6.The Alcatraz Rose

by Anthony Eglin

  “It would appear so.”

  “I’m not blaming you, Lawrence, if that’s what you’re thinking. In a couple of weeks I’ll be none the worse for wear and let’s hope that’ll be the end of it. It’s you that worries me.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Let me finish, because there’s one more thing worth mentioning.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Lately, I’ve noticed a car that’s been cruising or parked in our neighborhood. A silver Volvo XC90, newish. At first, I thought nothing of it—a new resident, probably. But now I’m wondering if I should have been more suspicious—made note of the license plate. I’m thinking that I might have been right.”

  “Meaning that they were watching us?”

  “You, more likely. This means that they could’ve followed you and Emma down to Gloucestershire, to Payne’s house, for whatever that’s worth.”

  Kingston reached for the Côtes du Rhône and topped up their wineglasses. He knew that Andrew was closer to the truth than he wanted to admit and had decided that further discussion along these lines would serve no purpose.

  “I must tell Emma right away,” he said. “She has to know.”

  Andrew nodded.

  “You’ll be okay, for tonight?”

  “Sure. I can move around slowly. I’ll take some more codeine before I hit the sack.”

  “Would you like me to have Mrs. Tripp come in tomorrow? She could fix you lunch and dinner.”

  “No, thanks. She’s a wonderful woman, but all her fussing will give me the collywobbles. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. I’ll give you a call in the morning. Let me know what Emma says. I’d like to see her again one of these days.”

  Kingston nodded. “I’ll work on that.”

  “Oh, and by the way, do please thank Mrs. Tripp for the scones.”

  Ten minutes later, in his office, he had Emma on the phone.

  “Hello, Lawrence. Didn’t expect to hear from you so soon. What’s up?”

  “Sorry to call so late. Something nasty happened tonight that you should know about.”

  He told her about Andrew getting roughed up, and the threat by the man who’d attacked him. She listened without interrupting, a characteristic that he had come to appreciate.

  “Is this the point when we turn the whole thing over to your people?” he asked, when finished.

  Emma hesitated before answering. “From what you just told me, the Met is already involved. But chances are that unless they start asking more questions about the veiled threat and your indirect involvement, it will be shelved as just another altercation in a city that has thousands a week. On the more serious side, the fact that someone has a tail on you—and me, too, probably—moves things up a notch or two. Someone’s obviously getting a little more than fidgety about our sniffing around and wants to put a stop to it.”

  “What do you suggest we do, then? Call the whole thing off ?”

  “If we ignore the threat and keep digging, we run a real risk of getting the same or worse treatment. If the information that this person, or persons, is trying to protect is such that it could destroy his reputation or his life, then he’s not going to stop now. You may be right, Lawrence. We may have reached the point where we have to tell my former boss or your friend Inspector Sheffield what’s going on.”

  “Do you want to do that? I mean, make the call?”

  “Let’s sleep on it. I’m expecting the results of the Brian Jennings search any day now. It’d be nice to know who he really is and what he’s done.”

  “If anything.”

  “That’s always a possibility.”

  Kingston smiled. “You could always try Facebook.”

  “Oh, sure. Here’s a bloke who’s spent most of his life as a recluse with a phony name, and he’s going to post his life story on the Internet looking for ‘friends’ and ‘likes’?”

  “It was a bad joke.”

  “I know. But when it comes to that stuff, I’m old-fashioned, too. Fifteen minutes of fame for anyone living and breathing who has a computer or smartphone.”

  “Couldn’t agree more. We’re reaching a point where we love our phones more than we love each other.”

  “By the way, on a cheerier note, I’m coming up to London again next week, on Tuesday. It’s a little short notice, but I’d like to return the favor and treat you to lunch before you take off for the States. You’re still leaving on Thursday, I take it?”

  “Yes, Thursday’s the day—and I’d enjoy that very much.”

  “I’ve heard that the Tate Gallery restaurant is very nice, and I haven’t been there since I was in my teens.”

  “It’s closed for refurbishments, I’m afraid. But we can find somewhere nearby. Shepherd’s is good.”

  “Whatever. I leave it up to you to decide. You’d better not trust me when it comes to restaurants.” She chuckled.

  “I just remembered something. When I saw Andrew tonight, he asked about you.”

  “Is he going to be okay?”

  “Yes, he’s fine, though I doubt very much that he’ll be up for lunch. But time permitting, we could stop by afterward, just to say hello. Cheer him up a bit.”

  “I’d enjoy that. I’m free after eleven thirty. Let me know where and when we should meet.”

  14

  WHEN ANDREW OPENED his front door on Tuesday afternoon, his face revealed in full daylight, Kingston could see that his cheek bruise was still purplish, while the abrasion on the other side of his face had improved measurably, and his lip was no longer swollen.

  Lunch with Emma at Shepherd’s had not disappointed, even though most of their conversation had been devoted to Andrew’s misadventure and to speculation as to the future of their nascent investigation of the Alcatraz rose.

  After a few words of welcome, Andrew ushered Kingston and Emma into his contemporary-furnished living room, where they sat and exchanged pleasantries for a minute or so.

  “So how was lunch?” Andrew asked. “I’ve never been to Shepherd’s.”

  “It was very nice, I must say,” Emma replied. “For me, one of the treats in coming up to London is the restaurants. Lawrence tells me that you’ve wined and dined your way through a good deal of them and that you’re a regular Gordon Ramsay in the kitchen. I don’t mean that in an expletive sense, of course,” she smiled.

  Andrew shrugged modestly. “I wouldn’t go that far. And talking of wine, could I offer you something to drink?”

  “Thanks, but no, Andrew. We just polished of a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.”

  “Lawrence?”

  “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

  “So what do you make of my being duffed up, Emma?” Andrew asked. “I imagine you’ve seen a lot of this type of thing in your day.”

  “I have. After pub closing, it’s commonplace, usually over something trivial and nearly always resolved on the spot. Yours is different. Perpetrated as some kind of threat of further action takes it into a more serious category of misdemeanor. But in your case, with the assailant gone, and no vehicle identification, it’s hard, if not impossible, to follow up. You were right, though. I think we can agree on one thing: There’s no question that your being assaulted was meant to be a not-so-subtle warning for us—Lawrence and me—to cease all further activity where Reginald Payne is concerned.”

  Andrew sighed, shaking his head. “It’s about bloody time. He won’t listen to me, but maybe you can knock some sense into him.”

  Emma nodded and glanced at Kingston. “I’ve been working on it.”

  Kingston listened silently; it was futile to protest or raise any pleas of defense, even signs of resentment.

  “So what do you plan to do now?” Andrew asked Emma.

  She looked at Kingston.

  “We’re pulling the plug,” he replied. “We talked about it at lunch. There’s really no choice.”

  “That makes me happy,” Andrew said, looking anything but. “Which doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to
find the bastard, and whoever he’s working for.”

  “It’s frustrating for both of us,” Emma said, “because we were starting to make progress.”

  Kingston was pulling on his earlobe. “With our dropping out, I doubt we’ll ever find him. The only person who might have been able to help is Grace Williams, and there’s no welcome mat there anymore, not unless she has a divine manifestation of some kind.”

  “I don’t think she’s the sort,” Emma said.

  On the word “sort,” a phone started ringing. It took a couple of seconds for Kingston to recognize the musical ringtone: the first bars of “Without You.” Emma’s phone, he realized. She got up, taking it from her blazer pocket as she walked across the room to the window, where she stood with her back to them, though still within earshot.

  “This is Emma . . . Oh, hello Paul.”

  Kingston and Andrew watched for a moment, as she moved to the other side of the window, lightly holding the curtain, looking out. As much as Kingston would have liked to eavesdrop on the conversation, he knew that Andrew would—and rightly so—find it inexcusable manners. Instead, he attempted to make small talk with Andrew in a voice not loud enough to distract Emma yet low enough to catch the drift of her one-sided conversation.

  “You did—that’s great,” she said, starting to pace slowly across the end of the room, now oblivious of Kingston and Andrew. She stopped suddenly.

  “Good grief. I should say . . . Jackpot is right . . . Are you sure about this?”

  She looked down at the carpet for a second. “It changes everything . . . Thanks for doing this for me, Paul . . . and please keep me posted on how it develops.”

  By now Kingston and Andrew had given up trying to talk and were exchanging quizzical looks.

  “Yes, I will for sure,” she said. “Thanks again.”

  She turned off the phone, put it back in her pocket, and stood for a moment staring into middle space before turning and coming back to join them.

  “You won’t believe this,” she said, her expression ambiguous.

  “Good news, I hope,” Kingston said, trying, but not succeeding, to mask his curiosity.

  “Putting it mildly. That was Paul Anderson. He’s an old friend on the Gloucester force. He put a trace on Brian Jennings, and guess what?”

  Kingston shook his head. “What?”

  “You’ve heard of the Great Highway Robbery?” Emma asked.

  “Of course,” Andrew said. “Who hasn’t?”

  “Well, our mysterious Mr. Jennings, it turns out, was one of the ringleaders.”

  Kingston was speechless.

  “I needn’t remind you, I’m sure,” she continued, “that they never found him—or any of the money.”

  15

  OCTOGENARIAN ROSE FANCIER, reclusive gardener, and one of Britain’s most wanted. It was like a bad movie script, Kingston thought.

  “The Great Highway Robbery.” Andrew shook his head. “I can’t believe it.”

  “It’s true,” Emma said. “Moneywise, it was the second-largest heist in British history: sixteen million pounds in today’s money. The Great Train Robbery, several years later, was the biggest.”

  Kingston frowned. “But it was when? Back in the fifties? Surely—”

  “There’s no mistake, Lawrence. Paul said that Jennings was twenty-two at the time, which would make him close to eighty right now—about the same age as Reggie is—Reggie was, I should say. It all fits. The years he was missing, where his money really came from, why the anonymity, Beechwood—all of it.”

  “Look, I can understand the significance of this,” Andrew interjected, “but will someone tell me what led up to this? What have you two been up to behind my back?”

  “Very little,” Kingston replied. “All we did was interview Payne’s sister, and found out that in his late teens he played in a band in Harrow. I got lucky and found an old jazz groupie who knew the band at the time. He said the lad’s name wasn’t Payne—it was Jennings, Brian Jennings. Emma persuaded a former colleague to put a trace on him, and Bob’s your uncle!”

  From his befuddled expression, it was clear that Andrew was not buying Kingston’s glib explanation. “This is becoming like a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Wouldn’t this Grace woman have known this all along? She was his sister, for God’s sake.”

  “Seems clear now that she did. And who knows what else she’s covering up.”

  “It could explain why she skipped off to Canada for twenty five odd years, too,” Kingston added. “But none of this is going to help us much now. She refuses to have anything more to do with us.”

  Emma was wearing her policewoman expression. “Now that it involves a much more serious criminal matter, all that could change. There’s still Payne’s murder, though; we can’t lose sight of that. Now that we know who he really was, we can’t overlook the possibility that whoever did him in might have been connected to the robbery. Paul said that there were six or seven in the gang, two never apprehended, and that there were other shadowy characters who played behind-the-scenes roles in the crime, too. None of them was ever identified or caught either.”

  Andrew leaned forward. “This is getting very complicated.”

  “And it’s going to get even more so. I think we’ve only scratched the surface,” Emma said, looking at her watch. “I think I should call a cab, Lawrence. I don’t want to miss the four o’clock train.”

  “But—”

  “I know,” Emma said, her patience clearly exhausted. “There’s a lot to talk about. But the next one’s not until six. And we won’t solve any of this tonight, of that you can be certain.”

  Ten minutes later, with Emma gone, Kingston and Andrew sat with glasses of Bass Pale Ale trying to weigh the ramifications of her bolt from the blue. Kingston remembered sketchy details of the Great Highway Robbery, but Andrew, being younger, was only vaguely familiar with it. Kingston related his hazy recollection of that rainy afternoon in Berkshire, nearly sixty years ago, when £800,000 was hijacked from an armored security van.

  “Well, it looks as if your Alcatraz rose will remain a mystery—for now, anyway,” Andrew said, when Kingston was finished.

  “You’re right. The damned rose.” Kingston sighed. He had almost forgotten about it, what with everything else that was suddenly happening. “One thing’s for sure. I’m convinced more than ever that Brian Jennings, alias Reggie Payne, wrote the notes in that book. That he’s a link between the rose and the robbery.”

  “Why don’t you have the handwriting analyzed? Compare it with Reggie’s.”

  “Good idea,” Kingston said, then frowned. “Though I seriously doubt that Grace Williams is going to part with samples of his handwriting. By now it would be difficult to find his writing elsewhere, I would imagine.”

  Andrew wasn’t finished. “But why would he give the book to Letty’s mother?”

  “We don’t know for sure that he did. Just because it was found on her bookshelf doesn’t mean it was hers. As Emma insists, it could have been given to her husband, or bought at a boot sale, for that matter.”

  “Have you considered that Letty’s mother could be tangled up in this somehow? She did disappear, after all.”

  Kingston frowned. “You mean that she was mixed up in the robbery? Fiona?”

  “Yes.” Andrew nodded.

  “That’s not possible. The robbery took place in the late fifties. I don’t think she’d even been born then. If she had, she was a toddler.”

  Andrew looked exasperated as he stood and picked up his empty glass. “I meant later on, but just forget it. I don’t know why we’re even discussing it anymore. Isn’t it case closed now, as far you and Emma are concerned?”

  “It rather looks that way, I’m afraid,” Kingston replied, adding silently to himself: For the moment.

  Back in his flat, the hum of the vacuum cleaner reminded Kingston that Mrs. Tripp was there. With his brain still whirring like a Cuisinart, the last thing he was in the mo
od for was a detailed report on her cat Tinker’s health issues. He would be polite, yet forceful, make a pot of tea, and disappear as quickly as possible into his office, where he would scour the Internet, searching out every website he could find that had information about the Great Highway Robbery.

  Fortunately, he didn’t have to visit many sites. He quickly found that Wikipedia had devoted more than a dozen pages to the subject, covering just about every aspect of the crime. Skipping pages and data irrelevant to his purposes, he printed out ten pages and started to read them carefully, discarding insignificant passages, charts, and graphics as he went. Ten minutes later, he’d culled and edited them down to seven pages. These, he condensed further, ending up with a clear picture of the crime itself—and Brian Jennings’s role in it.

  He took a long sip of tea and started to read once again:

  Summary

  The Great Highway Robbery is the name given to the £800,000 (evaluation of £16 million in today’s money) armored van robbery committed in April 1957, in Berkshire, England. The bulk of the money was never recovered. Although members of the gang and one of the guards inside the van were armed with handguns, no serious injuries resulted. It is listed as the second-largest robbery by value in British history. The Great Train Robbery, approximately ten years later, ranks first. Much of the information provided here was obtained from transcripts of the trial, individuals connected with the case, various law enforcement press releases, and newspaper articles, letters, biographies, and books written by both investigators and three of the robbers.

  The armed robbery

  The robbery took place at 3:15 on April 15, 1957, on a quiet stretch of road near the village of Ruscombe, situated between Swindon and Reading. On that day it was raining heavily. The armored van, transporting thirty canvas bags, containing £800,000 in English banknotes of varying denominations, collected that day from eight regional Berkshire and Wiltshire banks, was on its way to a central reserve bank in London. Three uniformed guards were assigned to the small van. A driver and his assistant occupied the front cabin, and a third guard, carrying a sidearm, sat in the rear with the sacks of money.