Unsafe Deposit

by J. E. Kellenberger

  ‘We’ll face the music together my love. It’ll work out okay, you’ll see.’

  But Sandra was wrong.

  John had said how ill Angela looked at the crematorium. ‘Hardly surprising,’ was Andreé’s response. ‘It’s never funny losing your mum but it’s especially hard when you are still a young woman.’ But she looked strange, John had persisted, she looked distant. John had then floated the idea that Angela might appreciate a phone call from Andreé. ‘She might find it comforting,’ he had suggested, and Andreé had indulged him. Her husband answered the phone when Andreé rang. Angela was not presently available to speak to her, he had said, but he would pass on Andreé’s good wishes. He thanked her and hung up. Andreé’s feminine intuition kicked in. She had not been told the truth, of that she was sure. She redialled and this time she was told the truth. Angela had been sectioned. Andreé had had to stifle a gasp of disbelief before recovering to ask what this really meant. ‘Being sectioned,’ he said, as if reading the information from a facts card, ‘means being admitted to hospital whether or not you agree to it. The legal authority to being admitted to hospital comes from the Mental Health Act rather than from your consent. This is usually because you are unable or unwilling to consent. The process usually starts because your general practitioner is worried about your mental health. The decision to section is usually made by two doctors and an approved mental health professional such as a psychologist. The duration of the assessment section is up to twenty-eight days and the treatment sequel up to six months. One member of your family is known as your “Nearest Relative”. I have been assigned this role,’ Angela’s husband said. ‘She must be very poorly,’ was all Andreé could think of to say in that instant so shocked was she by the turn of events. ‘I suppose they were particularly worried about the baby,’ she had continued. Talk of the baby unleashed a whole new set of emotions for the husband to which Andreé listened for almost an hour. Eventually she put down the receiver and told John the long and distressing tale.

  ‘She’s going to be out of action for some time then,’ stated John.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Andreé thoughtfully, ‘and WareWork is going to be in some sort of limbo with one of its major shareholders unable to take her place on the board and vote on issues due to mental illness.’

  ‘Always supposing that the law will actually permit her to inherit,’ replied John, ‘but we don’t know for sure whether a beneficiary who is sectioned is allowed to inherit. My guess is that all the time she is deemed to be mentally ill the law will block her right to inherit and freeze the assets. The state will step in and take control of them. It could be very messy and very protracted.’

  ‘And Daniel and the board might have to deal with “the law man” in addition to “the bank man”. What a mess!’

  Chapter Nine

  End Game

  2011

  Paul’s assistance in Ruth’s daring plan would be crucial, his knowledge of the criminal fraternity and how it worked being vital. When approached he readily agreed but with a few conditions. For one, he was not prepared to do anything criminal himself but he was prepared to suggest to one or two of his snitches that if they just happened to be at a certain place at a certain time and do a certain thing then he would refrain from blowing the whistle on their illegal activities and he would go on to itemise each activity in great detail so that they could be in no doubt whatsoever that they were between a jagged rock and a hard place. For two, he would not do anything to bring his firm, Street Cred Investigators, into disrepute. He liked working with Colin and Susan and the others and they didn’t deserve to be let down. And for three, he would only participate in Ruth’s scheme if the intended end result was likely to put a slippery criminal behind bars, one who had evaded the long arm of the law up to that point. Ruth assured him that she concurred absolutely with conditions one and two and in the case of the third the very slippery Sir Brian Day had been laundering drug money for decades and it was about time that someone hung him out to dry! With Paul on board she turned her attention to her IT geek client as the plan would need his skills too. When she told him what she wanted and enquired if there was a way of doing it he soon lost her in talk of widgets and cookies and time-limited self-destructing code, but the answer, with the same sort of conditions as Paul, was yes. His conscience would be clear if he did it as a “white hat” he told her, and when she ventured to ask what exactly that meant he explained that a white hat in internet terms was an ethical hacker. He’d be hacking for the good of mankind rather than for mercenary purposes, almost an act of altruism Ruth had assured him. It had proved easy to find Sir Brian’s email and house addresses as they were in the public domain and she passed them on to the geek. ‘I’ll start first with the most widely used online shopping website,’ he had told her. ‘Everybody who buys regularly online will have bought something from them at some time and if Sir Brian has done so too I’ll put in a tracking cookie and when he next makes a purchase we’ll know what he’s bought and when it will be delivered. We need something high-end so that he has to sign for it in person,’ Ruth had instructed, a belt-and-braces approach, and preferably with a delivery date of more than twenty-four hours. Bought on Friday and not scheduled to be delivered until the following week would be ideal. He assured her he would be in touch as soon as the silver surfer visited the website.

  Fort Knox, as the locals nicknamed it because of its overt security measures, was set on the outskirts of a lovely rural village in the rolling countryside of Buckinghamshire just north of the London commuter belt. The Old Rectory had been the residence of Sir Brian for more than a decade but of the church it had once served there was no sign other than a few scattered granite stones jumbled amongst high grasses and bracken a quarter of a mile or so farther down the meandering lane that led to the village. It had started life in the first half of the nineteenth century as a far more modest building but had been greatly and sensitively extended over the years so that the extensions blended with the white brick and slate roof of the original dwelling. The lower ground floor of the separate coach house, built of the same materials, had been converted for garaging and the upper floor renovated and modernised to form a flat for the present housekeeper and her husband. The now mansion was approached via a long curving drive passing through electric gates between high brick walls. A single strand of barbed wire ran along the top of the walls for their entire length. A notice in embossed wrought iron attached to each wall warned any potential intruder that the area within its boundary was private property. The imposing automatic gates had wireless intercom and images of any budding transgressors aiming to scale the gates would be captured by the latest in video camera technology.

  Before her geek had agreed to the task Ruth had done her homework on Google Earth. She had found an address in Lincolnshire far away from the rolling countryside of south Buckinghamshire. Steering her way with clicks on the plus and minus circles and pulling the mouse in different directions she had found a lengthy stretch of minor road with substantial houses dotted randomly on either side of its grassy banks, none closer to one another than a quarter of a mile. She gave the address to her geek. He would enter his own cookie under the guise of the server and when Sir Brian visited the website and made an order his billing address would be as he entered it but the delivery address would be altered to the address in Lincolnshire, same house name but different road, different town and different postcode. The delivery driver would be bamboozled. He would work his way back and forth along the winding road, becoming increasingly frustrated at being unable to locate a house named “The Old Vicarage”. Whether or not a house existed in that road with that name Ruth wasn’t sure but she did know that during her bird’s eye tour of the area from the comfort of her home office it was a road without house numbers, just house names and unless each name was announced clearly at the entrance the driver would be in and out of his cab trying to establish whether or not it was the dest
ination address. At some stage he would probably ring his boss for further instructions or just give up and take the package back to the depot.

  The tracking cookie, which would later self-destruct leaving no trace of malware, would also alert Ruth to the intended delivery time emailed out by the shipping company to Sir Brian. Ruth would pass this information on to Paul and a bogus delivery van, purporting to belong to the correct shipping company via means of adhesive sheets stuck to each side of the plain, white van proclaiming the shipping company’s name, would arrive at the purchaser’s automatic gates at the expected time. The bogus driver, a petty criminal hired for the job by one of Paul’s underworld contacts, probably fulfilling a favour in order to be let off some hook, would punch a button on the caller unit by the entrance gates.

  ‘Parcel for Sir Brian Day,’ said the delivery man into the mouthpiece of the caller unit.

  ‘Okay,’ said a woman’s voice, ‘drive up and park outside the front entrance.’

  She flipped up the cover of the indoor portable handset and pressed the gate-open button. The driver heard a loud buzz before the gates opened slowly and smoothly. He leapt back into his cab and proceeded up the curving drive, parking on the crunchy gravel in front of the imposing double front doors. The parcel he was about to deliver had been made up meticulously by Ruth. She had made a purchase from the same website expressly to obtain their cardboard packaging with name and logo. Inside the outer stiff corrugated wrapping was a white polystyrene box of a size and shape that could easily contain the latest laptop that Sir Brian had ordered and giving him no inkling or suspicion that the contents were not as requested. The housekeeper opened one of the double doors and prepared to sign for the parcel.

  ‘Sorry Madam,’ said the driver deferentially, ‘but it has to be signed for by the addressee, company rules. It’s probably an expensive item.’

  Somewhat irritated, the housekeeper went in search of her boss. Sir Brian eventually came to the door with pen in hand. The driver fiddled with his electronic digital signature capture device, seemingly trying to make it work.

  ‘Sorry Gov,’ he said, ‘it’s a bit temperamental sometimes. It doesn’t seem to want to work at the moment. I’ll get a paper invoice from the van. We always carry them just in case technology goes wrong!’

  He attached a professional-looking headed invoice to a clipboard and wrote the name and address of the purchaser of the goods in the box provided on the sheet. From the packaging he entered the product code and one or two other details, all false.

  ‘Just there, Sir,’ he said, pointing to the line requesting a signature, ‘and please write your name in capitals underneath.’

  He tucked the clipboard under his arm, handed the package to Sir Brian with thanks and his enquiry as to whether the gates would open automatically when he reached them was answered with a nod. Turning left out of the gates he drove slowly for the first three hundred yards or so and waved to the occupants sitting in a gunmetal coloured car parked in the elbow of a bend before speeding along as fast as the winding road would allow and through the next village. He halted in a quiet spot and peeled off the company name and logo from each side of the van and then took the turning for the next B road. At the first lay-by he came to he stopped and reported by text that his mission was accomplished. All he had to do now was to post the invoice that Sir Brian had signed as the correct addressee of the package in the stamped addressed envelope provided. He was off a hook and it felt good.

  It had cost just over a thousand pounds. It was the latest in laptops with a quad core processor for high performance processing, one terrabyte of storage, eight megabytes of memory, touchscreen and power for almost eight hours courtesy of its lithium-ion battery. In brushed aluminium it was light, sleek, glitzy and ultra slim and Sir Brian, seated at his desk in the large, sunny study, opened the outer packaging with gusto. A small, sharp penknife taken from a desk drawer cut through the corrugated outer wrapper like a hot knife through butter. The polystyrene inner box was wrapped in a clear plastic bag with neatly stuck-down ends. It looked the real deal but as Sir Brian was about to peel back the sticky tape his mobile rang. It was his current girlfriend ringing from his villa in Marbella reminding him that his afternoon flight to Malaga left Gatwick at four o’clock and she would be there to meet him. He looked at his watch and realised he had no time to lose. He placed the unopened polystyrene box in his cabin bag and said goodbye to the housekeeper. Ruth’s plan had suddenly gone awry but the outcome would be far more satisfactory than she could have expected. Sitting in the unmarked police car were two plain-clothes detective officers in the front and, in the back, a senior member of the police Arts and Antiques unit together with a young, aspiring forensic accountant. The van driver’s wave had been their signal to a twenty minute countdown. Twenty minutes for Sir Brian to open the package and to discover the Ruby Reds within. Twenty minutes for him to get his DNA all over them. Twenty minutes for him to read the message lying under the gems and twenty minutes for him to panic. That’s how long Ruth had judged necessary before the unmarked police car would drive up to the automatic gates and demand entry but something altered the course of predicted events as Sir Brian, in a black and red Smart car, drove past them in a hurry just ten minutes into the twenty-minute countdown. He saw the gunmetal car in his haste to get to the main road but thought nothing of it. In the police car the first to react to the changed situation was the accountant. This, he had hoped, when selected for the set-up would be his chance to show his capabilities and to impress his senior officers and he didn’t intend to let it fizzle out flatly. ‘Follow him discreetly but don’t lose him,’ he had immediately commanded from the back seat, and their car had turned around in a tyre-blistering seven-point turn in the narrow lane and sped after the tiny car. Onto a main road and then motorways, it eventually became clear that Gatwick airport would be journey’s end. They trailed him all the way to the long-stay car park leaving one of the detective officers to shadow him on the bus back to the terminal building while the other three headed to the airport’s police compound to alert them to the unfolding situation. ‘We can only apprehend him if he fails the x-ray scan,’ the airport police had pointed out. ‘We simply have no other right to stop and detain him.’ The Arts and Antiques officer grimaced; the Ruby Reds were probably sitting somewhere in Sir Brian’s home and his chance to recover them had greatly diminished. Now he could only hope.

  The concourse was fairly quiet for an early afternoon. The uniformed airport policewoman watched over Sir Brian’s quick passage through to the x-ray machines. With his pre-printed boarding card from the previous evening’s online check-in and no luggage save his cabin bag it had taken him no more than two minutes from first setting foot in the terminal building to pass through the boarding-card-checking station and to arrive at the scanners. He removed his jacket and belt and the loose change from his trouser pocket and placed them in the heavy-duty grey tray which he slid along the revolving metal cylinders. When beckoned he passed through the metal detector and waited patiently for his cabin bag to emerge from the dual-energy x-ray machine. It was at this point that things began to go seriously wrong for him. The x-ray operator stopped the conveyor for a more detailed look when the bag under scrutiny showed several distinct patches of glowing orange. He had been taught that inorganic materials and metals could be of various shades of blues and greens and purples and even black but organic matter was always orange. ‘Warning bells of danger should sound in your head,’ he had been told, ‘when you see orange blotches as most explosives are made of organic materials.’ Closer inspection showed six patches of orange in the bag. He called his supervisor for verification. His supervisor called the policewoman and Sir Brian was asked in a polite but firm tone to accompany her, together with his cabin bag, to a private office for further inspection. Protesting, he was led away to the interview room where his passport was the first thing to be examined.

 
; ‘Please sit down Sir Brian,’ directed the person sitting behind the desk. ‘I am George Young, a senior officer in the Arts and Antiques squad of Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise department. Beside me is a senior representative of the airport police responsible for Gatwick.’

  ‘I protest,’ said Sir Brian vehemently. ‘I absolutely protest at being stopped and being treated as nothing better than a common criminal.’

  Criminal, indubitably, thought George Young to himself, common, definitely not.

  ‘Did you pack your own cabin bag, Sir?’ continued the Arts and Antiques officer.

  Sir Brian sensed that this was an important point but had no time to think through the implications of any answer other than yes.

  ‘From the x-ray of your cabin bag we have reason to believe that you may be attempting to export stolen property and for that reason you are being temporarily detained until we can clear you of suspicion. Please start the interview recorder and cameras,’ he said to the policewoman standing by the door.

  The leading officer stated the date, place and time of the interview and the name of the three police officers present. He then invited Sir Brian to corroborate his name, address and date of birth. Continuing, he explained that he was placing the unopened cabin bag on the desk.

  ‘Please tell us what you have in the bag, Sir.’

  Sir Brian thought for a while.

  ‘Not much,’ he said. ‘A shirt, a couple of pairs of sports socks, a woollen jumper, today’s Financial Times, a prospectus for a mining company and a brand new laptop.’

  ‘Not much in the way of clothes, Sir,’ said the lead.

  ‘I keep a wardrobe of my clothes permanently in my villa in Marbella,’ said Sir Brian somewhat indignantly.