Twist

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Twist Page 23

by Tom Grass


  Fagin raised his hand to his face and tore off the moustache. He was smiling. Then she looked at the bonnet of the limousine. It was disappearing. Cribb had put it in reverse. There was a single blast of a siren and an unmarked police car braked hard as it passed the alleyway and came to a stop, blocking their path to Cribb and safety.

  The male detective was older, reaching retirement age and he was calm and unsurprised in the face of the chaos emerging from the Shard. He looked for a moment at the entrance then up at the hotel and then back down at the road in front of him, turning a full circle, scanning the cars that were pulling away, focusing on each one, missing nothing. It was obvious he was not here to put out the fire.

  She heard coughing and she looked over to see Fagin leaning forwards to hide his face. She watched as the second detective, a woman, younger, maybe forty, appeared from the car behind him, talking into a phone, coordinating the squad cars which had blocked both entrances to the feeder road.

  She felt Bill release his grip on her wrist and slide his hand down to clutch her own, pulling her forwards and turning to face Fagin, playing the concerned friend, and she followed his lead in a half-skip backwards as they moved towards the two cops.

  But the damage had already been done. The old cop was staring down at Bill’s hand as it turned her own, exerting just enough force to spin her outwards so that she gave him partial cover as the cop turned back towards Fagin and they strode past him. But his partner was more certain and Red watched her keep her eyes on Bill as a second wave of buyers spilled out at them from a side street. She was speaking urgently into her hands-free mic, pushing the crowd out of her way, reaching inside her jacket with her right hand for what could only be a gun.

  Red felt a sharp tug on her wrist and within a second they had turned and then they were sprinting, bursting through the crowd against the flow, stepping up off the road onto the pavement where there were fewer people. Bill pulled her low as they ran, slowing to the pace of the surrounding crowd as they passed the policemen at the end of the street who were standing on the inside of their car’s door frames surveying the crowd from above.

  And by some miracle they got past them, reaching the corner of the main road that led to Tower Bridge Tube station and spotting a Rolls-Royce which was parked up, its driver hidden by his newspaper, blissfully unaware that just two hundred yards away the tallest building in London was supposedly going up in flames.

  She watched Bill motioning downward with his hand and the Rolls’ electric window whirred down in response.

  ‘Finish early?’ the driver asked.

  Bill leant in and smashed the driver hard across the side of the face with his telescopic cosh. It stunned the man. He looked up at Bill as the cosh hit him on the temple, this time knocking him cold.

  Fagin got in the rear door and Bill pushed Red in alongside him then pulled the driver out of the car, got in and hit the accelerator, swerving out across the street into oncoming traffic, sideswiping a Ferrari and scattering socialites as he went.

  50

  DS Brownlow could see now that the auctioneer’s relief at not having to explain the expense of a helicopter flight while the building didn’t burn must have been short-lived. For the fact remained that there had been smoke without fire and that left a single question hanging tantalisingly in the air as the guards prised open the elevator doors with a crowbar.

  Was this just an elaborately planned hoax or a full-blown, balls-out heist?

  Brownlow had run down into the basement as soon as they’d identified Fagin in the crowd, leaving Bedwin outside to orchestrate the pursuit. He had not communicated this information to the auctioneer yet but he didn’t have to. The guy was old enough and smart enough to know that he’d been comprehensively mugged. His career hung in the balance and he was going to pieces.

  ‘Come on, come on …’

  The tension was killing Brownlow too. Standing here, peering into the darkness of the lift as the guards pulled back the doors and the auctioneer buckled under the strain.

  ‘Thank God,’ he gasped.

  Brownlow watched as the porters wheeled the trolley out of the lift and along the corridor to the vault.

  ‘Wait!’

  The sound of his own voice surprised him. Like something had leapt out of his mouth, a part of him that still cared and was inside the lift now staring at the floor. Forcing him down onto his knees, scrubbing in the dirt, placing faith in his hands, using them to pick up any differential in texture and temperature, something he should tell Bedwin. That when your eyes and ears played tricks on you, place your hands on the object and to hell with forensics.

  He looked up at the CCTV camera above him then turned towards the paintings and lifted the cover, listening to the sound the cloth made as it brushed over the corners of the frames. The auctioneer saw them first; Moll shredding rope, Moll dying of syphilis and finally Moll in her coffin, nothing untoward there. His relief was palpable. ‘Thank God. Get them back to the vault n—’

  ‘Hang on,’ Brownlow interrupted, leaning in closer, scrutinising the paintings. He was getting slow but his instincts were still sharp and he had seen the three tiny marks that the auctioneer had missed. The paintings were perfect in every way except one; where William Hogarth’s spidery signature should have been there was another sign-off, one that he recognised.

  TWIST

  Stepping back with his hands on his hips, wheezing for breath, Brownlow began to laugh. Twist had pulled the blinkers over the experts. The signatures on the originals were tiny and so were Twist’s graffiti tags, each located in the exact same spot as Hogarth’s were on the original paintings.

  He stepped past the fakes into half light, looking up at the ceiling and a tiny gap where the service hatch had not been fully shut. He pulled the trolley across the lift floor until it was directly beneath it and reached up to push the hatch open as one of the guards stepped forward to give him a leg up.

  It was dark in the elevator shaft and it took his eyes a few seconds to adapt, during which his gaze followed a service ladder which climbed its entire length, disappearing into the darkness hundreds of feet above him.

  ‘Torch,’ he said, hearing his knees crack in the silence as he knelt down to take one from the guard inside the lift.

  It was a powerful torch and its beam shot up the shaft, reaching a point of light one hundred metres up. He trained it on the ladder and began to ascend, gradually at first, then faster, as he sensed movement and zeroed in on a spider-like figure climbing fast with a silver tube strapped to his back and what looked like the back of a latex mask on his head.

  As if sensing that he was being watched the figure stopped and looked down, and Brownlow locked eyes with the boy called Twist and felt the mild elation sour into something like disappointment. He had given the boy the benefit of the doubt and released him but he had read him wrong. Shaking his head, watching the boy begin to climb fast up the ladder, he reached for his radio.

  ‘He’s in the lift shaft,’ he said.

  51

  He could not climb any faster. He was taking two rungs at a time, each footstep sending a hollow metallic clang ringing up into the void to return a half-second later as an echo. Like the bells ringing in the ears of a hunchback scaling a bell tower as the mob bayed for his blood in the streets below.

  He told himself not to panic. That Fagin’s assumption would prove to be correct. That the police would guess he would use the lift doors and then head down, not up, using one of the three stairwells which they would be watching like hawks, evacuating the building before working their way back up it, methodically, floor by floor.

  In the darkness the sound of the echo was intensified, carpeting the sound of steel twisting behind his back. The lift had already begun its ascent when he turned and saw the cables moving in opposing directions and he realised that Fagin had not counted on the man who was stood on top of the lift holding up the torch.

  It was the detective called Brownlow and
he was shaking his head from side to side. He didn’t look angry or bitter, just tired and old and sad. Twist broke eye contact first and turned back to the ladder, scrabbling now, up towards the next set of elevator doors. It was clear that Brownlow intended to take him now. That he would not shout down and tell the guy operating the lift to take his hand off the handle.

  Fifty metres, forty metres, thirty … the spotlight growing wider as Twist worked his jimmy hard into the crack between the doors. They didn’t budge and Twist could hear Brownlow’s voice now, clear, growing louder by the second.

  ‘It’s over, Oliver. Tell me to stop the lift.’

  Twist’s field of vision shrank. The torchlight in his eyes deliberate, trying to blind him. He got the fingers of his right hand into the crack but there was no sign of an automatic mechanism that would open or shut them once pressure was applied. Instead the doors held his fingers like a vice. Twenty, ten …

  Twist looked down at Brownlow.

  ‘My hand!’ he shouted down.

  But Brownlow didn’t flinch. He would not be fooled again. Twist looked back at the door and tried to get the jimmy back in. It slipped from his hand. He looked back and saw a look of fear spread across Brownlow’s face, then light flooding in through the gap between the doors and a pair of hands emerging, seizing him by the straps of his rucksack and pulling him through the foot-wide gap and out onto the fourteenth floor.

  Hands, Twist realised, that belonged to a uniformed policeman who now had him by the lapels as they tumbled backwards and hit the ground. Twist swept his own hands up and out to break his grip but the man was too strong and held him fast and Twist drew back his head to butt him, but froze. It was Dodge.

  Twist fell sideways off Dodge then pulled him to his feet and they ran together down the corridor to a right-hand bend. They tore round the corner and saw a policeman sprinting towards them and turned, then saw the lift doors open and two security guards waiting like sprinters in the blocks inside.

  Twist felt Dodge tug his rucksack back towards the policeman and they ran again, full tilt, straight at him and Twist saw at once what Dodge was doing. There was a pair of antique chairs halfway along the corridor and they hit them together, planting their inside feet on the chairs to get lift and sliding, their backs to the walls past the policeman.

  And then they were in the service stairs, taking four at a time, climbing higher up the tower in a race against the lift.

  * * *

  Bill spun the Rolls-Royce into a hard right on to Tooley Street, gunning the V12 engine to outstrip the police car on his tail. It was a Phantom, with an extended wheelbase and a kerb weight of over two and a half tons but he was throwing it about like a dodgem at a fairground.

  Red stared horrified as a black cab braked, swerving off and mounting the pavement as he pushed the Phantom blind round the outside of a number 47 bus. She looked back at Fagin, who was struggling to lock his seat belt.

  ‘What are you doing?!’ he yelled from the back seat. ‘This was never Plan B or even Plan C! It is imbecilic. Stop! Before you get us all killed!’

  But Bill was silent, focusing grimly on the rear end of a Golf, and Red closed her eyes as he accelerated into the back of it, nudging it once, twice, before the driver lost control, over-corrected, fishtailed then spun out, slamming sideways into an oncoming van.

  The lights of City Hall and Tower Bridge flashed past them on their left as they lurched onto the dual carriageway of Jamaica Road, heading for the Rotherhithe Tunnel. She turned and looked at Fagin. His face was chalk-white and he was trying to stop himself being flung around. He had one hand pushed against the central armrest and the other wedged up where the door met the roof.

  A second police car joined the first, pulling out suddenly from a side road, forcing Bill to slew wide out to his left. He burned rubber to correct his line then, spotting a gap in the central reservation, released the steering wheel, allowing the car’s momentum to carry them through it.

  The mouth of the tunnel appeared and she saw the orange glow of the ceiling lights and the sirens dropped to nothing as Bill roared into it, swerving violently to avoid oncoming traffic. She watched as he swerved too late, clipping a BMW 3 series which smacked into the side wall, flipped over and got hit twice by the two cars behind it.

  And then he put his foot down and they burst from the tunnel and the sirens were to their right as the police cars appeared once again. Red felt a huge pressure on her chest as Bill slammed on the brakes and she was squashed into the seat in front. As time slowed down she saw Bill smile for the first time, his head way back, fighting the G-force as the huge car dropped from seventy to thirty and he yanked on the handbrake and spun it in a perfect one-eighty, slamming into the side of an oncoming bus which stopped them dead.

  And then he hit the accelerator, so hard this time that she was thrown back against the seat and followed Fagin’s lead with the seat belt as Bill gave the cops the finger and re-entered the tunnel heading in the right direction.

  ‘Are you fucking crazy?!’

  It was the driver of the second car to hit the BMW. He was stood, trying to pull open the BMW’s passenger door. It had been squashed to half its original width by the twin impacts and there was a guy in the front seat looking bad. He was slumped forwards and he had blood running from a head wound.

  Bill slammed on the brakes and the great car skidded to a halt, turning thirty degrees. Red watched him get out of the car, march towards the guy and point his pistol at his face, forcing the guy to put his hands up and back away until he was on his knees facing the wall.

  Sikes then turned and motioned for them to get into the guy’s car, an old Passat, which only seemed to have a crushed bumper. She climbed into the back seat as Fagin got in beside her and then they were off again, leaving the carnage and the police cars behind them.

  * * *

  Twist and Dodge scrambled out onto the roof and raced along the edge of the building. Ninety-five storeys up, London was laid out beneath them like a circuit board. The ledge was not wide. Maybe about three feet and Twist was wondering where it was going to get them when Dodge climbed over the side and jumped out into mid-air.

  Twist heard a smashing sound behind him and he turned to see a fist in a black Kevlar glove punch out the remaining glass in a window. He ran forwards to the point where Dodge had jumped and looked down at his friend who was stood impatiently in a window cleaner’s cradle.

  Twist shook his head and climbed over the edge and jumped. It was a ten-foot drop and the cradle swung out wildly when he hit it, then lurched down as Dodge hit the button. He looked up to see the guard staring down off the edge of the roof at them.

  ‘Stop the cradle!’ the guard shouted. ‘Kill the power.’

  Twist watched the shadow of a second guard retreat from the glass inside as their descent continued until, five storeys lower, they stopped, a distance of at least two hundred metres above street level.

  ‘What now?’ Twist said, looking past Dodge to the policeman they had jumped over, smiling smugly at them through the glass.

  But Dodge was reaching into his rucksack, pulling out a smaller fabric pack which he handed to Twist.

  ‘Put it on,’ he said as he pulled out a second, drew out some straps and harnessed a parachute to his back.

  Twist felt the cradle beginning to wind back up again. It focused his mind, which had temporarily stopped at I don’t know how to do this. Then he looked over at Dodge who was grinning.

  ‘Sorry for getting you into this,’ he said, climbing up onto the edge of the cradle which tilted forwards as he stood upright, holding onto the cradle’s cord to steady himself.

  Twist pulled the pack onto his back and fastened the straps across his shoulders to another strap which fastened around his waist, then climbed up onto the edge and looked across at Dodge.

  ‘It’s easy,’ Dodge said, drawing out a toggle at the front of his pack. ‘You just pull this.’

  Twist found his own toggl
e and gripped it hard in his hand.

  ‘Can’t go through life trusting no one,’ he said.

  Then, as one, they stepped off the cradle and jumped.

  * * *

  Twist saw the dome of the nineteenth-century wharf-turned-shopping-emporium loom up at him. He looked down and saw fairy lights climbing the cast-iron pillars that supported the rectangular glass panels of the roof. He was descending too fast and had no control, trying to remember what instructions, apart from ‘pull this’, Dodge had given him, but losing his thoughts to the cold air and the fear.

  There was a flat stretch of roof before the dome about five metres across and he tugged hard on both handles and felt the parachute crumple above him and the roof rush up at him. He hit the ground hard and rolled, feeling the nylon cords of the parachute entangle him as the fabric caught the wind and lifted up like a kite, pulling him onto the glass panels.

  Snatching up the cord with his hands as the parachute began to drag him up the dome, he heard laughter from above him and he turned to see Dodge, tugging gently on his own handles, executing the perfect textbook landing, collapsing his chute with a quick flick of the forearms before it dragged him out onto the glass.

  ‘Well done, mate,’ Dodge said, reaching out with a knife to cut the cords so that his chute lofted up, caught the estuarine wind and sailed out across the river.

  Twist watched Dodge beckon him, then take off, gaining speed to a flat sprint to plant his foot and jump the gap to the next building but he didn’t follow him. He had his own move to make.

  52

  They parked in the shopping centre car park then walked up the ramp to the street. Fagin looked pale, crumpled but determined in his purple suit, leading them into the shadows on the dark side of the street to the steel ladder that climbed four storeys to the rendezvous.

 

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