Ransom Town Read online

  RANSOM TOWN

  Roderic Jeffries

  © Roderic Jeffries 1979

  Roderic Jeffries has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  This work was originally published under the pseudonym Peter Alding.

  First published in 1979 by John Long.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter One

  They finally broke through into the bank’s strong-room at four-fifteen on Monday morning, 9 June, barely inside their deadline. By then Barnes, an exaggerative pessimist, had been telling them for well over two hours that the job was bust and for well over two hours they’d taken it in turns to tell him to belt up.

  Allsopp, the originator of the job, was the first to wriggle his way inside: the other four followed closely because although each man claimed to trust his companions, each wanted to make quite certain none of the others made a quick dive unseen.

  The strong-room was fifteen feet long, twelve wide, and nine high. The walls and ceiling were painted a light green, supposedly to offset any tendency to claustrophobia: across one corner, stretching from wall to ceiling, was a cobweb which had trapped so much dust that the strands looked string-thick. At the far end were shelves which were stacked with suitcases, boxes, small crates, and even holdalls. Customers’ valuables. The contents of those could easily double the amount of the cash, which was their primary objective.

  The notes were in neatly stacked green canvas sacks and it was immediately obvious that there were more of these than their information had led them to expect so that their take was likely to be greater than the projected five hundred thousand. The sacks all had eyelets through which were threaded steel locking bars, padlocked and sealed.

  Allsopp took hold of one of the sacks – it had a pink label, showing it was filled with old notes to be returned for pulping – and began to lift it. Immediately a siren, ululating violently in that enclosed space, began to wail.

  The plans hadn’t listed a weight alarm, set in the floor. Goddamn it, they thought in that first moment of shock, the plans hadn’t listed any such alarm. It wasn’t fair.

  Then they ran. The other alarms which they’d bypassed were connected direct to divisional police H.Q. so almost certainly this one was as well. They had about two minutes in which to get free.

  There was a scrimmage at the hole they’d torn through the reinforced concrete lining of the vault and the brick wall of the cellar beyond because Barnes and Queen couldn’t decide who was going to have the privilege of leaving first. Queen used his feet and won the point and Race somehow managed to get past Barnes. Allsopp was the last out, not on the analogy of the captain leaving his sinking ship, but because the others had beaten him to it. He still had hold of the green canvas sack with the pink label.

  They left the ironmonger’s by the back door and piled into the stolen Granada, parked in the courtyard. Barnes, who could be clumsy at other times, was an expert driver and he had them out of the courtyard in ten seconds. They were just clear and apparently proceeding about their lawful occasions when the first police car, blue light flashing balefully, raced past them in the opposite direction.

  Chapter Two

  Rain lashed the window with a splattering sound and Detective Inspector Fusil stared out to see distorted images. A better than usual November, the long-range weather forecast had suggested.

  There was a knock on the door and Detective Constable Yarrow entered. ‘Some more bumf from H.Q.’ He placed several papers on the desk. ‘By the way, sir, I’ve had word through that the factory job in Blind Lane may have been Old Tommy Manderton returning to business.’

  Yarrow usually managed to irritate Fusil. He was not only bumptious and cocky, two characteristics which always annoyed the D.I., but on top of that he took great care frequently to remind everyone that he was a nephew of the detective chief superintendent at county H.Q.

  Yarrow said briskly: ‘I’ll check up on that report, sir, and let you know the result.’

  Fusil grunted an acknowledgement.

  ‘Terrible weather. What price a quick flip out to Barbados and the sun?’

  What price? wondered Fusil sourly as he watched Yarrow leave. With all the upheavals which had occurred when the Fortrow borough police force had been swallowed up by the county force, it should have been possible to ‘lose’ Yarrow – yet he was still around, still knowing all the answers, even to unasked questions.

  Fusil sighed. Intolerance was said to be an infallible sign of old age. He opened one of the drawers of the desk and brought out his heavily charred pipe and filled the bowl with tobacco. He lit the pipe and when it was burning freely he leaned back in the chair and thought about the amalgamation of the two forces. It was surprising how so much change had resulted in so few changes. He was still in command of eastern Fortrow C.I.D., although now it was called K division and the area had been extended to take in some of the surrounding countryside. Divisional H.Q. remained in the same outdated, overcrowded buildings, and finances were still too tight for any of the long-delayed alterations and modernizations to be carried out – now more necessary than ever because the establishment numbers had been raised. No new typewriters had been issued, nor had any portable tape recorders, the number of civilian clerical staff was even more inadequate in the face of an ever-growing mountain of paperwork. . . .

  He picked up and leafed through the papers Yarrow had left on his desk. Notices, lists, memoranda, requests for information, statistics. . . . An army marched on its stomach, the police force pounded along on its bumf. He came to the last sheet of paper. Origin, Detective Chief Superintendent Menton’s office: question, was there anything more to report on the bank robbery at Mattock Cross which had taken place in July?

  That robbery, so very much less successful than the villains must have planned, had taken place before the amalgamation of the forces and so ‘Babs’ Browning of J division had been in charge of the investigations. Very little progress had been made. Fusil drew on his pipe. He and Browning had joined the force within six months of each other. He remembered that when they’d first met he’d judged Browning to be a person who thought rules were promulgated in heaven: nothing in Browning’s subsequent career had caused him to amend that derogatory judgement.

  When a D.I. took over a new divisional C.I.D. he did so with the advantage of an unwritten, but much honoured, law: the cases still on the books (i.e. unsolved) were omitted from subsequent statistics of crime figures so that in this way one man’s record was not saddled with another man’s failures. The only exception to this was when the incoming D.I. actively pursued such investigation when, of course, the case would have to be brought back into the statistics at the obvious risk of depressing the all-important clear-up rate.

  Fusil held the pipe away from his mouth and watched the thin column of smoke rise, to be very quickly shredded by one of the many draughts which whistled through the room. He’d naturally read the file on the bank robbery within hours of taking over K division. One fact had stoo
d out like a sore thumb – the villains had had inside information. He hated traitors.

  Every time a bank robbery went unsolved, two more were undertaken, because crime, like any other business, followed success. And bank robberies were always potentially violent. So if the Mattock Cross job remained unsolved, sooner or later innocent people might suffer vicious injuries in a subsequent bank robbery as a direct consequence of the police’s failure. . . . He’d taken on the case. He claimed to be a self-honest man, always ready to step back and examine himself and his motives. But inevitably there were some areas which he did not examine very closely because subconsciously he was reluctant to do so. So it was that in this instance he carefully didn’t ask himself whether in truth his decision to keep the case open was not, in part at least, motivated by the far less laudable desire to black Babs Browning’s eye by succeeding where the other had failed. . . .

  He picked up the internal phone and called Campson into the office. ‘Sit down, Sid.’ He didn’t often use Christian names.

  Detective Sergeant Campson sat. He made a quick adjustment to his tie and then folded his arms. A man in his early thirties, he was already beginning to bald so that his hair had receded to leave a widow’s peak over his long, rather pointed face.

  ‘Reference the bank job at Mattock Cross,’ said Fusil. ‘How’s it stand?’ Campson was just as efficient as Braddon had been and he possessed considerably more imagination and initiative, but Fusil would have far preferred to have had his old detective sergeant back. Campson was another Babs Browning – always checking on what was supposed to be done and what was not supposed to be done.

  ‘In what particular respect, sir?’ asked Campson, in his deep, musical voice. He was equally unhappy to be serving with Fusil because sharp unorthodoxy must mean trouble sooner or later.

  ‘You worked with Mr Browning on it: how far did you get?’

  Campson knew Fusil must have read the papers. ‘Not very far, sir. The mob were real professionals and didn’t leave behind a single lead which ripened.’

  ‘There was one which should have done. They were fed inside information.’

  ‘Naturally, we reckoned that. But when we checked the background of the staff there was only one man who looked promising and he turned out to be in the clear.’

  ‘You can’t have dug deeply enough.’

  ‘Mr Browning had us digging down to the bottom and we still came up with the same answers. There’s no shadow of proof of anyone having fed the mob the details of the alarm system.’

  ‘Damnit, a blind man couldn’t miss the signs. The mob knew exactly which wires to cut to immobilize the main alarms and the plans of the original system were kept in the strong-room: the mob didn’t know about the weight alarm which was installed two years later and the plans of this weren’t in the strong-room.’

  ‘There must have been several copies of the original plans.’

  ‘Of course. So where are they? In the architects’ offices? In the installing firms’ offices?’

  ‘We checked out that angle, sir.’ Campson’s voice hinted at a sense of resentment: J division hadn’t been manned by a pack of fools, K division didn’t now contain all the brains. ‘We decided there couldn’t have been a leak either from the architects or the installing firm. So we reckoned the mob were just plain clever at their work.’

  ‘The easy way out!’

  Campson flushed. ‘We thoroughly examined all the possibilities. . . .’

  ‘But obviously not thoroughly enough. I want the bank staff turned over again. Sooner or later, the traitor will panic.’

  ‘You’re going to reopen the case, sir? But we checked and re-checked . . .’

  ‘You and me will get on like a house on fire when you learn that the only time I push a case to one side is when all the villains concerned are under lock and key.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Campson tightly.

  ‘O.K. Get things moving just as soon as you like.’

  Campson stood up. ‘There’s just one thing, sir. We’ve enough work on hand to keep two of each of us busy. If I have to detail men to backtrack on this case some of the current work is going to have to be put on one side. . . .’

  ‘No, Sergeant, no work is going to be put on one side. We’re just all going to work that little bit harder.’

  Campson left.

  *

  The letter arrived in a greyish envelope addressed merely to the Fortrow Gazette so it was opened in the general office to find out to which department it should be sent. The twenty-year-old secretary, who’d just had her hair re-styled and wasn’t quite certain whether she now liked it, slit open the envelope and brought out a folded sheet of paper. She read the typewritten message. ‘Hey!’ she said. ‘Get a load of this.’

  ‘Got another of them, have we?’ said the blonde. ‘The town’s overflowing with dirty old men.’

  ‘No, it’s not like that at all. Come over and read it.’

  The blonde left her desk and crossed the cluttered floor, having to step round a pile of old magazines. She picked up the letter and read it. ‘Twice round the bend,’ she said, with all the certainty of sophisticated inexperience.

  ‘But what department does it go to, Dulcie?’

  ‘Send it to that old cow in Production. It’ll scare the pants off her.’

  She sent it up to Editorial.

  *

  The editor of the Fortrow Gazette, a man who was usually a little less harassed than he looked, read the message for the third time.

  ‘O.F.S.E. needs money to help it fight for justice for the underprivileged so Fortrow’s going to provide it. We’ll set a small fire to prove we’re in business, and then the price is a million pounds. Pay up fast or the fires get bigger, and after each one the bill doubles.

  ‘Use the front page of the Fortrow Gazette to say the money’s ready. We’ll be in touch over the hand-over – make certain all the details of this are exactly carried out. Don’t leave things too long or it’ll get real expensive and a lot of people will find life becomes too hot for comfort.’ It was signed Organization for Social Equality.

  Genuine or the work of a mentally deranged person? The paper received a number of letters from crazy people in the course of every year and so he had had some experience of them: the style of this letter made him think it was not in such category. He reached over for the outside phone and dialled divisional H.Q. When the connexion was made he asked to speak to the detective inspector, to be told that Mr Fusil was out.

  ‘Blast!’ he said, having wanted Fusil’s snap judgement on the letter. ‘Look, ask him to give me a ring as soon as he gets in, will you? The paper’s received a letter which he needs to know about.’

  He said good-bye and replaced the receiver. If the police accepted this letter as potentially genuine, they’d check it for prints so it shouldn’t be handled any more than it already had been. But the Gazette must have a copy for its own records. He called his secretary and told her to get the letter copied, but to be careful to handle it only by its edges.

  Chapter Three

  Fusil studied the envelope and letter, to which was attached a slip saying ‘Checked out for dabs’. There would have been a number of prints and all these would have to be compared against those of the people known to have handled the paper: the odds against finding an unidentified print of consequence was too small to be considered at this stage.

  The postmark was Newcastle and the date of franking that of the day before. The quality of the envelope was ordinary enough for it to have been bought in any one of thousands of retail outlets. The typing was regular and the type clear.

  A fire and then a million pounds or a second, larger fire and after that the ransom was two million. Inconsequentially, he remembered the story of the Arab who was offered a reward and because he was ‘very modest’ he asked only for one grain of wheat for the first square on a chess board, two for the second, four for the third. . . . How many billions of grains were needed for the las
t square?

  Was this the work of a nutter? It was astonishing how many sick people wrote letters threatening, pleading, exposing, or prophesying. But their letters were usually prolix and egotistical in nature and this one was to the point and impersonal. No, he decided, this probably was not from a nutter. He re-read it, very slowly, trying to gain the flavour of the words. Was it from some terrorist organization, as its signature suggested? Apparently. And yet . . . For the moment, he couldn’t fully formulate what caused his doubt.

  He checked the number, dialled the Fortrow Gazette’s offices, and asked for the editor. ‘Bob here. Thanks for getting in touch with me about that letter. We’re checking it through now, of course . . . No, no real conclusions at this stage, but I’ll go so far as to say I don’t think it’s from a nutter. . . . Yes, I’ll be getting on to the anti-terrorist squad. . . . Now that’s one of the things I wanted to talk over. I know you’ll be dead eager to print, but hang back, will you? Look at it this way, Fred. Print the letter and a lot of people are going to get the wind right up, with reason. After all, if someone wants to set fire to a building, he’s tens of thousands of targets to choose from and right now the police haven’t a hope in hell of stopping it. So if I’m wrong and this turns out to be from a nutter after all, then all those people will have been scared half to death for nothing. On the other hand, if it’s genuine we’ve a lot of things to get organized before we can properly cope with the public’s reactions. . . . Yeah, I know I’m asking you to cut your own throat, or suffocate, or whatever. But you play along now and next time a town councillor is found in bed with a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl I’ll give you a head-start on the story. . . . Thanks a lot.’

  He replaced the receiver. He telephoned county H.Q. and spoke to Detective Chief Superintendent Menton, head of C.I.D.

  ‘No, sir, I reckoned to report to you before getting on to London but they’ll tell me if this O.F.S.E. outfit is known to them. Can’t say I’ve ever heard of it before. . . . Yes, I’ll get straight back on to you. . . . Dabs are working on the letter now.’