by Echo Freer
‘Hin ’ere, dear,’ a woman called.
Tentatively, Mercedes pushed the Bakelite door handle and entered a large room that was lined with shelves, all heaving with an unruly assortment of books, ledgers and files. They seemed to be in no sort of order but were falling at angles as though they’d been tossed randomly and filed wherever they’d landed. An enormous desk in the centre of the room was barely visible beneath the reams of paper that cascaded on to the floor. Mercedes looked round in disbelief: Spinks Organisation? Disorganisation, more like!
On second thoughts though, this would do nicely. She recalled an old joke her father had once told her: Where do you hide a stolen elephant? Answer: on a game reserve! As a child, she hadn’t understood but, standing in the midst of this wastepaper fest, it had suddenly become very clear - concealing the documents in this mess would be as easy as hiding a blade of dried grass in a haystack. All she needed was a few seconds on her own.
There was no sign of Harley but an older woman was standing behind the desk with her back to the window. Mercedes was struck by the incongruity of the woman’s appearance. She had dyed orange hair and scarlet nails, yet she was wearing a navy blue trouser suit that would not have looked out of place on board a Royal Navy destroyer and she had a cigarette dripping from the corner of her mouth.
‘Take ha seat, darlin’. ’Arley’ll be wiv you hin a mo.’
Mercedes looked round for somewhere to oblige but there wasn’t a seat to take that wasn’t under at least four inches of papers. Perhaps, she thought, this was her chance? She lifted up the sheaf of letters, files and folders from one of the wooden chairs by the bookshelf and was about to lower herself on to the seat when she saw the dust on the back of the chair. So much for wearing a cream suit to work. Still, there was nothing else for it. She dropped her carrier to the floor, sat on the filthy seat and placed Harry Spinks’s papers on her lap. She hoped her brothers would, one day, appreciate what she was doing for their sakes.
‘She won’t be ha sec,’ the woman puffed at her through the smog of her cigarette, ‘ ’er dad wanted ha word before she left.’
Her dad! It hadn’t occurred to Mercedes that Harry Spinks might also be there. A swarm of butterflies scrambled for take off in her stomach. She would not be sorry when all this was over.
The telephone rang and the woman behind the desk picked it up. ‘Good hafternoon, Spinks Horganisation.’
Whilst she was speaking, Mercedes slipped the folder of evidence out of the carrier bag and pushed it into the middle of the pile on her lap. By the amount of dust on the chair those files probably hadn’t been touched in months, so she was fairly sure no one would notice an extra one. So far, so good.
‘ ’Arry!’ the woman bellowed in the direction of the landing. ‘Hit’s your waife!’
Mercedes had seen Harley’s mother at school functions and had often felt sorry for the woman. Quite pretty, in a drab sort of way, she usually trailed her husband and daughter at a distance of a few feet, merging into the background like a shadow. Mercedes listened as the orange-haired woman spun the caller a well-practised pack of lies.
‘Yays, she’s getting hon fine, Fay... Yays, I’ll be very sorry to see ’er leave tomorrow... Don’t know what I’ll do without ’er next week.’
Harry entered the room and forced a grin at Mercedes. ‘Orright, darlin’?’
Mercedes smiled as disarmingly as she was able. ‘Is Harley ready yet, Mr Spinks?’
‘Nearly ready, swede ’art. She’s a bit emotional what with tomorrow being ’er last day working wiv Rita and all.’ Emotional? Mercedes wondered what emotion that would be. In her experience, Harley Spinks’ emotional spectrum extended from anger to abject outrage with nothing else even featuring. Before she could ponder further, her question was answered. Harley appeared in the doorway and tossed a handful of twenty pound notes at her father.
‘You can take your poxy money and stuff it! I ain’t going!’
‘Angel...’ Harry began.
‘And I ain’t no angel, neither!’
Never a truer word spoken, Mercedes mused.
‘ ’Arry,’ the orange haired woman cut in, ‘Fay wants ha word.’
‘What’s she want?’ Harley screamed. ‘If she’s bleedin’ well checking up on me again...’
‘Swede ’art, that’s no way to speak about your mother.’
‘She’s always on my bleedin’ case!’ Harley took a swipe at the wastepaper basket.
Harry rubbed his hand across his forehead and sighed. ‘Tell ’er I’ll ring ’er back, Rita.’
Mercedes watched the drama playing out before her as Harry dropped on to his hands and knees and began picking up the money whilst his daughter kicked out at anything within a seventy-deniered leg’s length. Rita turned her back on the scene and appeared to be whispering something diplomatic into the receiver when another phone rang from underneath the papers on the desk.
‘Look, I think it would be better if I went,’ Mercedes suggested, pleased to have an opportunity to escape. ‘Maybe we could do this another time?’
‘ ’Ang on darlin’, ’ang on,’ Harry said, his tone beginning to show the strain. He scrabbled through the papers on the desk trying to locate the source of the ringing.
‘No, just clear off! I never wanted to go shopping in the first place,’ Harley spat. ‘And if you think I want to end up looking like some jumped-up extra from ER with an off-white skirt and off-white jacket and stupid off-white surgical gloves, you can think again.’
OK, so the gloves were not Mercedes idea of trendy either, but they’d served their purpose and there was no way she was going to admit that to Harley.
‘It’s called haute couture,’ she explained, hoping to blind her with foreign phrases. Then added, with feigned regret, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, you dropped French, didn’t you?’ She ducked as a well aimed hole-punch whistled by her head and crashed against the shelves sending several folders tumbling to the floor. Mercedes took her cue to leave. She stood up and replaced the pile of papers and folders, including the file with the faked evidence in it, back on the chair. ‘Mr Spinks, I can see that you were right when you said Harley was feeling emotional, so I really think it would be better if I left now.’
Harry picked up the phone. ‘ ’Old on, will you?’ he said to the caller, then covered the receiver with his hand. ‘Orright darlin’; probably best.’
‘Yeah! Good riddance!’ Harley sneered, picking up a stapler. Then, when the words had fully registered she turned on her father. ‘Emotional? What d’you flamin’ mean, emotional?’
Mercedes gave the pile of papers one last glance, checking that the folder with the Boreham’s Bank information was in place, and then turned towards the door just as the metal stapler hit the wood of the desk.
‘Hey, Mercedes!’ Harley called.
Mercedes hesitated, anxiously. This could be one of three things. Harley was either taking aim ready to impale her on a paper knife, or had spotted the file, or was going to issue some cutting remark to try and beat her on the bitching stakes. Casting a glance at the chair she could see that it was undisturbed and Harley’s hands appeared to be free of missiles, so her money was on the latter.
‘Yes?’
‘That poncey suit you’re wearing’s got a dirty great smudge across the back of it. Shame!’
As she was about to reply, her attention was attracted by the scene behind Harley. Harry Spinks was on his knees amidst an ocean of stationery, whispering harshly into the phone. ‘I told you not to call here again... I don’t give a monkey’s... This is between you and the Twerp Twins, mate...’ And, call it intuition, but Mercedes was fairly sure that he was making reference to her own brothers. Which meant that, unless she was barking up the totally wrong tree, the person on the other end must be the grass that she’d heard Frankie talking about. She hove
red, pretending to look in her bowling bag for something.
‘Thanks for letting me know, Harley,’ she said, not paying the slightest attention to her schoolmate. ‘I’d better drop it into the cleaners’ tomorrow.’
Harry continued in hushed tones. ‘No chance, mate... You got a problem, sort it with Batman and the Boy Wonder.’ And then he let out the faux pas that she’d been waiting for. ‘I told you, you’re the only one what can crack the code, you plonker!’ And he slammed down the phone.
So, Sid was the double-crossing turncoat, was he? She didn’t know what she was going to do with the information but one thing was for certain, it would be of some use to somebody at some time over the next thirty-six hours, she’d put money on it.
‘Bye!’ Mercedes called, eager to put as much space between herself and the Spinks family as possible.
But, no sooner had she reached the bottom of the stairs than Rita’s voice echoed down the narrow hallway. ‘ ’Ere, you’ve forgot something.’
Mercedes heart stopped. No! It couldn’t be! She couldn’t have been rumbled already.
‘I don’t think so.’ She looked up and held out her hands, innocently. She was aware that she’d stopped breathing. It was too awful to contemplate that the last week might all have been in vain.
‘What’s this then?’ Rita held out something that, in the dingy light was difficult to make out but - Mercedes’ heart sank - it looked suspiciously like the folder.
The disappointment was too much; she was just going to have to resign herself to finishing her education in a young offenders’ unit. It was as though her feet had donned lead trainers as she slowly made her way back up the dismal staircase. But as she neared the top she could see the object that was being flapped in her direction was not, as she had feared, the folder with the information, but the carrier bag she had brought it in.
‘Thanks!’ she blurted before almost running down the stairs and out of the door. As she strode purposefully towards Oxford Street and the Tube, she took off her gloves and tossed them into a litterbin then dusted down her skirt, letting out a long sigh of relief. How her brothers had sustained a life of crime for so long was beyond her. If this was an adrenaline rush, they could forget it. She’d rather poke herself in the eye with one of Nick the Bubble’s Kalashnikovs than go through that again. But still, she was on the home straight now.
Sid checked his watch. It was ten to twelve. He put the top back on his thermos flask and watched as Pete, his young colleague, unwrapped the foil from his packed supper and bit into the cheese and pickle sandwich that his wife had made.
‘You not eating yours yet, Sid?’ Pete asked, his eyes glued to the film that was showing on the miniature television on the desk. It was next to a row of larger CCTV screens but, while the screen Pete was watching had scenes of screeching cars and people running in terror, the security screens showed a variety of rooms and corridors all totally devoid of human activity.
Much as Sid would have loved to be tucking into the pork and apple sauce sandwiches that his wife, Betty, had made for him, he knew, of course, that there was little point. In just under ten minutes’ time anything that went into his stomach now would be coming back up with the help of Tone’s boot. He just hoped the lad wasn’t too conscientious about his work.
‘Saving mine till later, mate,’ Sid replied, ignoring the echoing rumblings from his digestive system. Then preparing the way for what he was about to suggest, he said, ‘Cor, my knee ain’t half giving me some gyp tonight. That eleven o’clock round’s done it in again. You wouldn’t mind doing the honours with the midnight round, would you mate?’
’Course not,’ the younger man agreed. ‘But can it wait till this finishes?’ He nodded at the television.
‘What time’s that then?’ Sid felt himself begin to sweat.
‘Ten past.’
Sid’s heart was racing. Ten past was no good. Pete had to be well out of the way and at the top of the building long before that. He unscrewed the flask and poured himself another cup of tea; his mouth was beginning to go dry with fear. Sid was starting to regret getting involved with this whole business. He should’ve been satisfied with what he had. He and Betty hadn’t been that badly off before. All right, so he was pretty mad about being made redundant after all those years but he was still employable; he’d landed this job, hadn’t he? It wasn’t ideal but it had been OK here for a while. But oh, no - he had to go shouting his mouth off down the Snitch and Snake in Plaistow, didn’t he? Moaning to Gary, his old mate, about how the money was peanuts and how he was working in a bank and could read the combination of the safe, so he could get in there and nick a big wodge if he wanted.
Him and his bragging! Of course, the next thing he knew, Gary’s boss and his brother had gone round there to have a little chat and make him an offer he couldn’t refuse. All he’d been able to think about had been a long overdue trip out to Sydney to see their daughter Lorraine and her little girl. Their granddaughter was nearly seven years old and they hadn’t even seen her yet - well, only on video.
But, what he hadn’t known at that stage and what made matters a thousand times worse, was that the landlord of the Snitch was in arrears on his ‘insurance’ payments. So, instead of finding the cash from somewhere, he’d managed to get Harry Spinks off his back for a couple of weeks by offering him a little gem of overheard information in lieu of protection money. At first, Sid had thought that the whole thing looked pretty cushti - he was going to get two lots of money - one for doing the job and one for passing on the info. But now reality was starting to dawn. What if it went wrong? What if they got nicked? Getting a bit of a kicking is one thing, but getting banged up for a twelve stretch - well, that put a very different complexion on things.
He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow. ‘Sorry, mate. It can’t wait really.’
‘Aw - come on. Who’s going to know if I’m a quarter of an hour late?’ Pete stuffed the last crust of sandwich into his mouth.
Sid took another sip of tea and cleared his throat. ‘There’s cameras on us too, mate. The bosses’ll know.’ As long as he kept calm he’d be all right. He must keep a clear head.
‘Tell you what, if you can manage this one, I’ll do all the rest of the rounds - how’s that?’
Sid checked his watch; it was five to. Pete should be setting off now and yet he was still glued to the television. Sid loosened his tie and ran his fingers round the inside of his collar. The basement suddenly seemed to have developed the atmosphere of a sauna.
‘Can’t do it, mate. My knee’s been playing me up something rotten ever since I did the last one.’
Pete was becoming irritated. ‘Bleedin’ ’ell Sid - I’ve been watching this for an hour and a half. It’s not much to ask.’
Sid was sure he heard a car engine running outside. Maybe he was imagining it. Pete hadn’t responded, but then it was hardly an unusual event, to hear an engine running in the West End on a Friday night. He was getting paranoid. Although if Pete didn’t get in that lift and disappear up to the seventh floor pretty soon, the reality would be a whacking great hole in the wall and both of them getting a good going over.
‘What’s the big deal? You know that his brother done it,’ Sid said.
Pete sprang from behind the desk angrily. ‘No, actually, Sid, I didn’t know that his brother done it! Cheers!’ He snatched the heavy blue jacket from the back of his chair and put it on. ‘I don’t believe you sometimes.’ He pressed the button for the lift and the door opened immediately. ‘If you’ve just done this so you can watch my telly... I’ll... I will not be amused, Sid!’
The lift door shut removing Pete from the scene and propelling him to the seventh floor from where he would begin his descent, checking every room on every corridor for the next fifteen minutes. Almost simultaneously, Sid heard noises at the other side of the wall. T
huds sent a shudder through both Sid and the building then, within seconds, the bricks from which all but a few millimetres of mortar had been removed at the casino side, caved into the bank like a crumbling house of cards. They were off!
This was the moment Sid had been dreading; the moment he’d told Harry Spinks that he’d changed his mind about and had tried to negotiate a small fee and a ticket to Spain for the information he’d provided without having to be involved any further. But Harry wasn’t buying it. ‘And who the ’ell d’you think’s going to crack the code, you plonker, if you’ve ridden off into the paella sunset?’
So, here he was and, even though he had been expecting it, the sight of two men in boiler suits and ski masks bursting into the basement of the bank caused Sid to put down roots and become paralysed to the spot at the security station. He stood, helpless with terror, as Tone ran to one side of the basement and sprayed paint on the security camera. Then, like a rabbit with myxomatosis caught in the headlights of an oncoming death-wagon, he stared, petrified, into the barrel of Frankie’s AK47.
‘Move it!’ Frankie barked, waving the semi- automatic gun at Sid in a threatening manner - just for the benefit of the security cameras in the last few seconds before the paint dried.
But it was as though Sid was on intravenous Botox: not a muscle moved.
‘I said - move it!’ Frankie repeated.
Nothing. The other two men hovered, nervously. Sid remained behind the security desk, his eyes wide.
As soon as the cameras had been obliterated, Frankie took off his ski mask. ‘It’s me - remember? Now get over to the safe. We ain’t got all day.’
Suddenly, Sid sprang into life and began flapping his arms in the air like an inept boy scout practising semaphore.
‘For Gawd’s sake! This ain’t the flamin’ Oscars.’ Frankie thrust a pair of thin rubber gloves at Sid and almost dragged him across to the safe door. ‘Get a grip,’ he said, gruffly.