twenty minutes before, and she might like to check it on her way out. She took the first exit corridor she came to on the mall, used her code to pass through the fire door, and descended the concrete stair into the basement and out onto the loading platform.
Fifty yards to the left a couple of men in overalls were unloading a truck reversed against the dock. The Armacorp van was parked about the same distance in the opposite direction and on the other side of the service road, engine running, warning lights flashing. She walked in that direction and made out the driver behind the green armoured glass of the front compartment, waiting, and then saw him looking into his side mirror as two other guards, wearing uniforms and visored helmets and laden with bags, emerged from the doorway of a service stairway. They dropped the bags into a hopper in the side of the truck, one of the men spoke a couple of words into the radio clipped to his tunic, and they strode on to the next service stair, the van following slowly after them.
Kathy lifted her phone and reported to Brock again. ‘I’d say they’re nearly finished. Looks like they’re on the final stair.’
She walked on along the loading platform towards the exit ramp, past the security truck, giving the driver a wave as she went by. It was a shock, after the continuous sunlight of the mall, to realise that it was dark outside, the day over. Somewhere out there across the bleak, wet carparks, Brock and Bren and their teams would be huddled inside their cramped vehicles waiting for a decent excuse to go home.
She reached her car eventually, after forgetting where she’d left it. There seemed to be an incredible number of vehicles on the site, and as many coming in as leaving.
Her phone rang as she started the engine.
‘Kathy? Brock again. What’s happened to the security truck?’
‘I don’t know. Hasn’t it left yet?’
‘We haven’t seen it.’
She drove back to the mouth of the service road and parked on the roadside, running back down into the basement. The truck was still where she’d last seen it, lights still flashing, driver still sitting behind his bullet-proof windscreen drumming his fingers. She went up to his side window and showed her warrant card.
His voice squawked through a loudspeaker. ‘What’s the problem?’
She spoke into the microphone. ‘You okay?’
‘Yes. My crew’s been delayed upstairs. One of the big stores wasn’t ready for them. Rushed off their feet they are.’
The driver was nervous, she could see.
‘Big takings today?’
‘Biggest day of the year this is. Bigger than the sales. We picked up almost ten million this time last year. Reckon this year it’ll be more.’ He went on drumming his fingers, then said something into his radio, waited, shook his head. ‘They’re not picking me up. Reception’s bad down here.’
‘Want me to go up and check?’
‘Yeah, that’d be good. Thanks. I can’t step out of here. They’re on the upper level. Two blokes in uniform. Tell them to get their fingers out. Base is getting stroppy.’
Kathy went through the door the men had used, wondering what to say if she met some of Harry’s security people, but the stairway was empty all the way up to the top floor, making the bustle of the crowded mall seem all the more chaotic when she reached it. It took her ten minutes to check the main stores within range of the service stair. All confirmed that they’d handed over their day’s takings to the two Armacorp security guards at least twenty minutes before. With a growing sense of unease she ran back down the stair to confirm that the security truck was still there, still waiting for them, then she rang Brock.
Afterwards, recalling what happened next, Brock had a sense of events unfolding with a desperate slowness, as if, no matter how hard they tried to speed them up, they could only unravel at a predetermined pace. Having called for assistance, Brock had his team close the exits and check every shopper-exhausted, frustrated, quarrelsome and broke-as they tried to leave by car or bus. Meanwhile the rain descended more heavily, the wind picking up viciously.
The stream of traffic arriving at the upper site entrance closest to the motorway became blocked by some exiting vehicles trying to detour around the police checkpoint, and the resulting queues of incoming cars developed so rapidly that they had tailed back down the exit ramps and onto the M25 before anyone could control them. A number of tailgate smashes in the ensuing chaos ensured that the London orbital motorway was soon brought to a complete halt in the southbound direction, which didn’t help the armed robbery squad and Armacorp support vehicles attempting to reach the site from the north. Police and TV helicopters circling overhead completed the atmosphere of catastrophe.
In Silvermeadow itself, while police searched the retail floors for any sign of the two missing guards, Brock conducted a stilted interrogation of the Armacorp driver, who still refused to leave his locked cabin without instructions from base, and who stared out at the figures surrounding his truck like a worried goldfish in a green glass tank. This was only the third time he’d been out with the two other crew, he said, and though he didn’t know them well, he found it hard to come to terms with the idea of them making off with the final load of cash.
‘How much?’ Brock asked, and got the tinny reply, ‘A million? Maybe two.’
Each of the half-dozen staircases would have yielded something like that from the blocks of shops they served, apparently, four or five times their normal Saturday takings. Despite the amounts involved, the collection arrangements here, in enclosed and secure service areas, were considered relatively low-risk, and the difficulties that conventional bandits would experience in making a getaway added to the sense of security. The possibility of two guards laden with cash bags conspiring to walk off into the blue didn’t seem to have been taken all that seriously.
‘How do you know it’s only the last load they took?’ Brock asked.
‘Because I saw them deposit the previous loads in the cash hopper.’ He pointed over his shoulder, and Brock bent to examine the steel door built into the side of the truck.
He straightened again and spoke at the microphone. ‘You saw the actual cash?’
‘No, no. The bags.’
‘Maybe we should check what’s in them, eh?’
‘Can’t.’
The whole essence of the security system was that no one, neither driver nor crew, could open the secure box built into the vehicle’s body. Once the cash bags were in there through the hopper, only base could access them again.
It was almost half an hour before the Armacorp base vehicle, escorted by a police patrol car, managed to weave its way through the road chaos and scream, lights flashing and horn blaring, down the service road ramp. Four men got out, three very bulky and menacing, and one diminutive, wearing rimless glasses and a leather coat and looking like a Hollywood version of a Gestapo officer, Brock thought. The driver of the security truck at last consented to open his door and step down, saluting the new arrivals with pointed dignity. They conferred briefly with Brock, then the small man, screened by his minders, entered the rear of the vehicle like a sinister midwife to release the treasures from its belly. These comprised forty-three cash bags, some containing coin, some bulked out with crumpled paper and cardboard, all devoid of banknotes.
Not long after this detectives radioed Brock to report that they had encountered a locked cleaners’ store, located just off the first of the service stairs which had been used by the security guards, and the door latch wouldn’t budge, apparently jammed shut with superglue.
When he joined them Brock recognised the smell that hung in the air of the corridor outside, a smell familiar from the firing range.
‘Hercules powder,’ one of the two detectives, a gun freak, said to him, sniffing the air like a connoisseur.
‘Sure,’ the other said sceptically, lifting the ram to swing at the door.
‘No, straight up. Bullseye, I reckon. Yer Vectan and yer GM3 are sweeter, like. Know what I mean?’
‘Bullshit,’ the other grunted.
‘Get on with it,’ Brock said, and the man nodded and swung the ram against the lock. It burst open on the second swing, revealing the foot of the first of the two bodies on the floor inside.
From their positions in the cramped space, it appeared as if the two men had been forced to crouch on their knees among the buckets and bottles. Their black tunics, with the Armacorp flashes and radios, had gone, as had their helmets. They had knelt with their backs to the door, and a bullet had been put into each head at point-blank
