The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime Volume 8

by Maxim Jakubowski

  We collect Melinda and take her to another, larger hotel, surrounded by busy streets, bus routes and underground stations.

  I hand her a key-card and a holdall. “Go to room two-one-one. Here’s a change of clothes and some cash. Take off everything you own – jewellery included. Get dressed in the new stuff and leave the hotel through the rear cark park.”

  She takes the key. “What then?”

  “Just keep walking,” says Reece. “Don’t look back. Your trail needs to be clean.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if they get to us, they’ll surely get to you.”

  It’s cold and brutal, but she needs to see the facts.

  “You need to make a fresh start,” I explain. “Temporarily, anyway. Go to the beach, get a new job, invent a new name and background. It sounds drastic, but with those two still out there, it’s the only way. It won’t be for ever.”

  She still looks doubtful. “What are you going to do?”

  “Go after them.” We don’t really have a choice. It’s no good going to the police, and while Collinson and Pullman are out there, they’ll always be a threat – to us as well as Melinda. They’ll never let up.

  For them, it’s become part of the game.

  The only thing they haven’t reckoned on is that we know how to find people, too. However good they are, or where they go.

  And like I said, we don’t always take them back.

  Melinda blinks and tries a smile. It’s shaky, but comes out right in the end. “Okay. But when it’s finished, how do I find you?”

  “You won’t have to. We’ll come find you.” I give her my best cheesy smile. “It’s what we do, remember?”

  THE HARD SELL

  Jay Stringer

  THEY’D BEEN BROUGHT together by Ed Baker, the only real long-con player in the Midlands. People said he never got involved in anything that had fewer than ten moves.

  There were five of them at the meeting:

  Jake Nichol, former pro wrestler. He’d got as far as the big two in America before dropping out. He never quite made it, but he did get pinned by Hulk Hogan.

  Returning to England, Jake got put away for holding up a petrol station without a gun. The cops eventually found him with a mashed-up banana in his pocket. He went in a failure but came out a minor legend.

  Tom McInnes. Young and green, he was making a name at short con. Nobody liked him because he had the charm of a dead rat, but he was willing to learn. He had some nervous disorder and was always moving or twitching.

  Jamie Prescott. He talked a lot. He did it well. Put him in a suit, he was the smoothest lawyer you’d never seen. Put him in overalls, he could convince you he could turn your car into a spaceship.

  The strangest member of the group, the one everyone’s eyes kept drifting to, was Claire Gaines. She was the youngest daughter of Ransford Gaines. Everybody in the room was scared of Ransford Gaines and they all decided to be scared of his daughter, too.

  They sat around a pool table in the back room of Ed’s favourite pub and waited until he arrived. Jake leaned back and swigged from his bottled beer.

  “You know the problem with modern wrestling?”

  “No, go on,” Tom took the bait.

  “It’s the endings. Everybody knows how it’s going to happen, like.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s all fake, innit?”

  “Of course it is, but that’s like saying a movie is fake. You get someone good in that ring and it’s like a great film, or a great song, it’s telling you a story. It’s making you feel something, or that’s what it should do. It doesn’t, not any more.”

  Jake’s speech was interrupted when Ed finally arrived. He was wearing a suit and carried a laptop. He looked like he was about to do a presentation at a board meeting. He set the laptop on the pool table.

  “Have you all heard of the safety deposit con?”

  Two heads nodded, one shook.

  Claire didn’t seem interested.

  “Okay. It’s been around forever. Until a couple of years ago, I thought it was a myth.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “I tried it, up in Glasgow.”

  “Wow,” said Jake, impressed.

  “So, you get two guys dressed as security guards. You take your two guys to a bank, on a busy street, and you cover up the deposit box with a metal sheet. Hold it in place with whatever cheap glue you can find, but it needs to look real.”

  “You did it with a metal sheet?”

  “No, actually, I did it with hazard tape. Covered the deposit box and crossed over it with the tape, like a big X. But I think metal looks better.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, you’ve got your two security guards, you’ve got the safety deposit box sealed, and you’ve got a sign put up saying the deposit box is out of order.”

  “You never mentioned the sign,” said Claire.

  “I’m mentioning it now. The trick is, you see, that you’ll get all sorts of people coming to deposit their money. It depends on the timing, but if you do it on a Friday, just before five o’clock, you’d get a lot of impatient shop workers. They want to drop their cash and be done with their day. If you do it at the right bank, you can do it on a weekend, and get people who are in a hurry to be done with their week.”

  “And they just give it to you?”

  “That’s the job, you have to make them believe you’re a security firm acting on behalf of the bank. They put their cash into whatever you’re using – a metal briefcase, maybe, or a security van – and you give them an official-looking receipt. They go on their way, and so do you.”

  “It’s one of the first scams I ever heard of,” said Jamie, “No way does this work.”

  “I swear, I thought the same thing. But I tried it.”

  “And you made good?”

  “Five grand.”

  “I need another drink,” said Claire.

  After another round of drinks, Ed tapped the laptop again.

  “You want us all to work the security con?” said Jake.

  Jamie didn’t like the idea. “Where’s the money in it? I mean, five grand is good, and would pay for that nice shiny laptop of yours and maybe a Chelsea season ticket, but it won’t pay for five of us to be involved.”

  “You talk as if five grand is nothing,” said Jake. “You’re young.”

  Ed raised his hand and nodded at both Jake and Jamie in turn.

  “Okay. Jake, Jamie, you’re both right. But what if I told you I have an idea to make a hundred grand out of it?”

  He had everyone’s attention at this point.

  “Jamie is right, basically. It’s a short con, and there’s no fortune in it. I wanted to find a better angle. Do you know the trick to the long game? It’s finding the human interest. In this case, everyone always looks at the trick itself. I bet, even as I told you about it, you were thinking about the job. About which bank to hit, who to put in uniform, and how much money you’d get in your case when you walked away.”

  Jake nodded.

  Jamie shrugged.

  Tom twitched.

  Claire drank.

  “You know what I thought the first time I heard of it? I wanted to know what happened to all those people.”

  “The people you stole from?” Claire said in between her drink and a raised eyebrow.

  “Exactly. What happens to them? All these people putting their hard-earned cash into my briefcase. It’s their money and I got to keep it. So what happened to them?”

  “Banks cover it, don’t they?” said Jamie, “I mean, like if a bank vault is robbed, or if someone uses your identity to scam money, the bank’s insurance covers it, right?”

  “They do. That’s why I did the job, to watch and see. And in every case they paid up. To the exact penny. Banks can’t afford any bad publicity right now.”

  “Good for them. I don’t see the profit in it though. I mean, we steal a bit of money, the bank pays back a bit of money, and everyone goes h
ome happy. But we’re still only up by five grand.”

  “But what if we were the ones being stolen from?” said Claire.

  Nobody spoke for a moment.

  “Exactly,” said Ed. “We combine the short and the long con. We go through with it as normal. We also provide some victims. Some expensive and trusted clients. Say, for instance, the daughter of Ransford Gaines. The bank will cover whatever amount she was to have written on her receipt.”

  Everyone set their drinks down and didn’t pick them up again.

  “Brilliant,” said Jake.

  “Fucking brilliant,” said Jamie.

  “I don’t get it,” said Tom.

  “If that’s the end of your presentation,” said Claire, “what was the laptop for?”

  Ed picked it up and dropped it; it made a hollow plastic thud.

  “Case in point. It’s all about making people believe in what you’re doing.”

  Everyone nodded. Everyone drank several more drinks. The last two to leave, Ed and Claire, sat on the pool table talking through the plan.

  “You’ll need to find out which bank your father has most of his money in and, if you haven’t already, open an account with them.”

  Claire looked at Ed over her final drink.

  “You’re scared of me, aren’t you?”

  “I think we all are.”

  She had very dark eyes.

  “You can kiss me, if you want to.”

  ***

  On the 1st of April, Ed Baker walked into the bank in Solihull and opened an account.

  He opened it with a deposit of three thousand pounds and over the following month he paid in another two. Five thousand pounds in a month was enough for the bank manager to earmark him as an important customer.

  Claire Gaines already had an account. She’d been having large sums of money paid in on a regular basis from her father’s account, and similar sums going out.

  Living is expensive.

  On the 1st of May, at four in the afternoon, an unmarked van pulled into the alley beside the bank.

  Josh and Tom, dressed as security guards, took a thin metal sheet from the back of the van. Using cow gum glue they fixed it into place over the deposit box. Ed had given them a sign with the bank’s insignia printed at the top, stating that the deposit box was out of service. Ed had even put the bank’s phone number on.

  Jake didn’t like that last touch because it made him nervous.

  “Everybody’s got a mobile,” he said. “It won’t take them nothing to ring and check before depositing the cash.”

  “Relax. It’s just like the laptop, it’s all for show. They’ll see the number and they’ll assume everything’s okay. I promise you they won’t call.”

  “And if they do?”

  “Run like hell.”

  “We get to carry guns?”

  “Nah. You ever see a guard carry a gun? Not over here. Nobody will give you money if you carry a gun. Unless you’re pointing it at them.”

  At quarter past four, they got their first drop. A local shop owner making his weekly drop. He put seven thousand pounds in the case.

  Jake wrote him out a receipt on official bank slips.

  At twenty past the hour, Ed Baker walked up. He was wearing his best suit and he made a point of walking past a couple of cameras near the bank. He stopped to chat with a traffic warden. Outside the bank, he let the security guards explain the situation to him. They pointed to the sign. Ed opened his briefcase and handed the bigger of the two guards, the one who was writing the receipts, four bundles of plain paper. The paper was cut to look like bank notes. The fake money was locked in the case and Ed walked away with his receipt.

  Between twenty past and half past, they received two more drops totalling thirteen thousand.

  Claire was late.

  It had been arranged that she would turn up at half past, and be the last customer. At thirty-one minutes past, maybe thirty-two, the guards were due to get into their unmarked van and drive away.

  By thirty-four minutes past, Claire still hadn’t turned up. Ed had never heard of this job going longer than thirty-five minutes, which is why he’d planned it the way he did.

  There was some scientific study he’d heard of once, where scientists proved that neutral observers will watch crimes like this for twenty minutes before calling the police. Violence or murder, or crimes committed against themselves, they’ll call straight away. But if they are watching something like this, they will wait twenty minutes before it annoys them enough to call the police.

  At thirty-six minutes past the hour, with Claire still not turned up and Ed starting to sweat, a police car cruised past. It stopped at the traffic lights, ten feet away from the bank, and sat there while the light stayed at red.

  Tom’s nervous tic kicked in, and Josh began deep breathing.

  When he’d wrestled in front of crowds, he’d learned that the only way he could get by was to block out the crowd. Think through the script, think a few moves in advance, and you’re not thinking of what’s going on outside the ring.

  He blocked the police car out.

  He thought about Claire turning up, they’d talk for a minute. She’d deposit her fake money. Tom would put the case in the back of the van, Jake would pull down the metal plate, and they’d drive away.

  That’s what he thought about.

  The lights took forever to change. The police looked right at the bank, one of them made eye contact with Jake. He nodded a stranger’s greeting, uniform to uniform.

  The lights changed and the car drove on.

  Ed was no longer keeping track of the time when Claire turned up a few minutes later. Even from the safety of a coffee shop across the road, he was preparing to run. Claire strolled up, carrying half a dozen shopping bags.

  “There was a sale on.”

  She deposited her fake money, and collected her genuine receipt.

  She was barely ten feet away when Jake and Tom pulled away in the van.

  ***

  Police were called. By the time they got there, all they could do was canvass for witnesses and speak to the bank management.

  The bank’s security cameras picked up the whole thing, but it was impossible to make out the features of the security guards. They did pick out the faces of the people depositing their money, and the cash as it was handed over.

  Everyone held their breath and waited.

  They didn’t have to wait long. Three working days later, the first of the shopkeepers noticed that the money hadn’t appeared in their account, and they came in to complain. Not long after that, another victim came in; bringing a copy of the local newspaper that ran the story of the crime.

  It was a full week after the crime that Ed Baker came in with a receipt for ten thousand pounds and demanded the bank cover his loss. The bank was still reeling from that blow when, the following week, Claire Gaines visited the manager. She brought with her a young ambitious lawyer by the name of Jamie Prescott. She produced a receipt showing that she had, in fact, paid two hundred thousand pounds into the bank that day.

  Her lawyer not only pointed out the bank’s liability, but also how much he would enjoy making his name out of suing them if they refused to cover the loss.

  ***

  “And they paid?”

  “They paid.”

  Claire, Jamie and Jake were sharing a drink in one of Ransford Gaines’s restaurants. It was after hours, they could talk about whatever they wanted.

  “It took some major bluffing,” said Jamie. “For a while I thought they were going to call us on it.”

  “I just had to mention my daddy’s name a few times, the manager shit himself.”

  “Hey, don’t talk down my contribution. That was my best suit that I wore, and my best legal bullshit.”

  Jake called a taxi and left while Claire fetched drinks. She sat down close to Jamie, toying with her glass.

  “Does your dad mind you doing things like this?”

  “Oh
no. He’s always offering me work. But, you know, it’s impossible to make your own name when your dad is one of the most feared men in town. I can’t get a normal job, and I don’t want to work for him. I mean, he’d let me run any of his places, like my sister does, but I’d hate it, and the staff would hate me.”

  “Must be tough.”

  “It is. I keep trying to find something that’s all my own, you know? Even this, the whole thing revolves around cashing in on my daddy’s name.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You’re scared of me, aren’t you?”

  “A little bit.”

  “You can kiss me, if you want to.”

  ***

  Once Ed gave the all clear, they met in the old church hall.

  Four guys, one woman, several beers and a pile of money.

  Tom and Jake had been first, bringing in the twenty thousand pounds they’d collected on the day. They emptied the money out on the table, piling the bundles as high as they could for the best effect. Ed was next, bringing a crate of beer and a briefcase holding twenty-five thousand pounds.

  They sat and drank for an hour, talking about football and films. They tried not to show how worried they were that Claire was, again, late.

  It was just over an hour later when Claire and Jamie walked in. They were carrying a suitcase each. Two hundred thousand pounds; they set it on the table.

  Everyone who wasn’t already drunk caught up.

  Jake drank the most but didn’t really show it.

  “You guys know the problem with modern wrestling?”

  “Yeah, you said it was because it was fake.” Tom thumped the table.

  “No, I said it was the endings. Everyone knows how a match is going to end. The finishing moves are all that anybody bothers with.”

  “But isn’t that what they pay for?”

  “No. They pay for the drama, we sell them a story, the hard way. The little guy, the monster, people giving in or people going the distance. It’s about guys who have no right to win, but do. It’s—”

  “It’s about selling tickets. It’s about money.”