Hostage to Death

by Roderic Jeffries

  “Blimey, Bill, what’s up with you?” asked Seebring. “You look like… like…” He couldn’t find a satisfactory simile.

  “Just feeling a bit worn-out,” replied Steen, reluctant to give any hint of what he’d been thinking.

  “Me also. It’s not surprising, is it? They’d no right to drag us back here instead of leaving us at home, like the rest of ’em. Look, if you don’t feel up to working, you go and tell the old man you’re off and if he doesn’t like it he can take a running jump.” Seebring was always encouraging other members of the staff to revolt, but never himself led the way.

  “It’s probably because it’s hot in here. I’ll get used to it.”

  “If I’d have known I was going to end up hour after hour in this heat, I’d have had a word with the union bloke. There ought to be air conditioning down here.”

  Rook stepped over the sill into the strong-room. “How’s it going, then?” he asked, in a critical voice.

  “Tell him,” suggested Hodges.

  Seebring resumed work. “It’s a long, long job,” he observed.

  Rook spoke to Steen. “Are you going to start sorting things out, then?”

  “Sure. I didn’t hear the whistle blow, though.”

  Rook belatedly realised the need for a more diplomatic approach. “I’m sorry we’ve had to bring you back here like this, but it’s absolutely vital for us to find out what’s missing. If it’s money, you’ll be able to give us some numbers of notes, if it’s jewellery, we should be able to get descriptions. Get them circulated and we’ve a much better chance of nabbing the missing villain.”

  Steen nodded and carefully climbed over the confusion of cases and valuables to get into the far space. He looked around. The shelves had originally been about three-quarters filled and the best estimate he could now make was that a good half of all the containers had been opened and their contents dumped.

  To sort out the mess surely qualified as the thirteenth labour of Hercules. He’d need a table, the deposit and withdrawal book, the patience of Job…

  There was a foot high heap of valuables close to where he stood and he saw rings, necklaces, silver candelabra, tureens, gold coins, and stamp albums. He picked up one of the coins which glowed warmly in the overhead light. For a coin, it was heavy. It was French, a Louis, and dated from the reign of Louis the Thirteenth. So how much was that worth? He saw another gold coin and picked it up, to find it was a double pistole, a doubloon. A pirate’s treasure. In his mind he saw square-rigged ships in mortal battle…

  After his first few days in the bank, money had become a mere symbol without any meaning or real value. A thousand was not a new car (as it had once been), but was so many notes at such and such denominations. But suddenly he was once again identifying wealth as wealth: the gold coins, the diamond tiara and necklace, the porcelain kingfisher, represented a small fortune. Why should a few people have so much money they didn’t need it all, while so many had much less than they honestly needed? The tiara alone would take Penelope to the sun… Hell! He suddenly thought, if Wraight could read his thoughts at that moment he’d be sacked.

  He began the job of sorting through the chaos.

  Chapter 7

  Steen, grunting from the effort, moved the tea-chest along the shelves. He straightened up and mopped his face and neck with a handkerchief. That was the last of the undamaged containers and it was now clear that not quite as many had been ripped open as at first had seemed possible. Thank God for small mercies! Now to sort out the owners and list their names and, by elimination, find out which customers had had their possessions tampered with.

  He went to the small wooden box built in at one end of the shelves, opened this, and took out the deposit and withdrawal book, dirty and dating back a great number of years. A description of the container was entered by the depositing clerk, along with the date and the customer’s name, and the customer signed the entry. The container was then brought down to the strong-room and if labelled and locked, lashed down beyond immediate tampering, or sealed, (preferably all four), was stored: if it wasn’t sufficiently well-secured, the depositing clerk used label, twine, sealing-wax and a bank seal, all kept in the wooden box, to rectify the fault before putting the container on the shelves.

  Steen examined the nearest suitcase, medium-sized, metal-cornered, brown and shabby, and swore when he could find no name: obviously there had been a sticky label which had come off. He opened the deposit and withdrawal book and skimmed through the entries for the last year and found no medium-sized, metal-cornered, brown suitcase. He swore again. This was supposed to be the easy part of the job! He went back two years and almost immediately found the entry. He put a mark by the name in the book and wrote the name down at the top of a sheet of foolscap paper, then made out a label and stuck it on.

  The next container was a cardboard shoe box which had been festooned with string, with each knot sealed with an unimpressed grey-flecked green sealing-wax. The name Smithson was written in ink. The name was familiar and as he noted it he tried to put a face to it.

  He went to check a third case, but then stopped because something was worrying him. At first he couldn’t identify that something, but soon recognised that it was one of the entries which he’d fleetingly noticed in his search through the deposit and withdrawal book. He returned to where he’d left the book and opened it at the last page of entries. The final one was in a handwriting he did not recognise. He thought back. On Tuesday — the last normal working day at the bank — he had been called to accept a deposit not long before the bank closed: the deposit had been a small cardboard box which he had had to seal. By the time he’d finished dealing with it, there’d been only minutes left. He’d gone up top and back along to his open-plan office, just beyond the ‘Foreign Business’ counter. No one had passed him going down to the strong-room with an article to deposit and he was quite certain that no customer had deposited anything once he’d been in his office. He examined the final entry more closely. In form, it was correct. Date, the fifteenth: name, A. R. Parsons: description, one large brown expanding suitcase, roped and sealed. But the writing was quite unknown to him. Nominally he was in charge of deposits and withdrawals, but in practice he was so often busy that another member of the staff dealt with the matter. Even so, the person concerned was usually one of four people. Had everything been so busy Tuesday afternoon, just before three o’clock, that a member of the staff who had never before dealt with valuables had had to deal with this suitcase? Yet Tuesday had for once — it was market day — been a slack afternoon.

  Curiosity made him search along the shelves for a brown, expanding, roped and sealed suitcase with the name of A. R. Parsons. He soon found it. It was bound with bank twine, sealed with the colour of sealing-wax which the bank was currently using and the seals were impressed with the bank’s seal. On the face of things, absolutely in order. He looked at the label, then back at the book as he tried to think who could have handled this and how the deposit had been made without his knowledge and he suddenly noticed — his interest having been so alerted — that there was a distinct similarity in form not only between the capital ‘R’ in the book entry and on the label, which was perfectly feasible, but also between those two ‘R’s and the ‘R’s of the signatures, which was not feasible since the first must have been written by a bank employee while the signatures were the customer’s.

  He had the kind of sharp, vivid imagination which could be both visionary and practical and he now stared at the suitcase and let his mind run riot. The police and Wraight had assumed that the strong-room had been left in a shambles as an act of bloody-minded vandalism. But suppose the real reason was to make certain that for several hours no one could check whether anything were missing? A lot of money, in the higher denomination notes, could be stuffed into a large suitcase. That suitcase could be renamed, lashed up and sealed with the bank seal (kept in the wooden box). When someone came to withdraw the suitcase (one gunman had escaped — be
cause he had to organise the withdrawal, not for the far more obvious reason that he wished to be free?) and the police asked him if it was in order, he’d point to the unbroken seals. He’d be able to walk out of the bank without a moment’s suspicion touching him…

  He stared at the suitcase.

  *

  Dutch Keen was as English as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, but he had once sailed as a cabin boy on a Dutch cargo ship. He was an intelligent man, with a quick brain and a natural histrionic gift. His face was slightly pear-shaped and he used his facial muscles more than most so that he was a man of many expressions. Had he not been an alcoholic he could have been either a good actor or a really successful con-man.

  Drude stood in the centre of the poorly furnished room and stared at Keen. “You’ve got to play it real smooth.”

  “No problem, no problem at all,” replied Keen, in a rounded, self-satisfied, slightly condescending voice.

  “And keep off the booze.”

  “When I undertake a job…”

  “You spread this and you’ll never spread another job.”

  “Please, stop fussing. I assure you, the matter is as good as done.” For him at that point, failure was inconceivable.

  “Are you sure you can do the signature good enough?”

  “I’ve practised it until Mr Parsons himself would be unable to tell the difference.” Keen suddenly sniggered and there was something disquieting in the contrast between that snigger and his previous portentous speech.

  “Then get moving.”

  Keen crossed the threadbare carpet and stood in front of the tarnished gilt mirror. He slightly adjusted the set of his tie, then studied his general reflection. He smiled with quiet satisfaction. Every inch the retired army officer.

  *

  As Steen continued to work, his thoughts mostly stayed with that brown suitcase. If it were filled with notes of the higher denominations — probably not too many twenties because they were traceable since their numbers were kept — how much would it contain? Not quite certain why, or perhaps not yet admitting why, he looked over the cases and through the shelves to see if Seebring and Hodges were at all interested in what he was doing. They weren’t.

  A large sum of money would buy unlimited sunshine and unpolluted air… He tried to slam a door on his thoughts. But, suddenly, wealth had come to have too much real meaning to allow him to slam the door shut.

  To steal from the bank would be to damn his soul, never mind the danger, because he was old-fashioned enough to believe in an honourable soul. If placed in a position of responsibility, one honoured that responsibility through hell and high water… But here possibly the money had already virtually been stolen: but for his having made the penultimate entry in the book so late on Tuesday afternoon, he — and certainly no one else — would not have the slightest idea of what had, possibly, happened… To steal money already stolen was surely not breaking the honour he owed the bank? In any case, in the final event honour could never be more important than health. And did a starving man commit theft when he took a piece of bread from a baker who’d baked so much that a lot of loaves were being left to go stale?

  He reached out and touched the twine bindings of the suitcase. No one could ever know whether they had been cut during or after the siege: the whole area was littered with slashed twine. So he could safely cut the bindings and open the case (if it were locked, there was a huge bunch of keys amassed from God knows where, one of which would almost certainly unlock it). And if it was not filled with bank notes he’d be quite safe, except perhaps from his conscience. On the other hand, if it were filled with notes… He looked between the shelves at Seebring and Hodges once more. They were taking no more notice of him now — they could not see what he was doing from where they sat — than before. He put his hand in his coat pocket and withdrew a penknife.

  He cut the twine with frantic haste, dragged it free and threw it down on the floor, alongside other cut twine. He discovered he was breathing heavily and sweating freely.

  He heard Seebring speak. “My fingers are aching like they were broken. What’s more, I’m getting spots before my eyes. Someone bloody well ought to get hold of Wraight and tell him he’s got to find reliefs for us.”

  “So what’s stopping you?” asked Hodges.

  Seebring ignored the inconvenient question. “It’s just not fair to saddle us with all the work. How long have we been down here now…?”

  Steen tried the right-hand lock, expecting it to be fastened, and it snapped up with a sound that seemed deafening. Terrified, he looked through the shelves to discover the two men at the table were still taking no notice of him. He opened the left-hand lock, careful initially to hold down the flap, and released it slowly so that it made no noise. He raised the lid of the case. As he stared down at the bundles of notes in their original brown-paper wrappings, wedged in place by loose notes, he knew a sick excitement.

  Penelope’s health lay in that suitcase. Because of the two opposed sides of his imagination he could see at least some of the problems that would occur if he took this money. When the police learned how large a sum of money was missing they’d very soon work out what had happened. He’d be asked why he hadn’t noticed that last entry and identified it as false… How to work the switch? How to get the money out of the bank? If ever the police began to suspect one of the staff had switched the money, they’d surely look for signs of sudden wealth… How could he spend money taking Penelope to live abroad and yet hide the origin of the money?

  Someone must soon come for the suitcase because it had to be claimed before the money remaining was totalled and the true extent of the loss discovered. If he were to make the switch he needed another container which almost certainly would not be claimed… There were several containers which had been in store for years, probably because their owners were dead and none of the beneficiaries had known of the deposit (such containers were blown as coffins).

  The deposit and withdrawal book identified a coffin which had been in store for over ten years. He found the suitcase, dusty, locked but not roped. He lifted it up and judged it to be near enough the same weight — somewhere around eighty pounds. He collected the large bunch of keys and tried each in turn and finally unlocked the case to discover it was filled with papers and files. He transferred the money to the dusty green case and the papers to the expanding brown suitcase.

  The green suitcase was labelled — with an engraved visiting card — Geoffrey Braynton. He removed this and replaced it with one of the bank’s labels. He chose the name, which he wrote in block capitals, T. Edey. It was only later that he realised this was the name of a schoolmaster he had disliked. He dirtied the label and retied the rope, then replaced the suitcase with those he had checked. He lashed the brown suitcase with twine in the same pattern as before. He used a stick of sealing-wax and his lighter to drop sealing-wax on to the knots, which he stamped with the bank seal.

  “Are you brewing up tea?” called out Seebring facetiously, “because if you are I could go a cuppa.”

  He knew momentary panic, shocked that he could so easily have overlooked the smell of melting wax. Then he forced himself to calm and said: “Just replacing a seal that’s broken off.”

  It was so normal a thing for him to be doing that Seebring was immediately uninterested. “You’d’ve thought, wouldn’t you, that the old man would’ve at least laid on something for us to eat and drink? Not him, though. I’ve a good mind to…”

  Steen replaced the sealing-wax, the twine, and seal, in the wooden box. Then he opened the deposit and withdrawal book and drew a line through the entry of G. Braynton to show the case had been withdrawn: he added a scrambled signature and a date of four years back.

  He stared at the two suitcases, now side-by-side. It never occurred to him to wonder what the mob’s reactions would be.

  Chapter 8

  Dutch Keen, playing the retired colonel so thoroughly that his stride was firm and measured, his shoulders s
quared, and there was a look of sharp authority on his face, marched along the pavement until he reached an electrical store. He stopped, turned smartly to his right, and appeared to look at the window display. In the reflection of the glass he was able to judge that there was no particular police activity around the bank.

  He crossed the road and reached the far pavement immediately opposite the main bank entrance. There was still a P.C. in the porch entrance and as he approached, the P.C. said: “I’m afraid the bank’s shut…”

  “I heard there’d been trouble,” he said crisply. “Matter of fact, I’ve come to see about some stuff I left here. Be a bit of a blow if I’ve lost it. D’you know how I can find out?”

  “You’ve deposited something in the strong-room, sir?”

  “A suitcase. Got a few mementoes in it I’ve picked up from different places.”

  “If you’ll go inside, then, sir. The detective sergeant is checking up on the valuables and he’ll have a word with you.”

  “Thanks very much.” He walked past the P.C. and into the bank.

  Inside, he looked around with the confident air of a man who had never known what it was like to have his overdraft bouncing its limit. Young saw him, and even he, a natural iconoclast, made a quick mental note that here was someone of some importance. He went over.

  Keen explained in his chatty yet authoritative manner that he had only recently deposited a suitcase with the bank for safe keeping, but he’d heard there’d been some kind of robbery and wanted to make certain his mementoes were all right.”

  “What’s the name, please?” asked Young.

  “Parsons, Colonel A. R. Parsons. Though these days I forget the colonel part.”

  So I should bloody well think, thought Young as he turned and left.

  *

  Steen was placing two pearl rings with other jewellery found loose when Young stepped into the strong-room and stopped by the gap in the shelves. “Have you come across a suitcase belonging to an old colonel sahib from Poona, name of Parsons?”