The Man Who Hated Banks & Other Mysteries

by Michael Gilbert

  Superintendent Benjamin did not often laugh. Now his long face was wrinkled into folds of genuine merriment.

  “I was thinking,” he said, “that the Borners have—what’s the legal word?—surrendered to their bail.”

  “They’ve surrendered to their bail, all right,” said Dory. He thought of them as he had left them ten minutes before: Curly still unconscious, being worked on by the police doctor; the other four, white-faced, jumpy even when the cell doors had shut on them.

  “Do you think we ought to tell Whitcomb?”

  Dory said something uncomplimentary about the Stipendiary Magistrate and went over again to look at the crowd.

  “Count your blessings,” said Benjamin. “If we can get through without any more broken heads, we’ll come out the right side of the ledger. Think of the evidence those boys are going to give after tonight.”

  Dory said, “I fancy they’re moving.”

  “Moving?” said Benjamin. “They’re running away.”

  There was a disturbance at the mouth of the street. More than a disturbance, a turmoil.

  The crowd, which had already started to thin out, was thrown back on itself, as a stream is thrown when it meets a more powerful current. Men moved back on either side, leaving a clear lane in the middle. And down the lane was advancing—

  “Good God,” said Benjamin. He leaned forward and jerked the window open.

  It was hardly Petrella’s fault that his long, black hair should have been flattened by the rain over his skull, or that his face, under the neon light, should have taken on a peculiar bluish-white tinge.

  Benjamin took a grip of himself. He reminded himself of the unlikelihood – indeed, the impropriety – of the ghost of a Detective Inspector revisiting his old station; and he jumped for the stairs, ran down, and pushed through the crowd.

  “Open the door,” he said to the station sergeant.

  “What about them outside?”

  “I don’t think we shall have much trouble with them now. Help me with these bolts.”

  Petrella advanced diffidently into a hushed room. “Good evening, sir,” he said. “Good evening, Sergeant. What’s up?” He gazed in blank astonishment at the dozen and more uniformed men sitting round on benches. “Why the reception committee?”

  “You’d better come upstairs,” said Benjamin. And to the Sergeant, “You can send ’em all home, except normal duty men.”

  Upstairs Petrella found Chief Superintendent Dory lighting a cigarette. He observed that he had a split ear and a black eye.

  “Now that you are back,” said Dory grimly, “perhaps you’ll be good enough to explain what you’ve been up to.”

  But Petrella, for once, was unperturbed. He was triple-armed in his own unassailable rectitude.

  “I don’t know what’s been going on around here,” he said. “But it can’t be anything to do with me. I’ve been on holiday.”

  Argosy, September 1959.

  THE MAN WHO HATED BANKS

  THE DRILL SCREAMED AS IT BIT into the tough metal. The operator, a small man with a sad monkey-face, hummed to himself as he worked. It was the last of eight holes which he was boring, four on either side of the hinge of the strongroom.

  When he had finished the drilling, and had checked, with a thermometer, that the surrounding metal had returned to a safe temperature, he filled each of the holes with Polar Ammon gelatine dynamite, tamping the putty-like stuff delicately home with the blunt end of a silver pencil; then he used the sharp end to bore a hole in the middle deep enough to take the tube of the copper electric detonator with its plastic-covered lead of tinned iron.

  When all the detonators were in, he collected the eight ends, bared them, twisted them together, and covered the joint with insulating tape. Then he collected a pile of old Army blankets and helped now by a second man, draped them from wires which had already been fixed across the door.

  Both men retreated to the guard-door at the entrance of the strongroom lobby. Two of the bars had been cut out. They squeezed through the gaps, dragging the plastic-covered lead behind them.

  In the farthest corner of the outer lobby stood an ordinary six-volt car battery. The first man separated the lead wires and twisted one of them round the negative terminal. Both men squatted down, backs against the wall, heads bent forward.

  Then the second wire, carefully held in a rubber-gloved hand, was laid on the positive terminal. The shockwave of the explosion pinned them against the wall.

  The third man, standing in the doorway of a shop outside, heard the crump of the explosion and swore softly to himself. The next ten minutes were going to be the most difficult.

  A newsagent, sleeping four houses away on the opposite side of the street, sat up in bed, and said, “Cor, what was that? Have they declared war?”

  His wife said “Wassup?”

  “Sounded like a bomb.”

  “So what?” said his wife. “It hasn’t hit us.” She dragged him down into bed again.

  Eight minutes. Nine minutes. Ten minutes. Eleven minutes. What the hell are they playing at? Twelve minutes.

  The door of the shop opened and two men appeared. Both had heavy satchels slung over their shoulders. One carried the drill, another had the electric cutter which had been used to saw through the bars. The third man relieved them of drill and cutter and set off at a brisk pace up the street to where the car was parked. Not a word had been spoken from first to last.

  Police Constable Owens, of the Gravesend Police, saw the car nosing into the street. He thought it odd that it should have no lights on, and held up a hand to stop it.

  The car accelerated. Owens jumped, slipped, and fell into the gutter. He picked himself up in time to see the car corner and disappear.

  Police Constable Owens limped to the nearest Police Box.

  A pigeon took off from Boadicea’s helmet and went into a power dive. It was aimed at the head of a young man with a brown face and black hair, who had just crossed Westminster Bridge. Detective Inspector Patrick Petrella raised his arm. The pigeon executed a side-slip and volplaned off up into a tree. Petrella regarded the pigeon without malice. It was a beautiful day. It was spring. He was starting a new job.

  The message which had reached him at Gabriel Street Police Station had not been explicit, but he guessed that his spell of duty in South London was over. It had spanned three years; and he had enjoyed most of it, but three years in one place was enough.

  He pushed his hat a little farther back on his head, and swung in under the Archway and up the three shallow steps into the main building of New Scotland Yard.

  The private secretary, a serious young man in horn-rimmed glasses, inspected him as he came into the ante-room, and then said, “The A.C.’s ready for you. Will you go in?” Petrella found himself straightening his shoulders as he marched by the inner door into the presence of Sir Wilfred Romer, Assistant Commissioner in charge of the Criminal Investigation Branch of the Metropolitan Police, and – in Petrella’s humble opinion – the greatest thief-catcher since Wensley.

  “Sit down,” said Romer. “You know Superintendent Baldwin, I think.”

  Petrella nodded to Superintendent Baldwin, big, red-faced, conscientiously ferocious, known to everyone from the newest recruit upwards as Baldy.

  Romer said, “I’m forming a new department. It’ll be known as C12. And, broadly speaking”—here his face split in a wintry smile—“you’re the department.”

  Petrella managed to smile back.

  “You’ll have two or three people to help you, but the smaller you keep it, the happier I’ll be. First, because we haven’t got many spare hands – secondly, because smallness means secrecy. Your first job will be the collection and analysis of information.”

  As Romer spoke, an alphabetical index of subjects, from Abortion to Zionism upon which this remarkable man might be seeking information, flipped across Petrella’s aroused imagination.

  “On bank robberies,” concluded Romer.

&nb
sp; “Yes, sir,” said Petrella. “Bank robbery.”

  “Not bank robbery – in general. It’s a particular series of bank robberies that’s getting under our skin. Never mind the details now. You’ll get those from Baldwin. What I wanted to tell you was this. There’s one thing we’re quite certain of: there’s an organiser. I want him put away. That’s your second job.”

  Back in his own office, Baldwin filled in a few details.

  “The bumph’s in these folders,” he said. “It’ll take you a day or two to wade through it all. It goes back about seven years. We didn’t know that there was any link up, not at first. The actual jobs are done by different outfits. All pro stuff. Chick Selling and his crowd have been involved. And Walter Hudd. And the Band brothers. We’re fairly certain it was them who did the Central Bank at Gravesend last month. You probably read about it.”

  Petrella nodded. He had heard enough about high-class safebreakers to know that they left their signatures on their job as surely as great artists in other walks of life. He said, “What makes you so certain there’s a linkup?”

  “Three things.” Baldwin ticked them off on the fingers of his big red hand. “First, they’re getting absolutely accurate information. They’ve never taken a bank that wasn’t stuffed with notes. And that isn’t as common as you might think. You could open a lot of strongrooms and find nothing in them but Georgian silver and deed boxes. Second, the technique’s the same. They always work from another building. Sometimes next door. Sometimes as much as three or four houses away … that means slicing through a lot of brickwork. They’ve got proper tools for that too, and they use them properly. Someone’s taught ’em. And last, but not least, someone’s supplying them with equipment. It’s good stuff. So good, it can’t even be bought in this country for a legitimate job. When Walter Hudd’s boys cracked the Sheffield District Bank they had to cut and run, and they left behind a high-speed film-cooled steel cutter that the London Salvage Corps have been asking for ever since they heard about it. It comes from Germany.”

  Later, installed in a small room on the top storey of the Annexe into which four desks had somehow been inserted, Petrella repeated much of this to his two aides; the first was Detective Sergeant Edwards, a solemn young man with the appearance and diction of a chartered accountant, who was reputed to be extremely efficient in the organisation of paper work. The second – as Petrella was delighted to note – was none other than his old protégé, Detective Wilmot.

  “Who’s the fourth?” said Petrella.

  “We’re getting a female clerical assistant,” said Wilmot. “I asked at the pool who it was going to be but no one seemed to know. I don’t mind betting though, as we’re the youngest department, we shall get the oldest and ugliest secretary. Someone like Mrs. Proctor, who’s got buck teeth and something her best friends have got tired telling her about. What do we do next?”

  Petrella said, “No one really knows. We shall have to make most of it up as we go along. We’ve got to have the best possible liaison with the C.R.O. and the Information Room here both on the old jobs, and any new jobs that come along. Then we’ll have to circularise all provincial Police Forces, asking for information on suspicious circumstances …”

  “Such as?” asked Edwards.

  “First thing, we might see if we can get the banks to improve the reward system. At present, you only collect the cash if your information leads to someone being arrested. That’s not good enough. What happens at the moment is, someone hears a bang in the night … Might be something, might not. They go back to sleep again. If there was a reward – it needn’t be a big one – say, a hundred pounds for the first man getting on the blower to the police station, we might get some action.

  “Next, we’ll have to circularise local forces: for information about thefts of explosives; losses of strongroom keys; unexplained caches of notes; suspicious behaviour near banks; bank employees with expensive tastes—”

  “Bank managers with expensive mistresses—”

  “That’ll be enough from you, Wilmot. Do you think you can draft us a circular?”

  “Can do,” said Edwards.

  “The three of us will have to be on the priority warning list through the Information Room here, and the police station nearest our home. We may be called out any hour of the day or night.”

  “I’ll have to warn all my girl friends,” said Wilmot.

  That afternoon Petrella was sitting alone at his desk staring at the tips of his shoes, when the door opened, a girl looked in, and said, “Are you C12?”

  “That’s right,” said Petrella.

  “You certainly took some finding. Nobody seemed to have heard of you.”

  “We’re a very important department. But very hush-hush.”

  “They haven’t given you much of a room. My name’s Orfrey, by the way.”

  “I can’t help feeling,” said Petrella, “that, as we shall be working together for an indefinite period in a space measuring not more than twelve feet by ten, I shall find myself addressing you, sooner or later, by your Christian name.”

  Miss Orfrey smiled. Petrella noticed that when she smiled, she smiled with the whole of her face, crinkling up her eyes, parting her lips, and showing small, even white teeth.

  “The name’s Jane,” she said …

  About a week later, Jane Orfrey said to Wilmot, “Is he always as serious at this?”

  “He’s got a lot on his mind,” said Wilmot. “He might smile sometimes.”

  “It’s make or break, really,” said Wilmot. “If we sort out this lot, he gets the credit. If we don’t, he gets a great big black mark.” “It doesn’t seem to be worrying you.”

  “Paper work doesn’t mean a lot to me. I’m what you might call a man of action. What about coming to the pictures tonight?”

  “Thank you,” said Jane. “I’m going to take some of this paper home.”

  “It’s a serious matter, sir” said Sergeant Edwards.

  “What is?” said Petrella, coming up from the depths of his thoughts on the technical construction of strongroom doors.

  “Our allowances.”

  “What about our allowances?”

  “Now that we’re working at Scotland Yard and on a special job, we ought to get a Special Service increment and a Central London increment.

  But the regulations say that where you’re entitled to both, you can have the whole of whichever allowance you select, and fifty per cent of the other one. I’ve been working it out—”

  “And I thought you were doing something useful,” said Petrella.

  Sergeant Edwards looked aggrieved …

  Two o’clock on a Monday morning, twelve inches away from Petrella’s ear, the telephone screamed. He jerked upright, hit his head against the end of the bed, swore, and snatched the receiver off the instrument.

  “Job at Slough,” said a courteous and offensively wide awake voice. “They’ve pulled in the men involved: Ronald, Kenneth, and Leslie Band. There’ll be a car round for you in three minutes.”

  Petrella was still trying to fix his front stud when he heard the car draw up.

  He finished his dressing sitting beside the driver as they sped along the empty roads towards Slough. The driver didn’t seem to be pressing, but Petrella noticed the speedometer needle steady on the seventy mark. At that moment a motorcycle passed them, and he just had time to recognise Wilmot.

  Inspector Lansell, of the Buckinghamshire C.I.D., was waiting for them in his office.

  “It was the North Midland Bank,” he said. “They cut their way through from the cellar of an empty shop next door. Must have started some time on Saturday afternoon. Took all Saturday night and Sunday over the job. Blew the main strongroom door at half past one this morning. A chap living across the street heard it, and telephoned us. We happened to have a patrol car a few streets away, so we got them as they came out.”

  “Good work,” said Petrella. “I’ll have a word with them now, if I may.”

 
“They’re all yours,” said Lansell courteously.

  The Band brothers were small, quiet, brown-faced men, all with good records of regular service in the Royal Engineers.

  By six o’clock, Petrella had got what he could out of them. It wasn’t a lot. They had all been in the hands of the police before. The routine questions had been answered, blocked, or evaded.

  Petrella had hardly expected more, and was not depressed. He was particularly interested in two pieces of their equipment: a high-speed, electric drill with an adjustable tungsten-tipped angle bit which had been used to drill a series of holes down either side of the hinge of the strongroom door; and an oxyacetylene, white flame cutter, coupled with a small pumping device which stepped up the pressure and temperature of the flame.

  Both were in ex-works condition. The cutter had initials and a number stamped on the base. It looked like shipyard equipment. There was a department in the Board of Trade which would probably be able to identify it for him.

  If it had been imported under licence, it could be traced back to its maker.

  He had another reason for feeling pleased. The banks, some of which had jibbed at his automatic alarm-reward system, would probably support it now that it had shown results.

  He said to Inspector Lansell, “Any idea where my sergeant is?”

  “Haven’t seen him,” said Lansell. “I’ll ask.”

  But no one in the station had seen him. Petrella travelled back to London on a train crowded with coughing and sneezing commuters. He remembered the ice patches on the road and a nagging feeling of uneasiness travelled with him.

  In the course of that morning he rang Information three times. No accidents to police officers had been reported.

  At two o’clock Wilmot arrived, unshaven but quite unrepentant.

  “I’ve got a feeling,” he said – before Petrella could open his mouth – “that maybe we’re on to something. It was a turn up for the book. I stopped just short of the High Street to ask the way to the station, and I saw these two in an all-night cafay over the way having a cuppa; and I said, Oi, oi, what are they doing?”