by Tom Grass
And then the roof rose up at him and he hit it harder than anything he’d ever hit before. His left ankle buckled and he slipped out with it on that side, bouncing once, then spinning and turning to hit the roof again, this time face down, the gravel being driven deeper into his flesh as he used his hands like brake pads in his desperation, turning as he travelled, to see if Red was still with him.
But he could see nothing apart from a solitary figure standing on the rooftop opposite. He pulled himself up onto his feet, pain shooting up through his left ankle, and began to hobble back towards the edge. There was no sign of her, just Sikes standing training his pistol on him as he ran.
But Twist ignored the gun. It seemed irrelevant and he heard the crack as Sikes pulled the trigger. He kept running. He was only alive for one reason; Sikes had not been aiming at him, he’d been aiming low, aiming at Red.
He saw the tips of her fingers first, knuckles white as they gripped the plastic guttering. He skidded to a stop on his knees, then dropped flat and reached down and grabbed her by her collar, offering her his right hand. He saw the determination in her eyes and the muscles in her neck tighten as she let go with her right hand and snatched hold of his wrist.
He spread his legs, imagining his toes digging into its impermeable tar, and started to draw her to him, closer so that her breath was in his neck and he was able to reach lower, wrapping the waistband of her cargo pants around his clenched fist.
And then he heard a thud a couple of feet away and he felt Red shift her weight away from the point of impact. He heard the sound of hands scraping on the roof surface and he looked up, past his left shoulder and saw Sikes slipping back, winded, until he was forced to take hold of the plastic guttering.
And there he hung, suspended, staring at the wall, gulping for breath then turning sideways to look at Red, using his brute strength to pull himself up but then, once again, finding nothing on the flat roof surface that he could hold on to.
And as Twist redoubled his effort, trying desperately to pull Red up, he felt her panic, scrabbling with her feet as Sikes began to laugh as the absurdity of his position dawned on him. He was the victim of a tragic cliché.
He simply could not make it without her.
Twist watched Sikes slide his left hand along the guttering, six inches closer, then follow with the same arm. Twist tried to pull Red but they were too bound up in the mechanics of getting her up onto the roof now to attempt to move her sideways along its edge. And as Sikes slid his hands a second time, Twist saw they could not avoid him.
‘Hold on!’ Twist whispered in Red’s ear, as he felt Sikes’s fingers claw into the tendons of his left arm where the bicep met the bone.
‘I’ve got you now, boy,’ he said.
He felt Red slip, her right hand sliding back towards the edge as Twist took half of Sikes’s weight on top of hers.
‘No!’
He said it emphatically as he strained to hold on, feeling his feet slipping forwards an inch at a time towards the edge, knowing that if he released the fist from Red’s waist and struck at Sikes’s face Sikes would snatch for Red and he would lose her forever.
But then Red kicked out at Sikes’s groin and Twist saw the pain in the older man’s eyes, forcing him to let go of Twist’s arm and turn sideways to deflect her second kick onto his thigh.
Free of his weight, Twist pulled and Red ran her feet in small steps at the wall until her entire arms were on the roof and Twist was squirming, half on his feet, trying to stand so that he could pull her the rest of the way.
And then he saw fear flash in her eyes and he felt her weight almost treble and heard Sikes’s hollow laughter. His muscles burnt in his thighs and in his shoulders as he tugged and Red twisted and fought, until, slowly, Sikes’s grasp began to slip and with a horrifying cry he fell, hurtling down to the asphalt below.
55
Bermondsey took Brownlow back to the beginning. To a man called Barker who had drugged Brownlow’s grandmother’s Rizla, then drilled a hole in her bay window and passed a thin hollow tube through the hole, allowing him to open a wire noose and lasso then pull open the window latch.
Barker had been a specialist. It later emerged he’d cased the house two weeks before the robbery using a knocker whose day job involved checking out-of-warranty boilers for British Gas. While his grandmother was in the kitchen putting the kettle on, the nice man who’d jammed her boiler was upstairs photographing the silver which Barker then ran by his fence who confirmed that it was indeed a gilt silver cup commissioned by George IV to commemorate the opening of the Brighton Pavilion.
Barker’s mistake had been to carry out the robbery on a Thursday. Brownlow had spotted the logic immediately, based on his visits to Bermondsey Market as a child. In order to escape from his overbearing Rear Admiral father, Brownlow’s dad had taken him on long walks from his grandparents’ house in Greenwich, one mile west along the riverbank, to scour the market. Walks which, he’d recalled the Thursday night his mother had phoned to tell him his grandmother had been burgled, had only ever taken place on a Friday morning. The only day of the week the market opened.
So with his instincts bristling he had called in sick, arriving at H. T. Speyer’s superior silver antiques emporium when it had opened at nine the morning after the robbery. And there, after asking if Speyer had anything ‘special’, he was taken into a storeroom where Speyer had unlocked a mahogany cabinet and pulled out his grandmother’s gilt silver cup, offering him a ‘distressed purchase’ of just ten thousand pounds.
Brownlow smiled at the memory of the circular questions he’d asked Speyer regarding the cup’s provenance until, finally, he’d skinned his hand, shown his badge and watched Speyer buckle and confess to receiving it from a mysterious buyer at eleven p.m. in the car park of the Ferryman the night before.
It had taken minimal persuasion to lure Barker back with the offer of a second job and Brownlow recalled his disappointment when a grubby little man, as far from David Niven’s Pink Panther as could humanly be possible, had blown into his hanky, examined the contents then stepped into Speyer’s shop.
The rest of that Friday had been spent riding shotgun as Barker, who was a cabbie by day, had driven him around the hundreds of homes he’d burgled in a twenty-year career. It had been a glorious day. Recalled more fondly now than his wedding a year later, contradicting his parents’ concern that he had not followed his father to the Bar and culminating in the confession that got Barker seven years in Belmarsh and Brownlow a watching brief on Bermondsey.
And he was watching still, thirty years on, taking his ‘constitutional’ whenever he needed a boost. Which, he reflected, he needed more than ever this dark January morning after his ailing career had slipped on a hunch, fallen badly and broken its hip.
He had grown to know them all. The snipes, the fences and the Lovejoys who handed their trades down like a curse to the next generation, all nodding, smiling as they texted blindly beneath their covers to warn their accomplices that ‘The Godfather’ was doing his rounds. And prevention not cure had been his sermon this morning, preached sideways to Bedwin whose only vice was loyalty after the gamble on the boy had backfired and left their budget vulnerable.
It was to Bedwin Brownlow turned now as she tugged at his sleeve. He had no idea how long his phone had been ringing. It was only a matter of time before one of the bully boys in CID caught wind of his slight deafness and used it to scalp him and steal his job.
He raised the device to his ear without checking the screen to see who was calling, but he recognised it immediately. It was the boy called Twist who was the subject of a nationwide manhunt for his part in a string of successful art heists. Hunted not only by the police but by his crew’s former paymaster and every two-bit Russian hood this side of Vladivostok who had, like the recently deceased William Sikes, sworn fealty to one Arkady Rodchenko, known by his friends in Interpol as ‘The Archangel’.
‘I guess you heard about the reward?’ Bro
wnlow asked, listening carefully to what the boy was telling him before making his proposal.
There was a pause as the boy Twist took time to reflect upon the practicalities of Brownlow’s suggestion that the busy thoroughfare of St Pancras International was as good a place as any for an old-school switcheroo.
‘Is there anything in particular you’re going to need?’ Brownlow asked, waiting for what must have been a minute before Twist said:
‘One million pounds and a brown Adidas bag.’
56
It was brown and it was in a retro style. Brownlow hadn’t wanted to get into semantics with the stallholder. It had a big Adidas sign on both sides and it had been stitched well enough. The only problem he was having was with the strap. The bag weighed about twenty pounds and it cut into his shoulder blade as he came up out of the Tube station.
That was the second thing, after the bag. He’d get the word ten minutes before the RV and he’d be able to reach it in ten minutes from his ‘home base’ which he’d taken to mean Scotland Yard. The rest had sounded a lot like all the shows the boy must have seen on TV. Any sign of company and the deal would be off. He’d travel overseas with the paintings.
Where? Brownlow had wanted to ask. And what kind of price would he expect to get for them with Interpol and the Russian mob breathing down his neck?
He fished in his pocket as he crossed the concourse to the men’s toilet. There was a sign where the coin slot should have been. It read Out Of Order but there was a stumpy Latin American-looking woman with red blotches around her eyes sat on a stool behind the turnstile chewing on something, staring blankly down into a wicker basket in front of her which had some coins in it.
Brownlow raised his hand but she didn’t look up. He tapped the flat steel top of the turnstile a few times but still no response. He sighed, turning to look at the clock in the middle of the concourse. It was quarter to three. He had fifteen minutes to get into the café on the far side of the barrier where the ramp led down to the Eurostar. Not enough time to be playing games with this old bag.
‘Special Branch,’ he said, stepping up to the turnstile. ‘Open this gate or I’ll have you deported.’
The woman looked up and opened her mouth. She had something in there that had maybe once been alive. She stood up and Brownlow kept his eyes on her as he passed to her left into the men’s toilet. At least she kept the place empty, he thought, pushing open the first cubicle door he came to.
The money was in fifties, stacked in thousand-pound bundles. Two hundred bundles, just like the reward said, payable by the insurance company to anyone with information that led to the recovery of the three Hogarths stolen during the Shard heist.
He was back on the concourse within sixty seconds and in the queue for the Eurostar within a hundred and twenty. He had to hand it to the boy, it was a high-stakes game and he’d played a pretty cool hand. But to run he needed money. And that made him vulnerable, which was why Brownlow had to catch him now, before someone else did.
He put the Adidas bag on the roller pins and watched the man in front’s black satchel disappear along the conveyor belt. He was wearing a Homburg and square-framed glasses and Brownlow thought he might be Elvis Costello but then a blonde woman pushed in front of him and he turned to complain and Brownlow saw that he was a rabbi.
‘I’m going to miss my train. Do you mind? Thank you,’ she said, no apology, as if everyone else in the queue wasn’t also rushing for the 15:10.
He watched as she kicked off her heels and placed them in a grey box on the conveyor belt, then put her folded beige mackintosh into a separate box and stepped through the body scanner. Brownlow thought she must be a looker. The security guard gave her a double take when she walked past him to collect her stuff.
Brownlow looked back at his bag, telling himself not to lose sight of the money. He’d called ahead to each of the main stations’ heads of security to ensure there was no time lost accounting for the money and he smiled at the X-ray operator as his bag sailed through without issue.
But an alarm was still ringing. He looked up at the body scanner as he struggled with the laces on his left shoe. It was the rabbi. He was complaining as the gate guard raised his hands in the air telling him it was standard procedure at all international crossings now, land, sea or air.
A moment passed. Brownlow checked the time on his mobile. He was still good. Five minutes to the RV. The gate guard touched the rabbi’s pocket and he watched the rabbi look pleasantly surprised to find some small change in his jacket. Then it was Brownlow’s turn. He had planned ahead and was wearing the slightly too tight corduroys that didn’t need a belt and he sailed through without so much as a whisper.
He bought himself a coffee, in position at last, in the faux French café halfway down the walkway to the 15:10 train with sixty seconds still on the clock to the initial RV at 15:00 hours.
‘See anyone you recognise?’
It was Bedwin in his right ear.
‘Not yet …’ he replied, checking, scanning to his left and spotting the plain-clothes ‘help’ HR had sent them. He was in W.H.Smith pretending to read but kept looking up, moving his head from bag to bag then returning to the book, flicking through the pages like he was cross-referencing rare tropical birds. Obvious but OK if he’d actually seen the bag he was looking for.
A brown Adidas bag which was identical to Brownlow’s, travelling down the concourse beneath the arm of an emo kid wearing Ray-Ban aviators and dyed black shoulder-length hair tucked in beneath a baseball cap.
Brownlow stood up and clutched his identical bag, spilling coffee across the table as the emo kid turned and smiled, tilting his shades forwards, to reveal his true identity but also to send a message, by staring past Brownlow, at the café walls behind him.
Brownlow felt the first flush of an anxiety attack. He pushed himself up and out of the chair again and turned to see a sign which read: Support HTO – Exhibition Of Work By Local Artists.
Terrible pictures were interspersed with those of the Eiffel Tower. The first was right above his head. It was a picture of a woman with red rings round her eyes sitting on a stool behind a pair of turnstiles with what looked like an ice cream whip for hair …
He moved along the wall, walking his hands above the heads of a couple dining, past a black and white photograph shot from the top of the Eiffel Tower, until he reached the corner and then turned left … and saw Moll Hackabout arriving in London, fresh-faced, for the first time.
And then Brownlow was moving faster, walking his hands from one picture to the next, knocking a bottle of Coke to the floor and bumping into a waitress, until he found the second and then the third and then he turned and looked back for Twist.
But the boy had vanished into the rush of passengers who were surging down the concourse to make the 15:10. He checked his wrist and watched five seconds tick away to the moment of departure, his mind racing as the answer hit like someone had hurled a sweat-soaked sock across the café at him.
The bag!
His face contorted in anguish as he fumbled with the zipper until his hand was inside clutching a wad of newspaper sheets cut perfectly to size.
Brownlow felt his knees give way and the waitress put her arm on his and helped him into a chair. He had to think but first he had to square away what must look like dementia. He looked up and saw the manager staring suspiciously from behind the counter, enjoying the look of surprise then apology as he held up his police badge. He was using it too much today and he didn’t like it. It was a sign he was losing his edge.
He crossed his hands together, closed his eyes and let his mind go to work reconstructing the details of his walk from the toilet to the café, like a sceptic groping in the dark to expose the magic trick that had just humiliated him.
But he had a trick of his own, a way of reconstructing a crime scene after he had left it, stepping into it, exploring all its dimensions like a movie director stepping onto the set he had worked with his art direct
or to create. Except this time it was different. He wasn’t just the dispassionate observer revisiting the crime after the fact but the victim, and it took an act of will to step out of the role and see the big picture.
To see the face of the unfeasibly blonde woman from the front as she pushed past the rabbi in the Homburg. And recognise it as the face of Nancy. The girl in the gang, listening to her apologise again, in a half-arsed way to the rabbi as she slid past him, her right hand tracing the contours of his stomach, dropping some coins into his pocket as he puffed up in protest.
And then he pulled back from the scene, watching her step through the metal detector and look back and wait for her coat as it rolled down off the rollers on the far side of the X-ray. Then the camera was up on a crane, looking down from above as, at that exact same moment his Adidas bag full of money was passing beneath the X-ray and the rabbi was stepping into the body scanner and triggering the alarm.
And then the camera returned to its original position, in her face, up close and personal, capturing the intensity of her eyes as she tried to act casual, delaying just two seconds until his bag rolled out from the X-ray before picking up her coat, to reveal an identical Adidas bag beneath it, then reaching to the left, picking up his and turning to walk quickly away towards the 15:10 with a fat grin on her face.
‘Any sign of the paintings?’ Bedwin asked.
Brownlow looked up, blinking. She was stood in front of him, following his finger which he raised and pointed over his shoulder at the wall of the café behind him.
57
The laptop screen was catching the sunlight that was flooding in through the window, over the tops of the buildings across the street and bouncing off the mirror on the wall behind the bar. Pausing for thought, she watched as he picked up two menus and used them to shield the screen on both sides.
‘Shh,’ he told her. ‘It’s starting.’