Quite. Now – this is very important. Mr Chesil—’ The assistant manager sat up. ‘When you handed the bag of money to Mrs Ackroyd were the gunmen already in the bank?’

The assistant manager thought desperately. ‘I don’t know. One moment everything was normal then … I’m afraid I didn’t see them until they were
there
.’

‘What I’m trying to discover,’ said the inspector patiently, ‘is whether the villains
spotted
you handing the cash to Mrs Ackroyd. D’you see what I mean?’

They saw, but couldn’t help. Morrow drew a deep breath and moved on. ‘Right. Now what about the guns? You’ve had a chance to look through our little gallery of photographs? but I gather you’re not quite agreed about the type.’

‘Well,
I’m
quite sure,’ declared the manager. ‘I pointed the gun out to your sergeant. I’m positive it was the one.’

The assistant manager shook his head. ‘I’m afraid – I don’t think the gun was there in your collection. There were similar ones, but …’ He trailed off and shrugged.

The inspector wondered what else the numerous witnesses could disagree about. He supposed he should be grateful for what he’d got: that the two weapons appeared to be sub-machine-guns, and probably identical. Although the thought of sub-machine-guns did not make him happy, not at all. No one had used those kind of weapons on his manor before. The local villains and the ones from Liverpool and Manchester who did him the honour of committing armed robbery on his patch used sawn-off shotguns.

Ballistics had not been as helpful as he’d hoped. The bullet fired at the wall of the bank had spread, and it was impossible to establish the calibre. Neither could the interim report establish
why
the bullet had spread: it might have been a consequence of using a silencer – all the witnesses were agreed on the lack of a loud explosion – or it could have been a result of using a soft-nosed bullet. Or both.

Inspector Morrow drew a deep breath. ‘Any more thoughts on the gunman’s voice?’

Both men shook their heads. The manager said firmly, ‘I only remember his words. “Shut up or I’ll kill you!” he said.’

‘And what about the van driver, Mr Chesil. You’ve no more to offer us in the way of a description?’

The assistant manager shook his head. ‘It was only the briefest glimpse. Like I said, he had dark hair. And a white face. But as to what he
looked
like, well, it was all rather a
blur
.’

There was a pause. The inspector reflected that you couldn’t get blood out of a stone. He tried to end on an optimistic note. ‘But we do have some serial numbers, I gather.’

The manager looked pleased. ‘We do indeed. We had an unusual amount of new notes in the bank. We have numbers for notes totalling almost six thousand pounds.’

Almost a fifth of the money. Better than nothing.

The inspector then interviewed Mrs Ackroyd. The sergeant had told him what to expect: an earful. And that was what he got. Mrs Ackroyd had decided she was in some way to blame for what had happened and was determined to share the burden.

The inspector interrupted her, ‘Mrs Ackroyd, I need to establish one fact. But it’s very important.’

She blinked. ‘Yes?’

‘Did the gunman come
straight
up to you and take the bag of money?’