The fourth man had come along at the right time with his business plan. ‘Fifty million pounds for each of us the first year. By the second year, it should be up to eighty million.’
Lord Allerton, the third man in the quartet, had not been successful in life. There was the stately home, the wife and family, his position in society, and enough money to survive as long as they let in the tourists at the weekend to gawp at them. He had joined an investment bank on leaving school; his title had ensured a good salary, but he had not been successful. A weakness in mathematics meant that deal after deal went wrong. He had tried his hand at writing a history of the family, tracing it back for eight centuries, but the book had been poorly received. His father had been a war hero, his grandfather an admiral, but what had he achieved? Nothing, and it irked him.
The fourth man’s proposal, abhorrent as it was, promised untold wealth for little effort on his part. The peer knew that he was an honest man, but he had seen enough honest men with little to show. He threw his hand in as well.
The fourth man outlined the details. Each of the four would put in one million pounds. He, utilising his criminal connections, would do the rest. The other three knew that he had embraced crime as a profession, white-collar crime, and he had been successful. His name was not well known, not even to those who worked for him, nor to the criminal community in general, and very few had met him.
He reflected after listening in on the phone conversation of Hughenden, O’Shaughnessy, and Walters that one man did. He knew that Alex Hughenden had done a good job, and he did not have anyone to replace him, not yet, but the man was to be interviewed by the police, and what if he grassed, the same as Pinto? What then? Hughenden did not know his name, but it would not take a competent police officer long to find him. He knew what he had to do.
***
For a week there had been no sign of police activity. It was as if the heat was off. Devlin O’Shaughnessy knew only too well the crimes he had committed; he was after all an intelligent man who had been slammed up in prison for a crime he did not commit, although there were plenty that he had. It had seemed at the time that the police wanted him behind bars, and if they couldn’t get him for one crime, they’d get him for another.
A friend of his in Bayswater had told him that no police had been seen close to where he had lived. O’Shaughnessy, who had become interested in art in part due to the influence of Alex Hughenden, in part due to his innate desire to better himself, needed to visit his home.
After two weeks of living out of a suitcase, moving every few days just in case, he needed to reacquaint himself with his personal belongings. He knew the risk. Steve Walters, his offsider and a man who had no interest in the better things of life, thought he was crazy and told him so plainly enough.
‘You’ll never understand,’ O’Shaughnessy said, as he drank a pint of beer with Walters.
‘You’re in for life if they catch you.’ Walters, not an educated man, knew the realities.
O’Shaughnessy and Walters had met a year ago. A chance meeting, although fortuitous for all three. Hughenden, owner of a small shop in Notting Hill trading in antique jewellery, knew when the two men had entered his shop by the rear door that he could use them. Hughenden, respectable and beyond reproach at the front door; crooked at the back door.
A small lane by which those who had stolen from the rich to give to the poor, in that case Hughenden, had increased his wealth.
Those who came in the front door paid well; he made sure of that, but they were always arguing over the price and the quality and the state of their finances. Little did they know that after Hughenden had reworked what others had stolen, those items often ended up in the front of the building.
He had taken great pride when one tiresome woman had walked out of the shop thinking that she had purchased a bargain. Only five thousand pounds, she thought.
Hughenden, who knew her through the church, could only smile, knowing full well that what she had just purchased had been stolen from her six months previously and extensively reworked. Hughenden knew he was a master of his trade, and in the years that the store had been open, he had only been visited by the police once. And that was not about stolen goods, at least not his, just assistance in appraising a gold bracelet that had been found under the floorboards in the home of a thief now in custody.
O’Shaughnessy had been the easiest to win over, as Hughenden realised that notwithstanding his heavily-tattooed appearance, he was a man who appreciated the finer things in life. That was why he had let the ex-prisoner stay in one of his investment properties. Hughenden knew that it would be safe. Walters, strictly criminal class, had given him concern initially, until O’Shaughnessy, who had spent many a night drinking with him, told Hughenden that he trusted
