PART ONE
Chapter 1
The man in gray decided to take the Glen Suite of diamonds at midnight. Provided they were still in the apartment safe and the occupants away. This he needed to know. So he watched and he waited. At half past seven he was rewarded.
The big, wide limousine swooped up from the subterranean parking area with the powerful grace implied by its name. It paused for an instant in the mouth of the cavern as its driver checked the street for traffic, then turned into the road and headed toward Hyde Park Corner.
Sitting across from the luxury apartment building, dressed in a chauffeur’s uniform at the wheel of the rented Volvo Estate, Jim Rawlings breathed a sigh of relief. Gazing unobserved across the Belgravia street, he had seen what he had hoped for—the husband had been at the wheel, with his wife beside him. Rawlings already had the engine running and the heater on to keep out the cold. Moving the automatic shift into Drive, he eased out of the line of parked cars and went after the Jaguar.
It was a crisp and bright morning, with a pale wash of light over Green Park in the east, and the streetlights still on. Rawlings had been at the stakeout since five o’clock, and although a few people had passed down the street, no one had taken any notice of him. A chauffeur in a big car in Belgravia, richest of London’s West End districts, attracts no attention, least of all with four suitcases and a hamper in the back, on the morning of December 31. Many of the rich would be preparing to leave the capital to celebrate the festivities at their country homes.
He was fifty yards behind the Jaguar at Hyde Park Corner and allowed a truck to move between them. Up Park Lane, Rawlings had one momentary misgiving; there was a branch of Coutts Bank there and he feared the couple in the Jaguar might pause to drop the diamonds into the night safe.
At Marble Arch he breathed a second sigh of relief. The limousine ahead of him made no turn around the arch to take the southbound carriageway back down Park Lane toward the bank. It sped straight up Great Cumberland Place, joined Gloucester Place, and kept on north. So, the occupants of the luxury apartment on the eighth floor of Fontenoy House were not leaving the items with Coutts; either they had them in the car and were taking them to the country or they were leaving them for the New Year period in the apartment. Rawlings was confident it would be the latter.
He tailed the Jaguar to Hendon, watched it speeding into the last mile before the M1 motorway, and then turned back toward central London. Evidently, as he had hoped, they were going to join the wife’s brother, the Duke of Sheffield, at his estate in north Yorkshire, a full six-hour drive away. That would give him a minimum of twenty-four hours, more than he needed. He had no doubt he could take the apartment at Fontenoy House; he was, after all, one of the best safecrackers in London.
By midmorning he had returned the Volvo to the rental company, the uniform to the costumiers, and the empty suitcases to his closet. He was back in his top-floor flat, a comfortable and expensively furnished pad atop a converted tea warehouse in his native Wandsworth. However he prospered, he was a South Londoner, born and bred, and though Wandsworth might not be as chic as Belgravia and Mayfair, it was his “manor.”
Like all of his kind, he hated to leave the security of his own manor. Within it he felt reasonably safe, even though to the local underworld and the police he was known as a
“face,” underworld slang for a criminal or villain.
Like all successful criminals, he kept a low profile around the manor, driving an unobtrusive car, his sole indulgence being the elegance of his apartment. He cultivated a deliberate vagueness among the lower orders of the underworld as to exactly what he did, and although the police accurately suspected his specialty, his “form book” was clean, apart from a short stretch of “porridge” as a teenager. His evident success and the vagueness about how he achieved it evoked reverence among the young aspirants in the game, who were happy to perform small errands for him. Even the heavy mobs who took out payrolls in broad daylight with shotguns and pickax handles left him alone.
As was necessary, he had to have a front business to account for the money. All the successful faces had some form of legitimate occupation. Favored fronts have always been the taxi business (driving or owning), grocery shops, and scrap-metal yards. All these fronts permit a lot of hidden profits, cash dealing, spare time, a range of hiding places, and the facility to employ a couple of “heavies,” or “slags.” These are hard men of little brain but considerable strength who also need an apparently legitimate employment to supplement their habitual profession as hired muscle.
Rawlings, in fact, had a scrap-metal dealership and car-wrecking yard. It gave him access to a well- equipped machine workshop, metal of all kinds, electrical wiring, battery acid, and the two big thugs he employed both in the yard and as backup should he ever run into any “aggro” from villains who might decide to make trouble for him.
Showered and shaved, Rawlings stirred Demerara crystals into his second espresso of the morning and studied again the sketch drawings Billy Rice had left him.
Billy was his apprentice, a smart twenty-three-year-old who would one day become good, even very good. He was just starting out on the fringe of the underworld and eager to do favors for a man of prestige, apart from the invaluable instruction he would get in the process. Twenty-four hours earlier, Billy had knocked at the door of the eighth-floor apartment at Fontenoy House, carrying a large bouquet of flowers and dressed in the livery of an expensive flower shop. The props had got him effortlessly past the commissionaire in the lobby, where he had also noted the exact layout of the entrance hall, the porter’s lodge, and the way to the stairs.
It was her ladyship who had answered the door personally, her face lighting up with surprise and pleasure at the sight of the flowers. They purported to come from the committee of the Distressed Veterans Benevolent Fund, of which Lady Fiona was one of the patronesses, and whose gala ball she was due to attend that very night, December 30, 1986. Rawlings figured that even if, at the ball itself, she mentioned the bouquet to any one of the committee members, he would simply assume it had been sent by another member on behalf of them all.
At the door, she had examined the attached card, exclaimed, “Oh, how perfectly lovely!” in the bright cut- crystal accents of her class, and taken the bouquet. Then Billy had held out his receipt pad and ballpoint pen. Unable to manage all three items together, Lady Fiona had withdrawn, flustered, into the sitting room to put down the bouquet, leaving Billy unattended for several seconds in the small hallway.
With his boyish looks, fluffy blond hair, blue eyes, and shy smile, Billy was a gift. He reckoned he could work his way past any middle-aged housewife in the metropolis. But his baby eyes missed very little.
Before even pressing the doorbell, he had spent a full minute scanning the outside of the door, its frame, and the surrounding wall area. He was looking for a small buzzer no larger than a walnut, or a black button or switch with which to turn the buzzer off. Only when satisfied there was none did he ring the bell.
Left alone in the doorway, he did the same again, searching the inner side of the frame and the walls for the buzzer or switch. Again there was none. By the time the lady of the house returned to the hall to sign the receipt, Billy knew the door was secured by a shunt lock, which he had gratefully identified as a Chubb rather than a Brahmah, which is reputedly unpickable.
Lady Fiona took the pad and pen and tried to sign for the flowers. No chance. The ballpoint pen had long since had its cartridge removed and any remaining ink expended on a blank piece of paper. Billy apologized profusely. With a bright smile Lady Fiona told him it was of no account, she was sure she had one in her bag, and returned beyond the sitting-room door. Billy had already noted what he sought. The door was indeed linked to an alarm system.
Protruding from the edge of the open door, high up on the hinge side, was a small plunger contact. Opposite it, set in the doorjamb, was a tiny socket. Inside the socket, he knew, would be a Pye micros witch. With the door in the closed position, the plunger would enter the socket and make a contact.
