Chapter 10
It was early morning and the eastern sky had taken on the deep red streaks that often precede the actual sunrise. The Black Granada Scorpio was parked on the edge of the group of cars outside the Leigh Delamare motorway service station, but not far enough away from them to draw attention to it. Inside it there were three men, all of who would have frightened your grandmother if she had bumped into them unexpectedly on a dark night. Two of them were brothers, but apart from that, the common trait between all of them was a willingness to commit violence for gain.
Darryl and Kevin Walker were from the Cheadle area of Manchester and came from a well-kept, upper middle class home, although they had not been welcome there for several years. Given all the advantages of a secure family background and the necessary income to prevent any hardship, they had become that most difficult to understand of all delinquent groups, the upper middle class gone bad. It is a category that drives all teachers, parents and social workers to despair and produces such terrorists as the Red Brigade and the Bader Mienhoffs, so it was fortunate for mankind that the Walkers were neither political nor very bright.
They were twins, although not identical and at the age of twenty-six, had between them had spent some twelve of their joint fifty two years detained in one or other part of the prison service. Their criminal records, which had started at the age of thirteen when they burgled several of their neighbours, now included car theft, shoplifting and robbery with menaces. For their last conviction they had beaten a man of sixty almost to death in his own home, while trying to find his none existent nest egg. For this they were given six years out of which they served four. The Manchester CID considered them dangerous and psychotic and on the morning in question they had been out of prison for just three months.
Elroy Masters, the third man, was from the Stretford part of Manchester. Elroy was mainly West Indian although he had a white grandmother. He had started his life of crime at the age of twelve when he would stand by the cash point machine in the city centre and smile at the people using it. They would grin back at the cheeky little black kid with the skateboard and all the elbow and kneepads to go with it and then go on their way. They would not realise that the chalk mark he had just made on their jackets would identify them to his four older brothers, waiting around the corner armed with flick knives, who would be able to relieve them of their newly acquired cash. Elroy of course got a share. Elroy had then been left alone at the age of fourteen when the said brothers all went down for two years apiece for their part in a burglary. Robbed of his income he had taken to stealing handbags from old ladies as they left the Post Office with their pensions and by fifteen he was in a juvenile correction centre.
At this current point in time he had spent nine of his twenty-eight years in prison and had vowed that what ever else happened in the future, he would not be going back. It was a measure of the Walker brother’s own level of intelligence that they had invited him along on this occasion. He was not exactly stable or reliable, having developed a deep dependency on crack cocaine, but they had been specifically instructed to recruit a third man who would be expendable if things went wrong and they needed someone to take the fall.
Darryl Walker was sat in the back of the car with Elroy Masters, anxiously watching all new arrivals. His brother Kevin, sat behind the wheel, was reading one of the tabloids newspapers by the glow of the map light and the eerie half-light to be found just before the sun comes up. He did not seem to be at all worried. He glanced up at his twin in the rear view mirror and grinned to himself. Darryl got very insecure if they operated far outside of Manchester and this far to the south probably seemed like a different planet to him. He went back to the sports report, enjoying the account of last night’s humiliation of Arsenal by Manchester United. The silence dragged on.
“He's here.”
There was obvious relief in the voice and Kevin folded up the paper and shoved it into the door pocket. Three spaces away a white Volvo 850 estate car had stopped and the driver was at the open boot taking out three sports bags. They looked new and one still had the maker’s ticket hanging from the handle. The new arrival turned towards the Scorpio and Kevin leaned over and opened the passenger door. The man threw two of the bags over the seat into the back where the two passengers caught them. They were obviously empty. The third bag he left out on the car park by the side of the open door until he had folded his muscular six-foot frame into the passenger seat. Then he reached out and hauled it up onto his knees before closing the door. It seemed quite heavy. The fourth man was very different from the other three. He was black skinned, but not the black of the West Indies.
Mitael Khorta was of Somalian descent and his family were Christians. Fleeing from various persecutions against them some three generations or more earlier, they had arrived in Britain and founded their own little enclave in Bristol. The majority of them had since only married among their own tight knit community, occasionally importing a bride when necessary. As a result Khorta's skin was the blue black of Northern Africa and his features were much finer than those of his West Indian neighbours. The other unusual and startling difference was his eyes, which were a dark, but obvious, blue, a rare trait that had been even more rare in the past when such children were superstitiously killed at birth. Khorta was the brains behind this particular group and had planned the operation they were about to carry out. His first involvement in armed robbery had ended with him receiving a five-year prison sentence when he was arrested after another member had flashed his sudden wealth too soon and then grassed up his companions to get his sentence reduced. Since then he had forsaken working for others. These days he always sorted out his own jobs and chose his own companions when needed. In his time Khorta had planned and carried out some spectacular robberies, which had left the forces of law and order grasping at mist.
Khorta had made a lot of money in the ten years he had operated and had laundered it carefully through the stock market and the betting offices. His current problem was that several years ago he had decided to go really respectable and he had used the help of a well-connected acquaintance that had fallen on hard times to make the change. Through good name of this minor Lord of the Realm, Khorta had invested the vast majority of his money in Lloyds of London. Unfortunately for him this was just at the time when the insurance business was being taken to the cleaners and he lost his entire investment and more before he pulled out and left his front man to carry the can. Today's little jaunt was to put him back into the black and give him enough capital to start again in another business.
At thirty-eight he was the oldest of the four men and the definitely the boss. From his position in the passenger seat he turned to study the other three. He eyed Leroy Masters in the rear seat, who's hands and eyes were fluttering nervously and then his icy stare turned to Darryl Walker.
“Who is he?”
The English was precise and without accent. Kevin Walker, who was the more intelligent of the twins, saw immediately that Khorta was unhappy. He answered for his brother.
“Mitael, this is Leroy Masters. You asked us to get someone special and Leroy was free.”
“I asked you to get someone who would do as he was told and not ask questions. I did not ask you to bring me a junky”
Leroy Masters bridled.
“Who you calling a fucking junky, man. I don't have to take that shit from anyone.”
His hand was reaching forward to the door handle when an automatic pistol appeared under his nose as if by magic and Khorta's voice, soft with menace, filled the car.
“You make just one move and I will kill you where you sit. I know a junky when I see one and you carry all the signs. What are you taking, Crack?”
Masters clamped his mouth shut and turned to look out of the window. Khorta leaned over and banged the end of the barrel against his cheek just under his right eye.
“I said, is it Crack?”
The West Indian nodded, still staring out at the car park.
&nbs
p; “Will you need to take some more to do this job?”
Another nod.
“Have you got some?”
Masters nodded again. Khorta sighed. It was partly his fault. He had asked the Walkers to find the fourth man for this job, as he did not want to use any of his own former acquaintances. Most of them were now in prison or retired now anyway. The result was that he was stuck with this piece of useless trash, as the job needed four men. He sighed and then nodded.
“OK, but you take it before we get there and you only have one smoke. I don't want any hyperactive clown on my hands. Do you understand?”
Masters nodded and looked relieved. Khorta turned back to Kevin Walker.
“OK, head for Swindon. When we hit the outskirts head for the new shopping centre down where the old engine works used to be. Drive into the multi- storey car park and park on the ground floor if you can. I have a Ford Transit there that we will use to do the job. OK, lets go!”
Nothing happened and Khorta remembered that these boys were from the north. He sighed.
“OK Kevin. Just get on to the motorway heading north and I will direct you from there.”
Charles Andrew Pardoe was a bank manager of the old school. Only ever seen in a pin stripe grey suit complete with silk pocket handkerchief, he only attended personally to those clients with large balances or overdrafts, while the day to day customers he left to his Assistant Manager and the counter staff. However, today being a Thursday morning, despite his usual immaculate appearance he was a just a little nervous. His biggest and most valuable customer was the Chandler Mail Order Catalogue Company, situated some two miles away on the local industrial estate and Thursday was their wages day. Pardoe had other big stores and factories on his patch, but what made Chandler's different was that half of its some nine hundred employees worked in the warehouse and packing areas and insisted on weekly payment by cash in hand. That meant a large weekly cash pick up from his bank. The other half of Chandler’s staff was paid monthly by credit transfer and for three weeks of the month he didn't have to worry about them. But this Thursday was the first of the month and the monthly staff had just received their pay slips. This meant that many of them would be in to cash cheques during the lunch hour. What with one thing and another he currently had more than four hundred thousand pounds on the premises. For a small branch it was a lot of money.
Pardoe glanced at his watch. Normally they came to collect the cash between half nine and ten o'clock, in order to give their own staff enough time to make up the wage packets for distribution to the work force at about four o'clock. However, when he had arrived at his office this morning the telephone had rung and the chief cashier of Chandler's had informed him that they would not be coming to collect the money until midday. The security company they used to collect the money had suffered more than the usual amount of mechanical trouble this week and were running late. He had suggested to the chief cashier that they send a car for the money, but all he had received in return was a flea in his ear. Chandler's paid a professional company to take those sorts of risks, not their office staff.
He glanced at his watch again, nine thirty and time to open the doors to the public. He was about to go out into the main banking hall when his phone rang again. It was the chief cashier at Chandler's again. They had changed their minds and would be sending an unmarked van along sometime in the next half an hour to collect the money. They didn't like doing it, but they had to if they were going to get the five hundred odd pay packets made up on time.
Charles Pardoe breathed a sigh of relief as he put the phone down. When he had first entered the banking world after leaving university he had been as ambitious as anyone else. His first position with the bank had been as a counter assistant in one of the big West End branches where promotion comes a lot faster than out in the sticks. He remembered that he had been working on the queries counter on that particular day when a man had come in to enquire about opening a business account. Pardoe had taken the enquiry to the Assistant Manager who had instructed him to bring the man along to his office, and he had done so. But after he had shown the customer into the Assistant Managers office and was turning to return to the enquiries counter, the man had produced a pistol. Holding it against Pardoe's head he had instructed the Assistant Manager to call in the Manager. The ensuing half an hour had been an agony for him as the man and his by now several accomplice's had methodically emptied the vault of all its high denomination notes. All the while it was happening the pistol was held gently, but firmly against Charles Pardoe's left ear. They had then left by the back door after tying and gagging all the staff. Since then he had spent the next thirty-five years waiting for the other shoe to fall. What he didn't know was that today would be the day it happened.
He went out into the main banking hall, a pretentious name for a bank with only three service counters although being an old branch it did have a marble floor. He smiled and said good morning to Mrs Goldstone who was one of the clients he always saw personally. Her husband had twice been the Mayor and he had just retired after selling off one of the biggest private building firms in Swindon. He spoke to her twice, but she didn't even acknowledge him, her eyes fixed firmly on the door. He followed her stare and saw with some annoyance that the main door hadn't even been opened yet and it was a good five minutes past opening time. He turned to castigate his assistant and then stopped dead. How had Mrs Goldstone got in? The tap on his shoulder nearly killed him from heart failure. With trepidation he turned and saw the tall figure dressed in denims and a black leather jacket, wearing a ski mask over his head and wrap around sunglasses. He swallowed and tried to talk, but his throat was dry and scratchy from fear. The figure pointed the barrel of a pistol straight between his eyes and then spoke in a quiet even voice.
“Get the key and open the vault quickly and no one will get hurt. Play the fool or hero and people will probably die.”
He pointed to the main hall where another identically dressed figure could be seen and from his exposure to various TV programmes Charles Pardoe knew that what the man was holding was a pump action shotgun with the barrel sawn off halfway down. He looked around the other way and saw a third man behind the counter holding an identical weapon to the head of his Assistant Manager. It was happening to him again. He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out his keys. He indicated his assistant.
“David has the other key. The vault needs both keys to open it.”
The gunman turned to where the four female clerks were standing in a group against the office wall, white faced. He pointed to the eldest of them, a woman in her late thirties.
“Get the key from him and come with us.”
The woman went over and taking the key from David's trembling hand came to join them. The gunman visibly relaxed.
“OK, lets go do it.” And they headed for the rear of the building where the giant wall safe was situated.
In the main hall Mrs Rachael Goldstone just couldn't believe this was happening to her. All her life she had been protected from the nastier side of life. Firstly by her parents who had let her go only to private schools, and then by her husband, Solomon. How could this be happening to her? She had only come in to draw out a few pounds before going down to the butchers to order half a steer for the freezer. Jack Manning the butcher always gave her a five percent discount if she paid him cash. She suspected he only did it to fiddle his income tax, but why should that worry her and it made a trip to the bank worth it. As usual she had timed her arrival at the bank to coincide with opening time as she knew she could get served then without standing in any queue. She had not even seen the masked men, who must have been waiting for the doors to open before making their move. The first she had known of it was when she heard someone tell her to freeze and she had turned to find herself looking down an enormous metal tube. When her shocked mind finally realised it was a gun barrel she had nearly fainted on the spot. She had recovered somewhat when she realised that the man was telling her that she
would not be hurt if she faced the wall and kept still and quiet, but that had been quite a few minutes ago and now her sixty eight year old legs were getting tired of standing in one place supporting her sixteen stones. She felt her heart flutter and the tightening in her chest that meant she was about to suffer an angina attack. She could not reach her handbag as the masked man had taken it from her when he had turned her to face the wall and it was now on the floor somewhere behind her. She did not dare to turn around to try and get her pills so she began to try deep slow breaths in the way the hospital had taught her. She slowly lifted her right hand onto a nearby leaflet stand and gratefully allowed it to take some of her weight.
Stood by the main door Leroy Masters was desperate for another burn. The tall bastard that Kevin had called Cota, or Carter, had allowed him a quick pipe of crack before they had entered the bank, but the effect was wearing off rapidly. He felt the sweat pouring down his face under the woollen ski mask and tried to prevent his hands from trembling with the weight of the sawn off shotgun. A pity about the two customers, but the old woman and the kid had been waiting outside for the bank to open and had to be brought inside with the rest of them. He turned his head to study the kid who was stood facing the wall with his hands on his head as instructed. A tall black youth of about seventeen, he had not seemed at all phased when he was hustled into the bank by three armed men. He let his gaze stray over to where Darryl was holding the Assistant Manager and the remaining three counter clerks. One of the girls was a long legged, Marilyn Monroe type with blonde hair and a great pair of tits that would have kept anyone happy. He wouldn't mind giving her one. He let his imagination go to overtime rate.
As Mrs Goldstone lost consciousness her weight sent the glass shelved leaflet stand over. The sound of it hitting the old fashioned marble floor was deafening in the confines of the silent bank, it sounded like a cannon going off. Already twitchy from nervousness and drugs, Leroy Masters whirled around from watching the blonde girl and bringing the sawn off shotgun up all in one smooth motion, fired at the movement he could see from the corner of his eye. Mrs Goldstone, falling a split second behind the leaflet stand, was still only half way to the floor when the blast from the shotgun blew half her head away in a shower of blood, bone and brains and blue rinsed hair.
The following silence was broken only by the stifled scream and the muffled sobbing of the blonde as she stuffed her knuckles into her mouth to try silence herself. She was trembling violently while the rest of the staff stood frozen in shock like well made wax dummies. Masters looked down at what remained of Rachael Goldstone in disbelief and then spun around to Darryl Walker like a wild and frightened animal.
“It was an accident man, I didn't realise she was just fainting. You heard the crash. I thought a fucking gun had gone off. I couldn't help myself, I just reacted.”
“You stupid junky bastard.”
The icy voice came from Khorta who had raced back from the vault at the sound of the shot. Without hesitating he raised his pistol and shot Masters, who was backing away with the shotgun held out in both hands in front of him like a shield, straight through the right eye. The impact of a thirty eight-calibre bullet fired at such a close range blew out the back of Master’s skull and drove the body over backwards. Hitting the marble floor it skidded along for several feet until it came to a stop and lay still on its back. From where the back of his head had been, a rapidly spreading red pool met and began to mingle with the blood of Rachael Goldstone. One of the counter clerks fell face down without a sound onto the hard floor in a dead faint, her skull making contact with the marble floor producing a sickening sound. All though a couple of them twitched, nobody moved to help her as the rest of the staff desperately ignored the incident and stayed frozen, trying their hardest not to draw the attention of the killers to themselves
“Lets get out of here.”
Khorta moved towards the door lugging the two holdalls, one of them obviously much heavier than the other. Darryl Walker was still in a state of shock at the two sudden and violent deaths he had witnessed, but as Khorta moved rapidly towards the door he quickly backed out after him waving his shotgun at the shocked staff, none of whom had the slightest intention of trying to stop them leaving. Outside in the street Kevin Walker was sat in a dark blue Ford Transit van with the engine running. It had been almost four minutes since his colleagues had entered the bank and by now his hands were becoming slippery with nervous sweat. Then he'd heard the dull boom of the shotgun, followed by the sharper crack of the handgun and would have left there and then if his brother had not been inside. He almost wept with relief when the door opened and he saw them come out. He put the Transit into gear and gunned the engine.
As pre-arranged Darryl dived into the back of the van and Khorta threw the sports bags in behind him before shutting the door and racing around to the passenger door. He had opened it and was about to climb in when Kevin spoke.
“Where is Leroy?”
Khorta didn't waste words.
“Dead. Lets go.”
The police constable came out of nowhere to hit him with a rugby tackle just below the waist and the two of them went down to the pavement. They struggled for several moments kneeling face to face on the pavement until Khorta lashed out with the pistol and caught the other a crashing blow to the temple, forcing him to let go and sending him flying onto his back. Scrambling to his feet again Khorta looked down and met the stare of the now frightened and half stunned copper. He was about to try and climb into the frantically revving Transit for a second time when he realised that in the scuffle with the law he had lost his dark glasses. He turned again and met the clearing gaze of the policeman who was now in a sitting position, holding his head to try and staunch the bleeding from the jagged wound the pistol had left.
“Sorry friend.”
He raised the pistol and shot him twice in the chest. Then he climbed into the van.
“Lets get away from this fucking mess.”
The Transit rocketed of down the road leaving twin black streaks of rubber. Eventually those few of the public who had witnessed the incident unfroze and started to move like a snapshot coming to life.
The return to the car park and the swap back to the Granada Scorpio, their original wheels, were made in absolute silence and without any further incident. By this time they had taken off their masks and were just three more men carrying sports bags, the world is full of them. The Transit was left parked on the very top floor of the car park where it would take a systematic search to find it. It was all completed in silence and they were clear of Swindon and back on the motorway in the Granada before anything further was said. Darryl, this time with the back seat to himself, had not been able to bring himself to look Khorta in the eye since the shootings. Kevin, again at the wheel, was made of sterner stuff. He waited until Khorta had finished counting the money before he spoke.
“How much?”
“A lousy one hundred and twenty thousand. There would have been nearly four hundred thousand if we could have had another couple of minutes.”
“What happened back there?”
“Your junky friend blew half of an old ladies head away when she was careless enough to faint. Ask your brother. Christ, don't you idiots know any better than to rely on junkies.”
Kevin protested.
“It wasn't all our fault, Mitael. We didn't know he was a bloody junky. You asked us to recruit someone that couldn't be traced back to us. We reckoned you always intended to kill the fucker anyway.”
Khorta scowled.
“Of course I did, but not in the bank for Christ's sake.”
“So why not wait until we were clear”
“When you work it out for yourself you will think yourself lucky I didn't. Can you imagine what would have happened when the copper jumped us? That smoke brain would have blown away half of Swindon with that pump shotgun.”
Darryl broke the ensuing silence.
“Did you intend to kill us as we
ll then or was it just Leroy who was disposable. After all, he can't be traced back to you, but if anyone remembers us talking to him in the pub the other night, he could be traced back to us.”
It was a long speech for Darryl and he fell silent afterwards. Khorta turned and looked him directly in the face trying to hide his surprise that the man had managed to work out something that complicated. He wasn’t usually that sharp.
“Don't be a bloody fool, Darryl. The only major job you two ever got away with was with me. Did I cross you up the last time? Stop worrying about him. He was a junky and they are unreliable. If he were in this car with us now you would already be worrying about him. Remember how much he just cost you.”
Darryl shrugged. The car was pulling into the motorway service station where they had left Khorta's Volvo. Khorta held up the two sports bags that held the cash, divided equally. The third bag with the weapons had already been dumped in the canal miles back, although they both knew Khorta had kept his pistol. Darryl took the bags and opened them. They seemed to hold equal amounts.
“We'll take the black one. Less noticeable than the bright red one.”
Khorta got out lugging the red bag.
“See you fellows some time.”
He waved his hand and walked away towards the Volvo. The Walkers raised their hands in return and Kevin dropped the car into gear and pulled away. Khorta watched them go and then climbed into his Volvo
The Walker twins were back on the M5 where it cuts through the outskirts of Birmingham. Kevin had switched on the radio and was tuning it to a music channel. They were both slowly beginning to relax when its small electronic timer exploded the two pounds of Semtex moulded into the base of the sports bag. As Darryl was holding it on his lap at the time it killed them both instantly, blowing the roof of the big Ford saloon high into the air and turning the rest of it into a white hot inferno of blazing petrol and plastics, from which only the charred remains of two broken skeletons would later be salvaged. It would take the police several days to identify who the bodies belonged to and only then because of dental work they had undergone during their last time in prison. As luck would have it no one else was hurt in the explosion although some fifty other cars witnessed the blast, many of them suffering some damage from the hail of shrapnel it produced. The three lanes of traffic coming along the southbound lanes saw the explosion and gripping their steering wheels tightly, prayed that no vehicle coming from the opposite direction would mount the barrier and cross into their lanes. Their prayers were answered although there were at least three collisions as the southbound drivers realised that the giant snowflakes they were driving through were actually high denomination banknotes. Several of them stopped to release the bounty that was stuck to their windscreens, causing further mayhem. In total the M5 was blocked for several hours and at one time the tailback reached thirty miles in both directions.
Mitael Khorta drove the stolen white Volvo all the way to Bangor and left it in a public car park where he had the night before parked his BMW 530d. Consequently it was well after eleven o'clock that night as he drove back into Bristol that he heard over the car radio a report of a suspected car bomb on the motorway up near Birmingham. He smiled grimly at the announcers concern that it might be the result of renewed Al-Queda activity.
Vengeance Page 10