by Stan Mason
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said warmly. ‘I appreciate all that you want to do for me. I trust you and I like you very much but you have to understand that any relationship at the present time is out of the question. I spent all those years with Elizabeth and now that she’s gone, and the way that she went, I feel numb. Certainly there’s not an ounce of romance left in me, that’s for sure.’
She placed her hand over his sincerely. ‘I know,’ she uttered quietly. ‘Believe me, I know.’
‘How can you?’ he enquired believing that an element of her sympathy was false and that she was patronising him.
‘I was once let down badly myself,’ she explained solemnly. ‘I’ve never revealed it to a soul before but I’ll tell it to you. I was engaged to a man for over a year and we eventually decided to get married. On the wedding day, I was dressed in a beautiful white gown waiting for him at the church but time went by and he didn’t show. Eventually after I left the church, extremely upset at being let down, he turned up at my house very drunk to tell me that he had married another woman the week before and he was sorry... very sorry. He said that he realised he had made a terrible mistake but he couldn’t do anything about it. Oh, yes, he loved me. He swore on the Bible to that, but in a moment of madness, he had married another woman in a Registry Office. Can you believe that? You’ll be able to understand how I felt. I had known him for over a year and that’s what he did to me. I felt just as numb as you feel now and it took me two years to get over it. Then both my parents died in an air crash when returning from holiday. I had to do something so I moved here to get away from all the memories and everyone I knew. Do you know, despite what he did, I was the one who felt ashamed. I don’t know why I felt that way but when you’re vulnerable all kinds of strange thoughts enter your mind and you tend to blame yourself for what happened even though it wasn’t your fault. It’s true. I considered that it was my fault that he ended up with another bride.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Waverley managed to say sympathetically. ‘So you really do understand.’
‘I told myself I would never get involved with another man. I was determined to remain an old maid, and then I met you.’ She paused to regain her breath for a moment. ‘You think that I’ve been helping you to get over your sadness. Well let me tell you, you’ve been helping me to get over mine. I think the key point was that you came to Spain with me. It won me over more than you could say. Yes... we argued but then everyone does. It wouldn’t do if everyone had the same views on everything.’
He shook his head slowly. ‘Well how about that,’ he said smoothly. ‘It just shows how you can never determine what goes on with another person. I read a story once called ‘The Train of Thoughts’ which was about people on a train eyeing each other up and down, making assumptions from how they looked and of the clothes they were wearing. Remarkably every single one got it entirely wrong.’
‘I don’t expect for one moment that you’ll have any feelings for me... not for quite a while,’ she continued, ‘but I’m willing to wait. I know it will grow when you get to know me better. I mean you know nothing about me.’
‘You can remedy that right now if you want to,’ he responded earnestly. ‘I have to admit I’ve been remiss. You know everything about me but I’ve never asked you about yourself. You can start right now if you wish.’
‘Okay,’ she went on after a brief hesitation. ‘Going back to your story about ‘The Train of Thoughts‘, what do you think my background to be? What do I represent to you about my past?’
He pursed his lips and stared directly at her. ‘Hm,’ he muttered. ‘I reckon you lived with your parents in Buckinghamshire. Your father was a teacher maybe a farmer, and you grew up there until he moved to London. He was reasonably well off and you might have been a pupil at a private school but you never went to university. How am I doing so far?’
‘Would you like to have another go?’ she asked him with a smile on her face.
‘Okay,’ he went on guardedly. ‘You did go to university and you were supported by your parents who had a great deal of money and property.’
‘Like the people in your story, you couldn’t be more wrong,’ she told him with a slight smile touching her lips.
‘Well it’s how I see you,’ he continued, slightly annoyed that he had missed the mark. ‘Perhaps you’d better enlighten me.’
She smiled at him before replying and took another sip of her wine. ‘I was born in the East End of London within the sound of Bow Bells. That makes me a Cockney. My father worked as a presser in a ladies garment factory earning a very low wage so we were always counting the pennies. I had a strong Cockney accent. I used to speak completely differently to the way I do now.’
‘Really!‘ he cut in, with an element of interest in his voice. ‘Let’s hear you say something in Cockney now.’
‘Very well,’ she told him with a distinct East End accent. ‘Ah took a butchers ‘ook, stared at ‘is boat race, saw ’is cherry pips an’ ’is mince pies.’
He stared at her in a puzzled fashion. ‘Wow!‘ he uttered in astonishment. ‘Would you mind translating?‘
‘It means I looked at his face, to see his lips and his eyes.’
‘Remarkable!’ he responded in awe. ‘And Cockneys are English I suppose. But do go on!’
‘I realised that if I whiled away my time and did nothing, I‘d follow in my parent’s footsteps to live a life in relative poverty, so I went to elocution classes to learn to speak properly. After that, I enrolled at evening classes to study law and, subsequently, I now work as a legal secretary in a law firm.’
‘Bully for you!’ he commended almost ready to applaud. ‘That’s some achievement from cherry pips to law. You certainly fooled me. I think you deserve a medal for your efforts to improve your lot in life.’
‘And then my parents, who had saved up for years to go abroad, died in an air crash.’
He screwed up his face in ostensible sympathy. ‘That’s bad luck,‘ he told her. ‘It must have been devastating for you.‘
Well,‘ she told him sadly. ‘I suppose we all have to go sometime. Death and taxes are inevitable they say. It’s when it happens suddenly that you’re left in limbo.‘
He hesitated for a moment, stared at her solemn face, and then came to a conclusion. ‘You know, I think I’ve made up my mind,’ he told, surprising himself at his decision. ‘I must be mad but I’m going to go through with the plan. If it works as easily as the dummy run today we’ll be home and dry.’
’That’s my boy!’ she echoed. ’Positive thinking at last. Can I have that in writing?’
He laughed at her joke, suddenly feeling elated at his decision although the balance shifted to concern him from another direction. It worried him that he might well be caught in the act and arrested. However, the elements of the plan were something to absorb his mind over the next few days and allow him to forget the iniquity of his wife.
’Where do we start?’ he asked, relying on her totally to command the operation.
’I’m going to the car to get the guillotine and some newspapers,‘ she told him. ‘What I’d like you to do is to look around for some plastic banknote wrappers provided by your bank.’
Without hesitation, she rose and left the house, returning shortly with some newspapers and the cutting machine.
‘I put the newspapers in water last night and dried them out with a fan heater,’ she informed him,
‘Why did you do that?’ he enquired with a puzzled expression on his face.
‘They dry hard together like a brick,’ she replied. ’Once cut by the guillotine and put in the plastic wrappers, no one can tell them from the real thing.’ She placed some of the newspapers below the blade, measuring them carefully to the size of proper banknotes, and brought it down sharply. Then she turned the newspapers around to reproduce an obl
ong for insertion into a plastic wrapper. ‘There,’ she uttered brightly examining the final product. ‘How many of these go into the big plastic box in the bank?’
‘Forty,’ he answered swiftly.
‘What with these wrapped up neatly and tucked into the large plastic box with forty of them, no one will be able to see that they’re not proper banknotes.‘
He stared at the newspaper cuttings in the small plastic wrapper and had to agree with her. No one would ever know the difference. ‘I could hide the plastic box with them underneath the rest of them each day,’ he uttered slowly.
‘Exactly,’ she responded happily. ‘Let’s keep everything in order. We’ll cut up forty of them now and you can place them in one of the large plastic boxes in the bank the next time you go down to the safe,’
‘What do I do with the money afterwards?’ he asked becoming concerned. ‘Do I bring it back here and hide it under the mattress or what? Only I can’t put it in my account at the bank.’
‘Don’t bring it back here,’ she advised him flatly. ‘You’ll need to go to a Swiss Bank and open a new account. You know the routine being a banker.’
‘There’s a problem,‘ he told her. ‘I can’t do that without proper identity and clearance. If I told them I was the manager of another bank, which I would have to after they checked me out, they could accuse me of money-laundering.’
‘Not with these,’ she responded brightly. She opened her bag and removed a number of documents. You’ll represent yourself as Jan de Vries, a Dutch second-hand arms dealer, which is the reason you deal with large amounts of money. Here’s your passport.’ She passed the documents to him and he stared at his photograph in the passport in disbelief.
‘Where did you get this picture?’ he asked.
‘From the photographs taken last year at the operatic society,’ she admitted. ‘Your business cards are there as well as three letters of commendation from various sources in Dubai, Israel and Pakistan. And here’s a letter giving you diplomatic immunity from the British Government.’
‘This is incredible,’ he said in awe. ‘You’re really professional! How did you manage to get these?’
‘Never mind,’ she told him blandly. ‘It’s all going to be worthwhile in the end. Each time you take money from your bank you’ll pay it into your account in the Swiss Bank.’
‘And then what?’
‘You’ll always be able to withdraw it under the name of de Vries.’
’I bet you’ve even bought a place for us to live somewhere in the Caribbean,’ he advanced prophetically.
’She smiled briefly. ’Don’t worry. We’ll be all right. I’ll see to that. All I ask is that you just carry out your part of the plan.’
’You realise I’m putting my life in your hands,’ he went on with concern.
‘That’s exactly where I want it,’ she returned lovingly.
He stared at her bleakly beginning to regret having agreed to participate in the robbery. ‘I don’t know what my mother’s going to say about this,’ he bleated.
‘I’ll deal with your mother, ‘ she told him bluntly.
‘I was afraid you’d say that but there’s one thing you haven’t thought out. What happens when the Swiss Bank contacts any of the people identified in these letters. When they check the credentials, the whole thing will fall apart.’
‘Ye of little faith,’ she responded sadly. ‘I’ve hired a first-class accommodation service with lots of telephone numbers and addresses. They’ll handle all the calls but they can’t give any information under the Data Protection Act. You’re completely covered.’
‘I see,’ he managed to say, admiring her thoroughness. ‘You’ve thought of everything except for one thing.‘
‘What’s that?‘ she asked with a worried expression on her face.
‘How do we find a gang of robbers?’
‘I told you I was brought up in the East End of London. We always had our own way of settling matters. The police were never involved. A vigilante group always dealt with problems that arose within the East End. They handled things with justice and mercy, unlike some of the things that occur within the confines of the law. I should know. I’m a legal secretary. As far as the vigilantes in the East End were concerned, there was always a mixture of people living there which the police could never cope with. They had their cultures and characteristics. Some were honest people, others were crooks or burglars, dockers, immigrants... I could go on. Our next door neighbour was a burglar who taught his son the same profession... if that‘s what you want to call it. The son’s name is Sam Everett. He and his father still live in the same house albeit it that it’s falling down in a slum area, Sam joined a group under the leadership of a man called Fred Wilson. I learned recently that the gang has upgraded their activities to robbing banks.’
‘Not the gang that was reported in the newspaper as having got away with just over two hundred pounds!’
‘That’s the one. We should have no trouble recruiting him for our purpose especially as you’ll let him have the codes and the keys to the bank’s safe.’
‘So you intend for me to visit Sam Everett and his gang to give them all the information.’
‘At the right time, yes. But you’ll need to be heavily disguised. There’s no point if they recognise you when they rob the bank. They’ll smell something’s wrong and they’ll leave immediately. But first you must open the account at the Swiss Bank. Remember you’re Jan de Vries from Amsterdam. Put on one of your famous accents. Most importantly of all... remove all the plastic bank wrappers before you get there, You don’t need to let them know where the money came from.’
‘The plastic bank wrappers!’ he repeated, recognising the wisdom of her words.
They raised their wine glasses clinking them lightly and smiled at each other. They were now in a serious partnership which heralded great success or total disaster. There were so many aspects which could go wrong and only one direction if it went right. Time would tell! Only time would tell!
Chapter Eleven
In his office at Prescot Bank, Crozier sat is his chair finishing off another one of his spurious poems. Inspiration was difficult to come by that day. The main reason was that he had been distracted by two telephone calls which diminished practically all of his poetic thoughts. After sitting with a blank sheet of paper in front of him for some fifteen minutes, his mind leaping from one fantasy to another, he decided finally to give up the task and he left his office, locking the door behind him for fear that someone might enter and steal his famous poems. He walked a short way along the corridor before meeting Abbott who was coming from the other direction.
‘A brief word with you, sir,’ began the junior man with concern showing on his face.
Crozier checked in his stride with annoyance. His mind was still on creating a new poem and he had little time for anyone who would distract him. ‘I’m busy, Abbott,’ he returned curtly, glancing at his wristwatch I have five minutes to get to a meeting. If its that important, walk with me to the lift.’
Abbott changed direction to relate the information in his possession. ‘I’ve discovered more about or friend Mr. Wayv...’
‘The senior manager turned on him sharply to interrupt him. ‘No!’ he said in a loud tone, looking up and down the corridor in case someone else overheard any part of the conversation. ‘No names... not here!’ he reproached. ‘Walls have ears! Wait until we meet in my office!’
‘When will that be?’ asked the younger man. He had been thinking about contacting Crozier all morning but realised that he had left it too late.
‘I don’t know,’ returned the senior man testily. ‘I don’t carry my diary around with me! Ring me to check!’
They arrived at the elevator and Abbott pressed the button to call the lift. It arrived almost instantly and he entered with C
rozier to face a woman who was also going down in the lift.
‘If I may say, sir...’ began Abbott as the elevator doors closed.
‘No you may not!’ snapped Crozier curtly. ‘What we have to say is private!’ He stared at the woman in the hope that his subordinate would refrain from continuing the conversation.
The woman stared back at them with an element of distaste showing on her face. ‘I’m not a person prejudiced by relationships between two men so ignore the fact that I’m here, although I do suggest that you discuss your relationship in private.’
Crozier inhaled deeply with equal disgust. ‘You don’t understand, madam,’ he started to say before she interrupted him.
’What’s there to understand,’ she enquired. ’Nature’s a strange animal. With some people it’s all a matter of gender. As I said, I’m not prejudiced. It’s all part of daily life.’
The senior manager began to fume and he glared at Abbot who stood quite still pretending that he was invisible. When the lift stopped, the woman stepped out and turned to them with a final comment.
‘Have a nice day together,’ she uttered before moving off to the exit.
Crozier turned to his junior with fury. ‘I ought to have you strung up, Abbott!’ he snarled. ‘You’re as useless as a refrigerator at the North Pole!’
‘I only wanted to tell you about Mr. Waverley,’ advanced the junior man.
‘You never learn do you, Abbott! I said no names, so what do you do, eh? I think you ought to consider another field of employment. Something where secrecy doesn’t matter. Or perhaps you’d be better off retuning to the branches as a cashier.’
Crozier pressed the control button in the elevator and Abbott watched him as the door closed and the lift went upwards. The subordinate stood in the hallway looking bleak for a moment before glancing at his wristwatch. It was the time of day when Waverley went to lunch and Abbott decided to take advantage of it. He climbed the stairs to the next floor and walked along the corridor hoping not to meet anyone. He soon arrived at the door to Waverley’s office, waiting outside for a moment to catch his breath, with his heart beating like a drum. As soon as his nerve began to hold, he knocked on the door and looked inside breathing a sigh of relief when he saw that Waverley had left.