Signal Red (14 page)

'Do you believe in fate, Charlie?'

Charlie shrugged. 'I know what fate's got in store for those monkeys who nicked the cars if I ever find them.'

'I'm sure.' Bruce raised his glass to a DS at the far end of the bar and indicated to the barmaid that the tosspot's drink was on him. Neutral ground, after all. 'But I mean, you know, that some things are pre-ordained. Meant to be. We should have been able to live off Heathrow for years, shouldn't we?' Charlie nodded. 'And Weybridge looked like a steal.'

Charlie pursed his lips. 'It still could be.'

'Nah. It's gone.' Bruce knew there was too much speculation out there, too many whispers about what the Jags had been for. He doubted anyone could pinpoint the exact job, but he would steer clear of Surrey for the foreseeable future. And Jaguars. 'Fate, see? Wasn't written in the stars.'

Charlie spluttered into his pint. 'What are you now? Nostra-fuckin'-damus?'

Bruce was impressed that Charlie knew who Nostradamus was, but let it pass. 'It's almost like we were waiting for the real one, the genuine article.' He indicated the dartboard with his glass. 'Game of arrows?'

Charlie collected two pouches of darts from behind the bar and moved over to the corner. Bruce rubbed the board clean and chalked 301 at the top of two columns. 'Double to start.'

Charlie weighed the Unicorn darts in his hand and fussed with the flights, licking finger and thumb and smoothing them out. Then he stepped up and threw a double top.

'Bollocks,' said Bruce. But Charlie's next two throws only added forty-one. He wrote in the opening score and took his place at the line.

'Thing is, Gordy and Brian have come with something else. Something better.'

'What's that?' Charlie wasn't keen on Brian Field, the bent solicitor. Oh, he had his uses all right, but at the other end of the business, some way down the line, when it came to briefs and bail. He didn't like the idea of him becoming active in the actual thievery.

Bruce's first effort went home into the fibre of the board with a satisfying thunk. 'Double eighteen.'

'Yeah, yeah. What's better?'

The jukebox kicked into life and Bruce frowned over at the greaser type who had fed money into the machine. Leather jacket, enough oil on his hair to run a fair-sized chippy and stiletto-thin winkle pickers. It was a style rapidly going out of fashion, replaced by something neater, smarter, of which Bruce approved. He heard the whirr of the Wurlitzer's mechanism. What had the kid selected? Looking at him, he was likely to be a Gene Vincent or Johnny Kidd and the Pirates boy.

The Beatles came from the speakers - 'Ask Me Why', the B-side of 'Please Please Me'. Bruce relaxed; he quite liked the group. They might be gobby Scousers with long hair, but they were just a bunch of working-class kids trying to make some money Mind you, they had started using Dougie Millings, his and Charlie's favourite tailor, and now you couldn't get into the shop for screaming kids or pop groups wanting to get the Beatles look. They would have to move on again.

He threw a triple twenty and stepped to one side to give himself a decent line of sight.

'So what is it?' asked Charlie once more. 'What's better?'

Bruce winked at him, and Charlie could sense his excitement. He had already left Weybridge behind. That's why he didn't give a toss about the Jags and who took them. They were history. Bruce felt it was no good letting a slight fester or harbouring a grudge if it got in the way of future business. Charlie, he knew, didn't let go of an insult quite so easily. Bruce had to refocus him.

'I don't know what, exactly.' Bruce hesitated with his last dart poised in mid-air. 'But Gordy said how much.' He let fly. 'There you go. One hundred and eighty.'

'Bruce,' snapped Charlie. 'What's the griff? How fucking much?'

The Colonel dangled the same bait that had been used to snare his interest. He was guessing until he met the inside man up at Finsbury Park with Gordy and Brian Field, but it was a nice, round juicy plum to dangle in front of Charlie. 'Big money.'

'How big?'

'How does a full million quid sound?'

'Big.' Charlie thought for a minute, imagining the noise one million pounds' worth of fivers might make. He gave a dreamy smile. 'Big like bleedin' Beethoven.'

'So forget about the Jags?'

Charlie gathered up the glasses for a refill. 'What Jags?'

'You can call me Jock. That'll do for now. Not even Brian Field or the man you were introduced to as Mark know my real name, so let's leave it like that, eh, Mr Reynolds? Yes, a tea would be lovely, thank you. One sugar.

'Now, what I am proposing concerns the Night Mail from Glasgow to Euston. You know that film? And the poem? "This is the Night Mail, crossing the border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order?" W.H. Auden. Well, gentlemen, the train doesn't always bring cheques and postal orders. It also carries good old-fashioned money, of the paper kind. If banks in Scotland have surplus cash, then it is parcelled up and sent to London in an HVP. That's a High Value Packet carriage. It's a separate section of a TPO - a Travelling Post Office - locked and secured from inside. Five or six workers are in there, sorting the mail. In the sacks is the excess cash from the banks plus there's worn notes to be destroyed, too. Untraceable notes. How much in all? Well, I'll come to that.

'The thing is, gentlemen, the Night Mail has been running for one hundred years, give or take, and nobody has ever even tried a blag. Not once and why not? 'Well, there are lots of coppers at every station along the route, you see - at Glasgow, at Euston and all six or seven stops in between. Yes, it picks up as it travels towards London, so the nearer to Euston it gets the more cash there is on board. The bags are piled on platforms, but there is always a Transport Police guard, so the stations are too risky. You have to stop the train between them. How isn't my problem. The service runs both ways, but I would go for the "up", the one bringing cash down here to the central banks.

'The other problem you have is that, although there is only a handful of staff on the HVP, there might be eighty other sorters on that train, sorting those letters for the penniless and the stinking rich, as the poet had it. Now I know you lot are a bit handy, but eighty is a big opposition. You have to think of that. I can see what you want to know. I do believe Mr Field here mentioned a sum of one million. That's a minimum. And I have to say that if that is the case, my associates and I want a hundred thousand pounds. But, choose the right day, just after a Bank Holiday when money has backed up in the system, for instance, and it could be a lot more. But if it is more, my amount increases proportionally. I know I can trust Mr Field to look after that side for me. There will also need to be something for Mark, who was instrumental in forming this plan and introducing me to Brian. So, shall we say forty for Mark? And we have some expenses of our own.

'One more thing. British Rail has ordered three new HVPs for the Glasgow service. They are steel-lined, triple-locked, like mobile safes. You would have to cut into them. Now, they are due into service later this year. So, choose a Bank Holiday - a Scottish Bank Holiday, mind. And you'd better look carefully at your Letts Desk Diary, and do it sooner rather than later, before these Wells Fargo jobs come on line.

'Well, that is the proposition. I appreciate you would like to discuss this matter further. Perhaps you'll let me know your decision within the week? Perfect. Nice meeting you, gentlemen.

Twenty-nine

Glasgow Central station, May 1963

Spring had yet to make much of a mark on Glasgow and, as he felt a creeping dampness invade his bones, Buster Edwards cursed that he had drawn the short straw of coming north. Bruce had given him detailed instructions, and after a few drinks in the station bar, he had spent the last half-hour acting like any commuter waiting for his stopping service home, pacing up and down to keep warm. The mail train had been there as he had been told to expect, platform 6. He had watched stacks of mailbags being transported onto the platform by red Post Office vans and unloaded under the beady gaze of uniformed policemen. A team of porters then conveyed them, by trolley, to the appropriate carriages. He couldn't actually see the HVP, thanks to the curve of the track obscuring the front portion of the train, but certainly some sacks - the bright crimson ones - were treated with more respect than others.

Now the doors had been slammed, the porters dispersed and the transport cozzers were standing, hands folded, eyes on their watches and their hopes on an early-evening pint. Which didn't sound too bad to Buster. He was booked on the sleeper back down south, which gave him a couple of hours to kill in the city.

The train gave a single powerful jerk, there was a synchronised clanking as couplings took up the slack, and the Night Mail moved forward, taking its haul of letters, postcards, coupons and cash to London. Cash. Bruce hadn't said how much, but those initials, HVP, caused Buster's heart to flutter and his palms to sweat. There were a lot of readies in this one, he could feel it, smell it. He knew people who had been stopping trains on the Brighton line - Roger Cordrey, Bobby Welch from the Elephant - netting a few good grand at a time. But this was different, this was clearly big money. Life-changing money. That had been promised at Weybridge, but he had never believed in that the way he did in this.

Buster Edwards rewrapped the scarf around his neck as he watched the rear lights of the Travelling Post Office disappear around the curved track of Central station.

Godspeed, my son, he thought. For tonight, anyway.

At Euston, two hours later, Roy James watched the West Coast Postal, a second Night Mail, again with an HVP as the second coach, prepare to slide out of number 3 platform and head north. Sorters had been arriving for the best part of ninety minutes, and work had already begun inside each carriage, placing letters and parcels in the appropriate pigeonholes. There were no passengers. Apart from the train crew, every man aboard was a Post Office employee.

Roy, situated at the end of platforms 1 and 2, was loaded down with the railway books he had bought at Euston's Collector's Corner and was scribbling in a notebook. His platform ticket had permitted him to walk right out adjacent to the Travelling Post Office, enabling him to examine the great brute of a slab-faced loco, the parcel carriage and, behind that, the HVP. He scribbled down the number on the engine: D326/40126.

'English Electric Class Forty,' said the voice over his shoulder.

'What?'

It was a young lad, sixteen or seventeen, but a good head taller than Roy. A good-looking boy, marred by his skin: his face was positively ablaze with spots, mini-volcanoes all, some already erupted. He was wearing a school blazer, scarf and grey flannel trousers. The boy held up his own notebook, filled with dense writing in different coloured inks. 'You should do columns. Date. Station. Platform. Engine Type. Number. Makes it easier.'

Roy smiled at him. 'Yeah, thanks. I'm new to all this. I mean, I used to do it when I was your age but I'm out of practice.'

'You'll get ribbed for it. Specially a grown-up. People will take the mickey.'

'That what your mates do?'

'Sometimes.'

'Fuck 'em.'

The lad grinned. 'Yeah. Fuck 'em.' He said it as if he was trying the obscenity for the first time. It can't be easy, thought Roy. Blighted by acne and out trainspotting, when he should be chasing girls. He pointed at the pages in the lad's book. 'What do the colours mean?'

'Steam, diesel or electric,' he replied. 'I'll show you.'

The sudden burst of enthusiasm, and the wild look in the lad's eyes at finding a fellow spotter, unnerved Roy, and he recalled Bruce's warning about not getting yourself noticed. 'No - no, thanks,' he said hastily. 'I only do diesel, me.'

'Diesel?' The kid's blotchy face twisted with scorn. 'That's really boring. A lot of them don't even have names.'

'Yeah, well,' said Roy with a shrug, shuffling away. 'Takes all sorts, eh?'

Jimmy White poured a cup of Bovril and passed it to Tony Fortune, who was behind the wheel of a Vauxhall Velox, sitting in the overflow parking area just off Mill Road. This asphalted area was higher than the main car park, affording them a better view of the activities on some of the overlit platforms of Rugby railway station. Unfortunately, most of the activity seemed to be happening beneath the cantilevered canopies that blocked their view. Still, they weren't worried about that.

It was coming up to two o'clock in the morning, stars pin-sharp in a clear sky, and both men were sleepy. Jimmy was supposed to do this by himself, but he had felt sorry for Tony after the Jag foul-up. He had expected a decent drink and what did he get? An empty garage. And, apparently, an earful from his missus about missing paydays.

Jimmy had cleared bringing Tony along with Bruce, of course, and Bruce had said OK. They might still need a driver for the job he had in mind, and Roy had told him that Tony could handle a motor.

'Thanks,' said Tony as he took the Bovril.

Jimmy poured himself a second cup. He held it in both hands and blew across the surface. 'Love this stuff. Bloody Army marches on it. Well, the Paras do. You all right?'

Tony had only been lending half an ear. He felt more at ease with Jimmy than he did many of the others. Certainly more than Gordy and Charlie. With them, he felt that the least wrong word would land him a right hook or worse. There was always an air of crackling tension about them, as if an electrical storm could break out at any moment. 'What? Yeah. Just thinking. You don't want to buy a Hillman Husky, do you?'

Jimmy laughed. 'Nah. I like Land Rovers, me. They go on for ever.'

'Husky's got a heater.'

'You poof,' chuckled White. 'A heater? Only sissies need a heater in their car. You'll be telling me it has suspension next.'

'And you don't need an airfield to turn it round in.'

'Greengrocer's car,' sneered Jimmy. 'Not your sort, I would have thought.'

'Brother-in-law's,' Tony admitted. 'Ah.'

Marie had beseeched him - there was no other word - to take the Hillman Husky off her brother, Geoff, who was boracic. He'd done so, and paid him cash, over the odds. Now it was stuck at the back of the showroom, embarrassing him. 'I got myself right stitched up. Wife's up the duff, you see. Hard to say no to her.'