by Guy Ware
I had heard my father talk about the farm before, how things were before the war, about granddad and granddad’s pigs that weren’t really his, they were Leary’s. But this was the first I’d heard about a man with a suit and a car.
“So how come you’re not an auctioneer?”
“Oh, you know. Your granddad didn’t want me to have anything to do with animals. He said he’d spent his life covered in pig shit – pardon me – and I wasn’t going to do the same. So I went to college, and spent my life covered in oil instead.” He laughed, reaching up to put his hand on my shoulder as he spoke. “So come on. Who do you want to be like?”
I tried, but I couldn’t think of anyone. After a while I said, “There’s you, of course.”
He pretended to cuff me round the ear. “You can do better than that.”
I shook my head. He was trying, I knew; but, really: no. There was no one.
“Who do you want to beat, then? Who do you look at and think: I could do better than that?”
There was no one.
“Oh, well.”
Dad picked up the watering can and pointed to the half-finished row of potatoes, as if to say they wouldn’t bank themselves.
The office door opened again and DC Moody said, “Karen said to come straight in.”
“Did she offer you a coffee?”
Moody turned the second uncomfortable chair around and straddled it, crossing her arms and leaning on the back. “I don’t drink coffee.”
Bernie said, “No wonder they’re drumming you out of the force.”
“It’s bad for the reflexes.”
Rachel Moody was taller than Bernie – which wasn’t that unusual, even for a woman – and about half as wide. When she walked, she swung her shoulders, not her hips. Her hair was black and cropped close to her head; even so, the strawberry blonde roots showed. She said, “Hey, Bern.” And when he looked across at her she said, “It makes your trigger finger twitch.”
She was looking at Bernie, but she was talking to me. I said, “So what have we got?”
She turned to face me. Her eyes were a metallic blue I always found disconcerting. She said, “Are we not going to talk about what just happened?”
“I am talking about it.”
“We discharged our firearms, sir. You and me. One apiece.”
“And I’m asking you what we got for it.”
I forced myself to keep looking into those blue eyes until she said, “You’re a harder bastard than I thought.”
I wasn’t, and she must have known it.
She said, “Twenty-two four hundred.”
“That’s it?”
“Plus Bernie got us a bracelet, three necklaces and four watches – a Tissot, two Seikos, one Swatch. None of it worth a thing. Plus seventy-four pounds eighty-six in change.”
Bernie said, “Shit.”
Moody said, “It’s more than anyone else here’s going to earn today.”
“And a lot less than they’ll earn over thirty years.”
Thirty years was the kind of time we were looking at.
At the start, last September, there’d been forty-six members of the Outplacement Network. HR broke us up into sixes and sevens, and hired an outplacement coach to facilitate our first meeting. After that we were on our own. DC Moody sat right opposite the coach in the circle of chairs he’d laid out. I sat between the coach and a man from Payroll with two missing fingers and a stammer. Bernie was at nine o’clock, between a couple of uniforms. Apart from the Payroll guy, I hadn’t met any of them; from the way they acted when they arrived, I guessed none of them knew each other either. Moody crossed her arms and put her right foot up on her left knee. She wore Doc Martens – not the shoes so many uniforms wore, but eighteen-hole cherry reds – and I noticed they were new, the patterned soles not yet worn smooth, the leather’s shine lacking any real depth. When the coach asked us to introduce ourselves and say a word or two about what we hoped to get out of the network, she said, “This is such bullshit.” The coach asked her to explain, and she said she wasn’t supposed to be there. She’d made detective just last year and was already getting results. There had been some fuck-up in Personnel, because there was no way it was supposed to be her coming to this bullshit network. The coach stepped over to a flipchart in the corner of the room. He lifted a couple of sheets over the back and drew a diagram with a fat blue marker pen. He said, “Kubler-Ross’ five stages of bereavement start with denial.”
“No they don’t,” said Bernie.
I was the only one who laughed.
The next time, when it was obvious there’d been no clerical mistake and her name was definitely still on the list, Moody said it was because she was a woman. There was a short silence while the rest of us looked at each other, then one of the uniforms said, “But we’re all men, detective.”
“Yeah. And you’re getting chopped because you’re crap, or past it. No offence. For me it’s because I’m too good – and a woman, and young. They can’t handle it.”
The man from Payroll said, “That’s b-b-b-bollocks.” It was the only thing he said throughout the morning; he didn’t come to meetings after that.
Bernie said, “Suppose you’re right – what difference would it make?”
By then Moody had already had her first individual session with the outplacement coach, a session that apparently lasted rather less than the allotted ninety minutes. She said, “Don’t get all fucking coach-y with me.”
“You’re still out of a job.”
“And you’re still a wanker.”
I found myself signalling for calm, raising my hands and lowering them together. Doing my best to imitate the coach’s slight adenoidal hum, I said, “How does having DC Moody call you a “wanker” make you feel, DI Jenks?”
“Horny.”
It wasn’t the answer anyone expected, and that’s what made us laugh. Moody said he was disgusting and just proved her point. The uniform who hadn’t spoken before said even he thought Bernie was out of order, but after that the meeting went much better.
When I turned up for the third session, at the start of October, there were still six chairs in a circle, but it looked like Bernie and I would be the only ones attending. Bernie obviously hadn’t shaved for a couple of days, and I wondered if the stress was getting to him after all. While we waited, he said he’d pulled DC Moody’s personnel file. He waited for me to ask what was in it so he could answer:
“She’s a mite over-enthusiastic, if you know what I mean. Watched a bit too much TV.”
“Don’t you all?”
“Maybe, but for some it’s just a matter of time before they do something stupid. All in the name of justice, of course. Moody’s one of them. Keen on martial arts and firearms training. Not too keen on record-keeping.”
Bernie leaned back in his chair, locked his fingers and put his hands on his head, palms up. Under his arms the seams of his shirt were yellow.
Then DC Moody turned up for the meeting after all and the three of us talked about what we might do when the axe fell. That was when Bernie made the joke about robbing banks. As far as I know, he never mentioned the file to Moody, because the conversation took a different turn. I said: you can’t rob a bank on charm and personality, and Moody asked what I was on about. I explained it was what Willie Sutton said: when he was going to rob a bank he always took a pistol or a Tommy gun. “He never shot anyone, though. He robbed a hundred banks and never shot a soul. They say he never robbed a bank if a baby cried or a woman screamed.”
Moody said, “That’s just stupid.”
It also wasn’t true, I knew, if only because Sutton’s MO was to take control of a bank half an hour before opening time. He’d be gone before the public ever turned up. It was just something people said because, for a while, Sutton was a hero.
Moody said if she was
going to get the guns, she was going to get ammo, too. We didn’t have to shoot anyone, but we had to know we could. And would. Otherwise, what was the point?
Willie Sutton died in 1980. When a journalist asked, “Why do you rob banks?” he was supposed to have said: “Because that’s where the money is.” But he never did. He never said it; the journalist made it up. In the end, though, it made no difference: when he wrote his autobiography, that’s what he had to call it – Where the money was. He had no choice.
After that, we moved the meetings to my office, because I had an office, which was rare. Money is power, even when it isn’t your money, and I’d inherited some of the trappings from the days when Likker did the job. Before he moved up; before he retired and died. When I leave they’re going to take the office out, and squeeze in a few more open plan workstations.
Moody said it wouldn’t be hard. It would just take cash. By now our conversations really had taken a different turn. I said I’d take care of that. I didn’t want to know who Moody knew. It made me uneasy when I couldn’t do everything myself, but I knew that if I wanted guns at all – and by then I knew I did – then Moody was my best bet. The kind of deal she would have done with the kind of people she shouldn’t have been doing deals with – the very reason she was here in the Losers Support Group in the first place – was just exactly what we needed.
“So what do you want?”
What I really wanted was a Tommy gun. But I needed to frighten people, not make them think I was an actor.
Moody said, “MAC-10? TEC-9s? They’re pretty popular these days. And cheap.”
“We don’t want cheap.”
“No?”
I said, “If we’re going to do this, DC Moody, we’re going to do it properly, with style. We don’t want to look like crack heads. We want class. When we’re in a bank we need people to feel we’re in control, that we know what we’re doing. That way they’ll do what they’re told.”
“You hope.”
“Basic psychology.”
I’d read it in Willie Sutton’s book.
“Class costs.”
“Of course. But the initial stake is mine.”
She said she’d see what she could do. But, she said, if she was getting guns, she was getting ammo, no two ways about it. Anything else was just stupid.
Bernie said, “I can’t shoot anyone.”
“We’re not shooting anyone.”
“I can’t.”
“But we might want to put a bullet in the ceiling,” Moody said. “Just to get their attention.”
At the time, I could see the sense in that.
Now, in my office, Bernie had pushed back the heavy chair. He was up on his feet saying: “Go where the money is. That’s what you said.”
I stood up, too, putting one hand on the small of my back to help me straighten up. The main problem in robbing banks wasn’t the alarms or the security guards or the strength of the vaults, it was that you can’t do it alone. It takes at least two other people, and sooner or later, one of those two will let you down. Willie Sutton said that, too. You involve yourself with a very low grade of person when you become a thief. Out of my office window, a long way down, I could see the van we’d used, parked alongside a couple of others in a car park mostly full of ordinary, civilian cars. I turned back to Bernie. “That’s right, I did.”
“So where’s the money?”
Moody said, “It’s in the van.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Sutton never said banks were where the money was. He said he robbed banks because he enjoyed it. He loved it. So he kept doing it, even when it made no sense. He had no choice, but at least he knew it.
I said, “I know, Bernie. Willie Sutton said –”
“You know what? Fuck Willie Sutton. I read the book you gave me. Willie Sutton got 126 years.”
“At least he was alive.”
“Do you ever ask yourself why nobody else robs banks these days, Bill? Do you?”
I tried to answer, but Bernie didn’t let me. “And don’t give me that crap about how no one’s got the dedication, or the skill, any more. How they’re not prepared to work. And it’s not because the security systems are better, either. Is it? Is it, Bill?”
This time I wasn’t going to even try to answer. Bernie had to have his rant. It was what he did, the way he coped. Just as I planned the next job.
Bernie said, “Nobody else is stupid enough to rob banks, because Willie-bastard-Sutton was wrong. Maybe he was right once, but he’s wrong now. There’s no money in banks. No real money. Look at your payslip, Bill. It’s all electronic transfers and direct debits. There is no fucking money.”
We stared at each other, Moody the only one still sitting.
I said, “The thing is – it was never about the money anyway. That’s what Willie Sutton really said. It’s about the craft. About doing it right. He said, The money was the chips, that’s all.”
Bernie shook his head. “Two women died for chips?”
I didn’t answer.
Moody had been letting us get on with it. It was what men do. But now she looked up from her chair at the two of us, squaring off against each other.
She said, “What women? Who’s dead?”
4
AT THAT POINT nobody in the public area of the bank, including even the remaining gunmen, knew whether there had been one person in the interview room who had been wounded and then put out of her misery by the second gunman, or two, one of whom had been traumatised by the sight of the other being shot and had screamed and then wailed/keened in horror and fear before being shot herself in an attempt by the second gunman to reduce the level of noise, and possibly the tension and stress being experienced by the people who could hear that noise. If anyone had asked me at the time, given my training and experience, I would have opted for the simpler scenario of there being one person – probably a woman, given the pitch of the screaming/wailing/keening – who had been hit and presumably horribly injured by the first, stray bullet, and that the screaming was in response to her extreme pain and possibly also shock and confusion, the woman having been shot in a room that contained nobody else and certainly nobody with a gun. An alternative, more complex, scenario was, however, certainly conceivable. In this scenario, the screaming was the equally understandable response of a bank customer to the shock of seeing someone who had, just a moment before, been advising the hypothetical screamer about the pros and cons of offsetting her mortgage debt against resources in her other accounts and convincing her that it was the right product for her, holding out a pen and waiting for her to sign, and mentally perhaps spending the commission she would receive as a result of that signature, and who was now, without any prior warning or threat or opportunity to lay down on the floor and avoid injury, quite suddenly flung sideways, with the right side of her face, as the screamer looked at it, intact while the left seemed to burst and flower and spread itself across the table, and across the carpet and walls of the small interview room, and possibly across the screamer herself, which would, in all likelihood, add to the fear and trauma involved, without actually increasing the pain or suffering of the already dead bank employee. Such a scenario should, I know, only be considered if and when the more straightforward option has been disproved or discounted. If, for example, there had actually been two distinct screams issuing from different screamers, however briefly, one in extreme pain, the other in fear and horror at the traumatic sight confronting her. Or if, later, after the gunmen had left but before the emergency services arrived, I had managed to look into the interview room for myself and see not one but two corpses with obvious and unmistakable head wounds, as perhaps I should have done. At the time, however, I was preoccupied with the continuing stand-off between the first gunman and the older, professor-type man who was still, at this point, standing, walking stick pressed between his arm
and his body, tucking his still empty wallet – despite his unhurried calm he had not, in fact, withdrawn any actual cash from the cash machine – back into the inside pocket of his tweed jacket and looking at the gunman with an expression of mild interest or curiosity. Because of the helmet, I could not see the gunman’s face, just his eyes and his mouth, which was narrow, as if he were pressing his lips together tightly.
I can see D leaning way back in his chair, sliding down until he is almost horizontal, then hauling himself up like a walrus at the water’s edge, making sure, even while I read, that we all know he’s here, and that he’s bored. He fiddles with the memory stick, spinning it like a top until Theo catches his eye. D plonks his finger down heavily. The memory stick hits it and stops spinning and instead skids across the table towards Theo, who picks it up and passes it to me to pass back to D without a word, which I do.
The second gunman, the one who had fired the second shot, now came back into the public area of the bank, no longer wearing a balaclava. It was only at this point that I realised that the second gunman was in fact a woman – having previously been misled by her height and bulky, shapeless clothing, including heavy boots and the thick stab-proof Kevlar jacket; by the balaclava itself; and, of course, by years of cultural conditioning and straightforward factual reporting which led me to assume that an armed person who robbed banks and possibly shot another person simply to reduce the noise that person was making was in all probability a man; but I had been wrong. I saw then that the robber’s gait, despite the heavy boots and a certain self-conscious swagger, was that of a woman. And her face – high, wide cheekbones, pale eyebrows and freckles that seemed at odds with her dark, cropped hair – was without doubt that of a woman, who said, It’s OK. Let’s get on with it. The hands on her sub-machine gun were red with blood; there was blood on her stab-jacket and blood on her face.