Unsafe Deposit

by J. E. Kellenberger

  ‘Please open your cabin bag and take out the contents, placing each item separately on the desktop.’

  The look on Sir Brian’s face showed that he was indisposed to do this but he had no alternative and, one by one, each item was placed on the desktop as instructed. He had forgotten to mention handkerchiefs and a couple of puzzle books otherwise his list of contents was correct and, for the benefit of the audio, the lead confirmed that this was so. He then instructed Sir Brian to place each item back into the cabin bag except for the new laptop which he was directed to open. Sir Brian peeled back the sticky tape holding closed the ends of the plastic bag and removed the polystyrene box from within. Four more short lengths of tape were eased and the box top taken off. A thin sheet of white tissue paper covered the contents. The atmosphere in the room was electric. Sir Brian didn’t know why but he was about to find out. A slight draught of air from an overhead fan caught the weightless tissue sheet and it slid off the box onto the floor. There was a stunned silence as the three people around the desk took in the beauty of The Ruby Reds. The policewoman standing by the door moved forward to see the cause of their astonishment and stopped dead in her tracks when she saw the six gleaming jewels twinkling back at her; such was their beauty that she muttered an involuntary expletive. But nobody else spoke. The Ruby Reds were sitting in a clear plastic tray, a thin but rigid sheet of transparent plastic from an arts and crafts shop which Ruth had fashioned into a shallow container, spaced in regimental order one from the other. Underneath, showing through the tray, was a sheet of paper on which there were printed words. The lead took a pair of disposable gloves from a dispenser sitting on top of a cabinet and pulled them on. He lifted up the tray with the gems and removed the sheet of paper. He read its message and then showed it to his colleague. Both men understood that the message would permit them to obtain a warrant to search Sir Brian’s house.

  ‘I think you had better read this, Sir,’ said the lead, passing the sheet to Sir Brian.

  He took his reading spectacles from his upper jacket pocket and read:

  Sir Brian,

  Your final payment from Brazil.

  Good luck to Zilbar Holdings.

  The sheet wavered in Sir Brian’s trembling hand. This was a set-up.

  ‘I know nothing about this,’ he said adamantly, wafting his hand at the polystyrene box and its contents. ‘I bought a laptop online. I took it out of its outer packaging just before I left home. I put it in my cabin bag unopened. I drove here. C’est tout!’

  ‘Can you confirm Sir that your cabin bag was with you at all times between leaving your house and reaching the x-ray machine?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied quietly, there was no other reasonable answer that he could give.

  ‘Can you also confirm that, to your knowledge, nobody tampered with your cabin bag during that period?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know what these gemstones are?’ probed the lead.

  ‘Rubies, I guess.’

  ‘Yes, Sir, they are rubies but do you know what they are collectively known as?’

  ‘No,’ he lied.

  ‘I’m surprised about that, Sir, because they are famous. They were stolen some years ago from a London Museum which added to their notoriety. They are The Ruby Reds.’

  At about the same time as Sir Brian was being escorted out of the terminal building to a waiting police car, an attractive woman in her late thirties was monitoring the arrival of passengers off the London flight in the arrivals area of Malaga airport. She waited, at first expectantly, but became concerned as the trickle of new arrivals dried up. She called his mobile number but it was on voicemail. She texted him but received no reply. Baffled, she went in search of airport passenger handling staff. The first assistant she found suggested making a public address call for her friend. She waited agitatedly at the stated meeting point but Sir Brian did not appear. Finally she found an airline representative of the low-cost carrier on whose flight he had been booked who checked the passenger list and told her that Sir Brian Day had been a no-show for the flight. Puzzled and disturbed she made her way back to his villa uncertain as to what to do next. She sank onto the corner sofa upholstered in soft, light grey leather in the first-floor living room. It overlooked the sixth fairway of a golf course constructed in the mid-1990s and gave out onto a full-width balcony from which vantage point an interested observer could see both tee and green. But this evening this held no interest. The phone rang suddenly and unnerved her.

  ‘Hallo,’ she answered.

  ‘Hallo,’ said a voice she did not recognise. ‘Am I speaking to Deborah Hunslett?’

  ‘Who is enquiring?’ she asked.

  ‘One minute please,’ said the unknown voice of the police officer, ‘I’m handing you over.’

  She heard the noisy exchange of receiver from one person to the other.

  ‘Hallo Debbie,’ said Sir Brian’s distinctive voice. ‘I’m having a bit of a problem at this end. Some business has arisen unexpectedly and I can’t get over for a few days. Just carry on your holiday without me and I’ll keep you posted as to when you can expect me, cheerio for now.’

  He clicked off before Debbie could utter a questioning word.

  She had been his live-in girlfriend for the past six months. She liked the trappings of his luxurious lifestyle, mansions and villas, banquets in historical surroundings and restaurants with celebrity chefs, rubbing noses with the powerful and influential. She liked it very much but she was now perplexed. Just five hours ago she had spoken to him and he had said he was about to leave for the airport. Now, five hours later, the tune had changed completely. She felt a little silly as she had been anticipating and relishing a change of surname. A new passport in the name of Day would be a new beginning, banishing her former existence as Mrs Doug Watson but maybe now, just maybe, she might need to revert to her maiden name of Hunslett.

  ***

  When Arthur moved in with Sandra contentment flooded into his life and as the weeks passed living in her small house Arthur’s values changed. Gone was the need to keep up with double-barrelled Joneses or the desire to be seen at traditional upper-class recreations. His innate love of the fine arts would remain with him forever but his life would be centred round Sandra and he would not be ashamed of owning up to his true roots. He set aside his first thoughts of buying a large house in a prestigious area with part of the very substantial pension pot that had accrued in the account Brian’s hedge fund had set up for him, something that suited Sandra’s more modest tastes would suit him too. But how he would really like to spend his retirement, if that was the correct terminology for someone who had never really been gainfully employed in a lawful job, he was uncertain. One restless night it came to him in a flash. He could sense that he had kept Sandra awake. He stretched out an arm and pushed down on the bedside light’s button.

  ‘What is it?’ demanded Sandra. ‘You’ve been tossing and turning all night long.’

  ‘Sandra, my sweet,’ he said, sitting up and pulling her into his arms, ‘how would you like a long holiday abroad, say for a year or two?’

  ‘Where and doing what?’ she enquired sleepily.

  ‘I thought of having a base in the Cayman Islands, renting a small villa there but going off exploring for a few weeks at a time to various places.’

  ‘Like what places?’ asked Sandra, now wide awake.

  ‘We could explore the Aztec empire in Mexico, the Incas in Peru, the terracotta warrior soldiers in China, always returning to our Cayman Island base.’

  ‘Sort of sun and sand interspersed with culture!’ quipped Sandra. ‘Sounds good to me but can we afford it?’

  ‘Now that Jane is dead the family house I made over to her on our divorce will be inherited by Angela. As you know her husband is an estate agent. He will sell it for a handsome price and it will easily pay
for all the treatment and care that Angela will need until she recovers, and I pray she does. So I don’t have to provide further for her. Whatever we’ve got is ours to enjoy and we should have plenty for a long spell abroad before coming home and buying a place in somewhere like Bath. What do you say?’

  ‘With a few tweaks I say yes!’

  ‘Right, I’ll get it underway in the morning. I’ll sell my holding in the investment trust, give the proceeds a spin round some of the offshore tax havens like Jersey and the Turks and Caicos, open an account in the Caymans and by the time it reaches there it will have been laundered as clean as a whistle. It won’t be traceable to Zilbar Holdings UK or anywhere else for that matter.’

  ‘And what surname will we use?

  ‘I thought Arnold and Sandra Bennett would be suitable. Do you agree?’

  ‘My maiden name! Yes, that would be very suitable and I like Arnold. I shall call you Arn. Lucky my side of the family is just as crooked as yours. I’ll get them onto it. Oh! And by the way Arn, it is already morning.’

  ***

  A warrant was issued to search The Old Vicarage. It was not strictly necessary as Sir Brian had been kept in custody overnight and under section thirty-two of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act the only authority needed was that of the investigating inspector. But erring on the side of caution because of the detainee’s protestations that he knew men in high places and as soon as he was free he would make them feel the full weight of his displeasure they produced evidence in front of a hastily summoned judge and the search warrant was issued. It was the forensic accountant who now took the lead. One of the youngest inspectors in the Fraud Squad, he had a double-first from Cambridge in Law and Accountancy and was full of ambition to head the department by his thirtieth birthday. A regular reader of the financial press he, like Ruth, had been intrigued for some time by Zilbar Holdings UK. It seemed impervious to all market conditions and even in the current double-dip recession its published accounts showed it easily outperforming similar investment products. The old consumer adage of “if something looks too good to be true it probably is” was never far from his thoughts where Zilbar was concerned and hence his growing excitement when he learned that the Fraud Squad had received a tip-off, from sources unknown, that Sir Brian Day, chairman of this organisation might be handling stolen goods. For the forensic accountant this was his golden opportunity to get inside the mansion and examine any paperwork that lay within. The housekeeper was swept aside by the invasion of law enforcement officers entering the mansion carrying crates of plastic bags and rubber gloves. Asked about the location of a possible safe she answered truthfully that she had no idea. The library with its shelved walls, large desk and desktop computer was the obvious starting point but yielded, disappointingly, very little and in the files of the non-password-protected computer there was little to whet the appetite of the forensic accountant.

  Renovations of The Old Vicarage had not been confined to the second half of the twentieth century. It had had a wartime addition too in the form of a dugout to act as a bomb shelter. A short, substantial staircase with deep treads led down from what in those times was probably a scullery into a square, subterranean room of approximately nine feet. With a low ceiling tall adults would have needed to crouch to protect their heads. In wartime there would have been bench seating along three walls where occupants would have sat out each raid waiting for the siren to sound the all-clear. Successive modernisations had left the structure of the concrete bunker intact although the steep steps down to it had been updated with rubber treads and the installation of a handrail for safer access. The call of a junior officer tasked with exploring the nooks and crannies of the building alerted them to a possible discovery of importance. Following him down into the cool room they found that its current use was as a wine cellar with two walls decked out from floor to low ceiling with wooden racks which were filled with hundreds of bottles, some dusty, others clean, as if laid down recently. In a dingy corner by the stairwell, easily overlooked and not readily accessible, the lower racks were empty. The junior officer shone his torch into the void and pulled out a black A4 file wallet with a button-down flap. Back in the library the forensic accountant glanced through the slim sheaf of papers he had removed from the wallet. The printed information they held appeared to be of inconsequential value. He removed the eight data sticks and lined them up in a row. They were of varying gigabyte capacity but all made by the same manufacturer. He pushed one of the small capacity sticks into the USB port of his work laptop and was soon scrolling steadily and methodically through dates and figures and names. He was shortly joined by one of the squad’s computer experts in case passwords had to be overcome. Over two hours passed in this concentrated manner. The Arts and Antiques detective departed and was replaced by the forensic accountant’s boss who stood behind looking over the shoulders of the two men huddled around the monitor. When the eighth data stick was removed the forensic accountant slid it back into the wallet and turned with triumph to his boss. ‘Dirty money from Brazil in,’ he said, ‘laundered money out into Zilbar Holdings UK via umpteen shell companies but orchestrated by a firm named Meares Import Export working out of Ludgate Hill.’

  ‘No password protection, no encryption,’ said his boss in disbelief, silver surfers protect their houses with the latest video cameras, motion sensors, alarms, barbed wire, mortise locks and God knows what else but they haven’t cottoned on that their computer files with precious financial data are totally vulnerable unless they take steps to protect them. Even my kids double encrypt details of their pocket money and send the whole lot floating on “the cloud”!’

  The raid at the offices of Meares Import Export took place early the following morning when the cleaners opened the building at six o’clock as the senior investigating officer had wanted to avoid as much disturbance as possible. The low-key raid promised much but appeared at first to deliver little. Inside the foyer the Fraud Squad members were met by a notice on the firm’s entrance door. Two strips of white duct tape had been carefully stuck over the lettering announcing Meares Import Export and on top, in a neat hand, a black permanent marker had been used to write in capital letters “office closed”. The birds have flown, remarked one of the officers casually, and when sent to check the nameplates on the front of the building he found an empty space between two brass plates from where a previous occupant’s name had been very obviously unscrewed. The cleaner responsible for the ground floor foyer expressed her concern about the police presence. They were in her way, she told them, and she couldn’t get on with power-cleaning the marble floor. She was on a tight schedule set by her supervisor and was worried that she wouldn’t finish in time. Asked how long the “office closed” message had been up she said she wasn’t sure but it was only a day or two. To her further consternation an officer started picking the door lock to the suite and despite showing her his warrant card she was clearly not mollified. Save for the furniture the office suite was empty. No computers, no printers, no telephones, no paraphernalia of normal office life not even a calendar swinging from a hook on a wall. It had been cleansed of all activity and replaced by a malevolent silence. The SIO worked his way through the rooms comprising the suite. All appeared the same. A hasty but planned retreat had taken place. It was the forensic accountant who said what was not obvious by pointing out to his boss that the mere fact that the flight had been planned meant it had taken place before they had apprehended Sir Brian as it was inconceivable that insider knowledge of the set-up could have leaked out otherwise Sir Brian would not have been caught holding the baby. He received an affirmative nod from his superior who added that their case against the big fry in the shape of the knight would be greatly enhanced if they could find the smaller fry who did the dirty work. After further discussion they returned to the remand centre, leaving behind a small team of civilians to gather evidence of fingerprints and DNA or anything else they could find.

 
; Set-ups, Paul had assured Ruth when she first approached him with her plan, are given the non-attributable go-ahead by the high-ups when a rare chance occurs to trap a big fish and lots of tiddlers and he had seized the opportunity to drop in the surnames of Meares as a medium-sized player and Lindsey as smaller fry and hence the involvement of the Lindseys was not going to be overlooked by the police. When Arthur had drawn his long criminal association with them to a final end he gave instructions to Ron and Lizzie to clear his set of rooms thoroughly, leaving nothing but fixtures and fittings. Documents were to be cross-shredded and the spoil taken to the nearest dump. They were to vacate their own rooms too, clearing them in a similar manner. The management company of the new leaseholder would contact the other tenants offering them extensions to their tenancies and would advertise for new tenants to replace the leavers and the building’s reprehensible past would soon be lost in the hustle and bustle of its new life. Lizzie arrived before eight o’clock to finish the clear-out of their suite. In truth the rooms had never held much more than a filing cabinet of paperwork to do with their legitimate business in the trade fairs sector, reflecting its main purpose as purely a cover. She had no more than a few notebooks to remove this morning in which various details of their ongoing scams were recorded and these she stuffed in a colourful holdall with long straps that she slung over her shoulder. After a systematic check of the premises she closed the door onto the half landing for the final time and slipped the keys into an envelope which she posted through the letter-box of one of the remaining tenants. The detective constable observed her leave and walk down Ludgate Hill on her way to Black Friars tube station where she took the District Line alighting at Mile End. She had no possible reason to believe that she was being followed and went openly to the lock-up garage where the siblings kept their stock and records. Filing the notebooks away in an old kitchen dresser, she pulled down the up-and-over door, locked it and departed for her short walk home. The detective constable wrote the address of the lock-up in his notebook and when Lizzie was gone from sight he radioed in with the information but was told that no further action was required.