Hostage to Death

by Roderic Jeffries

  Hostage to Death

  Roderic Jeffries

  © Roderic Jeffries 1977

  Roderic Jeffries has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1977 by Walker Publishing Company, Inc.

  This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 1

  The bank, which was situated in the high street at the point at which the road began to dip towards the traffic lights, had been ringed by policemen. Six of them were armed with revolvers and six with rifles equipped with telescopic sights. The buildings on either side of the bank, and the flat above it, had been evacuated and were now occupied by police. To the rear of the bank, and protecting it from the road, was a courtyard and a ten-foot-high brick wall in which were tall wooden doors. Against the wall a scaffolding platform had been erected and from this the police kept watch. Three patrol cars were parked in the high street and of these one was used as a communications centre and another as a place where senior police officers could briefly rest or hold conferences which ran no risk of being overheard.

  The public — and even late at night they were there in numbers — were held back in a flattened semi-circle whose radius was three hundred yards from the bank’s outside doors. The two TV teams had taken all their stock shots and now the crews sat around and played poker and waited, hopefully, for a crisis.

  At the police’s orders the water company had cut off all water to the bank. The Post Office had rigged up a telephone in the patrol car which was being used as a communications centre.

  Relatives of the hostages were allowed to watch from the point where the right-hand semi-circle of onlookers became flattened and cut off by the row of shops on the opposite side of the road. There was always either a detective or a uniform sergeant present to comfort them and assure them that no harm had or would come to anyone and to suggest they went home to wait since they would be called out the moment anything happened. Few took the good advice. The remainder, tired, frightened, stared at the wooden doors, with the bank’s crest on them, or the three tall windows, and despairingly wondered what was happening behind these.

  *

  All it had taken had been one lousy scream, thought Val Thomas with renewed bitterness. He reached into his pocket and brought out a pack of cigarettes which he’d taken from one of the bank staff. He lit a cigarette. Originally his orders had been no smoking because a butt could tell a split a story, but that precaution was now a waste of time.

  One lousy scream, he thought yet again, as he drew on the cigarette which rubbed against the edge of the mouth-hole in his nylon hood. The woman clerk had screamed and all five of them had swung round to check who was the nearest to shut her up: in that second someone had pressed a hidden panic button. He didn’t know which of the staff had been the clever bastard: had he known, he’d have smashed him.

  He stared along the length of the bank. The staff and the customers who’d been in the bank when the raid began were sitting or lying down in front of the counter which ran the length of the main area. The men were beginning to look scrubby because of the stubble on their chins — except for the soft looking, bespectacled clerk whose chin still looked smooth. A poof, thought Thomas with contempt. “We’ll shoot ’em, one at a time, if you don’t lay on escape cars,” he’d told the split over the telephone. He’d knock off that fairy first. But he remembered the police’s reply: “No matter what happens, we won’t release you. Kill anyone and your situation will be far worse.” If they left the hostages alone they’d collect a stiff sentence, but one with an end to it: kill any of the hostages and if the police didn’t give way then they’d collect life and it would be life. Their strength had become their weakness.

  Could the police refuse to negotiate and continue to put the lives of all the hostages at risk? Had they the moral strength to stand out against the emotional pressures raised by the threat to kill the hostages? He wanted to think the hadn’t, but they’d recently broken several hostage sieges by refusing to trade, no matter what the cost.

  His mind veered round to optimism. One dead man could make a whole world of difference (the British could be very sentimental). So suppose he blasted that poof into hell and had his corpse flung out on to the pavement in front of the public and the TV? Then the emotional pressures would boil. His optimism waned. If the police hung on and refused to give way despite the death, or deaths, then eventually it would be a murder rap for them all and the judge would hand down a sentence that would make topping a soft way out. After ten years in the stir, a man went soft: stir-fever. Prison life became normal, outside life abnormal.

  He dropped the cigarette on to the floor and ground it out with the heel of his shoe, picked up the sawn-off shotgun which he had put down on the till counter. He walked down to the ‘Foreign Business’ counter. He’d like a ticket to somewhere else, bloody quickly, he thought with mordant humour. Next to this counter was a two-foot-six swing door which gave access to the passage beyond. He leaned over the door and released the retaining catch, pushed the door inwards, and passed through. To the left of the open passage were several doors: assistant manager’s office, male and female cloakrooms, storeroom and, at the far end and at right angles to the others, the door to the strong-room.

  He opened the end door and went down the concrete stairs. The large basement was divided into two by the strong-room whose reinforced concrete wall, with sensor alarms set in it, was twelve feet from the foot of the stairs. The door into the strong-room was circular, eighteen inches thick at its thickest, and made from layers of different metals to increase its strength and bleed away heat: on the outside was the large wheel which operated the manual locking lugs and the time clock which set the electrically controlled locking lugs. The surround was metal two feet deep, bonded to the concrete with specially strengthened tie rods, with lug holes at regular intervals.

  Ginger Chase sat on the table, heaped up with bundles of bank notes, in the first part of the strong-room. He looked up. “What’s happening now?”

  “Nothing,” replied Thomas as he stepped over the circular sill into the strong-room. “They’re still outside and we’re still inside.” He walked past the table. The further half of the strong-room was taken up with shelves, three feet high, on which were stored customers’ valuables. The shelves ran round three walls and then came out on either side for five feet to leave an open doorway of six feet. He went through this open doorway and stood in the centre of the area and stared round at the shelves. On them were suitcases, in every shape and colour, wooden and cardboard boxes, tea chests, strong-boxes, and packing cases, many of them lashed with twine whose knots were sealed with sealing-wax. There could be half a dozen fortunes in them, he thought. Gold, platinum, silver, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, pearls…

  Chase had slid off the table and now he came to the open doorway. “So nothing’s happening. We’re here and they’re there. So how long do we sit around?”

  Chase had removed his nylon hood and Thomas stared at his heavily featured, powerful face. “Until they change their minds.”

  “And you reckon they’re going to?”
r />   “I reckon.”

  Chase scowled his angry disagreement. He turned and went back to the table with the money on it. For some reason which he’d either never fully understood himself or else had been unwilling to explain — it couldn’t have been fear — he’d been against the bank raid as planned from the beginning.

  He picked up a thick bundle of new notes, bound by a brown paper wrapper. “Twenties,” he said in his hoarse, croaky voice which made it sound as if he suffered from a permanent sore throat. He waved the bundle in the air. “Fifty thousand quids’ worth of twenties — all bloody wastepaper.” He threw the notes on to the table.

  Soon after the siege had begun, Thomas had come down into the strong-room and emptied the bundles of notes, each in a lead-foil container, out of the green canvas sacks, padlocked and sealed, in which they had been brought to the bank. He knew the numbers off by heart. Two large bundles of twenties and one small — a hundred and twenty thousand pounds: five bundles of tens — a hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds: ten bundles of fives — two hundred and fifty thousand pounds: twenty large bundles of ones — a hundred thousand pounds. Five hundred and ninety-five thousand pounds in new notes. Probably something over three hundredweights of money. Add to that the old notes and the customers’ valuables… They were millionaires. Yet one lousy scream had made certain that they were millionaires only whilst they stayed inside and the police outside.

  *

  His parents hadn’t been very wide awake or they would never have christened him Cyril. C. Rook. It was not a very good name for a detective inspector. To an outsider the joke was rather a thin one, but inside the force it continued to amuse long after it should have been pensioned off. If his character had been different, perhaps it would have been.

  He was a good detective who managed to annoy both his superiors and his inferiors by his insistence on observing the rules, even when everyone else knew that there were times when they needed to be studied with Nelson’s blind eye. It wasn’t really any lack of imagination or initiative, but just his refusal to set even one foot out on a limb. If one stayed within the rules, one must be covered. In many ways it was strange that someone so careful should have joined the police force.

  In physical appearance he was a stand-in for Mr Average Man. He was of average height, average build, and was neither good-looking nor ugly. His eyes were an ordinary shade of brown and his eyebrows didn’t arch or droop. His brown hair wasn’t greying and if it were beginning to thin this fact wasn’t yet obvious. His nose was to regular, his mouth precise, and his lips suggested a well-balanced libido. When he smiled, which wasn’t all that often, there was usually a sense of reserve to that smile. He dressed as well as he could afford, which wasn’t very well, and he liked a clean shirt every day.

  “Shall I try to raise them again, sir?” he asked.

  Pollock, assistant chief constable, looked briefly at Rook, then back at the bank. “You might as well, mightn’t you?”

  “Right, sir. I’ll go and try.” Rook was always very careful to call his seniors ‘sir’ as often as was reasonable. This was not from any sense of servility but because he believed one must always pay the proper respect to rank. In a hazy fashion he understood that his kind of world depended on due respect being paid to rank and that was why he disliked the modern protestors, whether of the right or left.

  Rook crossed to the white patrol car which was their command centre. A TV camera tracked him. It was the first time he’d handled a case which hit the national headlines and he couldn’t really reconcile himself to the attendant publicity. Would Amy laugh when she saw him on the TV?

  Detective Sergeant Young, who sat in the front seat of the car with the door open, said: “Is anything moving yet?”

  Young more often than not didn’t bother with a ‘Sir’. It irritated Rook, though he never pulled rank on it. “Nothing’s altered so I’m going to try and talk to them again.”

  “Keep the dialogue going, no matter what the reception?” Young grinned.

  Rook recognised the words as a quote from the latest pamphlet, drawn up by H.Q., ‘Procedure on hostage-related cases’. He’d read it through very carefully a month ago, memorising all the relevant points.

  He opened the back door and sat down. The telephone had been put on the back parcels shelf and he lifted off the receiver and dialled. The ringing began.

  “Yeah?” said a. voice which sounded harsh.

  “This is Detective Inspector Rook.”

  “Don’t you ever sleep?”

  “You haven’t been giving me much of a chance… I want to know if there’s anything you’d like us to send in to you and the hostages?”

  “Bloody big deal!” Thomas could not hide his surprise — until now, the police had refused to provide anything.

  “We could send in food and water.” The pamphlet from H.Q. had clearly laid down the various stages. ‘After cutting their communications and for a reasonable length of time denying them any request, so bringing home to them their complete loneliness, offer them a few basic necessities (this will, in any case, have to be done out of consideration for the hostages). In this way a rapport will be built up between police and captors which can be utilised to persuade the captors that only the police are offering them any sympathy and understanding…’ It was the age-old cat-and-mouse game: the hard-and-soft pitch. Kick a man really hard and he’ll be grateful if next time you kick him only softly.

  Thomas tried to reassert his authority. “Listen — there’s only two hours before we hit the first hostage.”

  This was the fourth different deadline the police had been given. Rook spoke as he might have done to a child and his pedantic authority made his words effective. “Let’s forget all that sort of nonsense. We both know you’re not going to be stupid enough to actually kill when we’ve got you surrounded and you’ve no way out. You’re not going to buy yourself a murder rap.”

  Thomas stubbornly repeated the threat. “In two hours we’re hitting the first hostage unless you lay on cars and then a plane to take us and six hostages out of the country.”

  “You’re not going anywhere and you know it.”

  “You’ve only two hours.”

  “How d’you feel about some grub? There’s a restaurant along the road that’ll lay it on. What’s more, you’re lucky — it’ll come for free.”

  “Stuff the grub.”

  “Surely the ladies are getting hungry and thirsty? Give me a bit of time to organise things and I’ll get a couple of coppers to drop the grub and some water on the steps in front of the doors. How’s that sound?”

  Thomas hesitated for a long time, then said: “One quick move from either of ’em and we’ll hit the first hostage.”

  “I’ll send in the slowest moving couple I can find.” It was the breakthrough, thought Rook with gratification, but no surprise since the pamphlet from H.Q. had foretold exactly how events would work out.

  Chapter 2

  Bill Steen eased his weight from one buttock to the other and leaned his right shoulder against the wooden wall of the counter. One of the hooded gunmen watched him, his ugly, truncated shotgun cradled in his right arm so that it could be instantly flipped up to bear on a target. Initially, Steen’s mind had been filled with fearful thoughts of his head being shattered by a charge from one of the guns, but familiarity bred if not contempt then limited acceptance even towards his own murder and for many hours his desperate worry had been Penny.

  With her, shock or tension often brought on a sudden attack of asthma so what would have happened when she’d learned about the bank raid and his being taken as one of the hostages, under threat of death? He was convinced she must have suffered an attack. The torturing question was, how serious an attack? A relatively mild one, capable of being contained by pills? A mediumly serious one, necessitating an injection of adrenalin? Or a severe one, so that she had to go to hospital, suddenly hollow-faced, struggling for breath until in an oxygen tent?

 
; Asthma, he’d once read, had never killed anyone. Maybe. But its side and after effects had killed with profligate freedom. Emphysema, strained heart, grossly lowered resistance to other diseases… After the third serious attack in the first five months of their marriage he’d said to their G.P.: “I can’t understand why it’s got so much worse since we married.”

  The G.P. — elderly and old-fashioned enough to be genuinely concerned in helping his patients — had spoken with tired defeat. “We think we know a lot about asthma now — and we really know next to nothing. It comes without warning, it can disappear without reason. Any doctor can give you a list of probabilities and he can also tell you how often those probabilities turn out to be totally wrong. In your wife’s case, her asthma is clearly both nervous and allergic in origin: somewhere along the line, her marriage has triggered off certain nervous signals.”

  He’d said angrily: “I don’t beat her up every night.” The doctor had smiled, sadly.

  Her asthma had become worse. They’d gone to a specialist in London, a very well-dressed, urbane, sympathetic man.

  “I’m afraid, Mr Steen, that it does happen in a few cases and we cannot really claim to understand the cause, although we can, of course, surmise that the tensions are subconscious and unrecognised. From what you have both told me there is no apparent reason for the worsening of Mrs Steen’s asthma. Frankly I don’t think that at the moment anything more can be done than to try somehow to discover what those tensions are, when steps can be taken to meet them, and to continue with your doctor’s advice to take Intal up to four times a day and keep Ventolin handy since you have found that to be the most effective drug.”

  “There must be something more?”

  “From a practical viewpoint — I am afraid not.”

  “Then from an impractical one?”

  He’d rubbed his strong, square chin. “Sometimes a complete change of environment can work what takes on the nature of a miracle. There’s no real explanation of this in the case of nervous asthma, although with allergic asthma there may be an obvious one.”