Stone Killer (2 page)

The time had come. There was no point in putting it off any longer. Judith took a deep breath, clenched her teeth, and drew the sliver of glass across a prominent vein in her wrist.

F
or as long as anyone in the town could remember, the Friday street market had been the high point of the Whitebridge shopping week. From the moment the traders finished erecting their tubular metal stalls, to the point at which the dismantled stalls were slid back into the traders' vans, the High Street was as loud as a carnival and as busy as a port-side brothel.

Housewives – having confiscated most of their husbands' pay-packets the previous evening – could be seen flitting from stall to stall, the brown envelopes which contained the week's wages nestling in the tight security of their firmly held plastic handbags. Market traders – who worked six days a week, but never as profitably as on this day – could be heard screaming out the virtues of their sometimes-dubious wares. Gnarled hill-farmers – free for one morning from scratching out a living on the cruel and unrelenting moors – ambled up and down the road, and wondered if it wasn't perhaps time to pay a visit to the nearest pub. That was how it was, and how it had always been.

But not on this particular Friday in December 1964 – a Friday so close to Christmas that everyone should have been doing record business. On this Friday, the stalls, though weighed down with their merchandise, stood unattended and unscrutinized, and the only people who seemed to have any use for them at all were the dozen or so police officers who had their eyes firmly fixed on the Lancaster Cotton Credit Bank and were using them for protection.

Heavy iron police barriers had been hastily placed at both ends of the High Street half an hour earlier. Behind them – and straining against them – stood the crowd of people who were somewhat aggrieved that their normal daily business had been disrupted, yet were also bubbling with anticipation over the sudden and unexpectedly dramatic turn of events.

The arrival at the police barrier of a Wolseley, with its best years of service already far behind it, excited little interest at first. Then the crowd noticed that it was being driven by a big man in a scruffy tweed jacket – a man whose photograph appeared in the papers far more regularly than he would have liked – and a collective sigh of expectation ran through the throng.

Chief Inspector Woodend had arrived, people told each other.
Now
there would be fireworks.

Woodend stepped out from the driver's side of the car. His assistant, Sergeant Monika Paniatowski – blonde hair, intelligent blue eyes and an Eastern European nose which some of the onlookers considered a little too large for their own snub-nosed taste – emerged from the passenger side. The spectators attempted to surge forward, but the line of constables, their arms linked, held firm.

A uniformed sergeant approached the two detectives. ‘Would you like me to remove the barrier, sir?' he asked Woodend.

The Chief Inspector looked mystified. ‘Whatever for?'

‘So you can drive closer to the crime scene, sir. It'll be a bit of a squeeze, what with the stalls an' everythin' in the middle of the road, but you should be all right if you're careful.'

Woodend looked first at the crowd pressing against the barrier, and then up the High Street towards the bank.

‘Just how far would you estimate it is to the Cotton Credit, Sergeant?' he asked.

‘About a hundred yards, sir.'

‘So you'd go to all the trouble of removin' the barrier just to save me walkin' a hundred yards, would you?'

‘Well, yes, sir.'

Woodend shook his head. ‘It's a very kind thought, lad, but me an' Detective Sergeant Paniatowski here have both been blessed with legs, so we might as well use them.'

The Chief Inspector stepped around the barrier, and his assistant followed him. They walked up the street, passing Williams' High Class Furniture Emporium, Clark's Chemist's, and Deyton's Family Butcher's – all of them festooned with coloured lights to celebrate the coming holiday.

Some of these businesses had been there since he was a boy, Woodend thought. Some even before that. But though they all still looked out on to the same street, they now looked out on to a very different world – a world in which strange and violent things were happening which they'd never have dreamed of thirty or forty years earlier.

‘What I don't understand, Monika, is why we're here at all,' Woodend said to his sergeant. ‘It's always been our job to catch murderers – an' I like to think we're rather good at it.'

‘We're
very
good at it,' Monika Paniatowski said.

‘Aye, you're right, this is no time for false modesty,' Woodend agreed. ‘But if we are so good at it, why are we gettin' mixed up in an armed bank robbery? I admit – given that such things are almost as rare as a sunny day in Whitebridge – that nobody on the force has got a great deal of experience with them, but even so, I'd have thought there were half a dozen fellers better equipped to handle it than I am.'

They were thirty yards from the bank when the uniformed superintendent came up to them.

‘According to the witnesses we've spoken to so far, there are three of them in there, Charlie,' he said, without preamble. ‘They came out of that van.' He pointed to a dilapidated blue vehicle which looked very like the dozen or so market-traders' vans parked close by it. ‘They're dressed in army fatigues and ski masks. They're heavily armed, and they're carrying huge rucksacks containing God-alone-knows what. The whole thing's a complete bloody mess.'

‘I can see that, sir, but—' Woodend began.

‘Do you
know
how few officers there are in Central Lancashire who are licensed to carry firearms, and trained to handle this kind of thing?' the superintendent ploughed on. ‘I've been drafting men in from all over the place – Bolton, Bury, Preston—'

‘It must be a difficult job for you, sir – I can well appreciate that – but what the bloody hell am I doin' here?' Woodend interrupted. ‘As far as I can tell, I'll only be in the way.'

‘You haven't been told, have you?' the superintendent asked.

‘Told what?'

The superintendent raised his right hand, and wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of it. ‘One of the first things we did was to establish a dedicated phone link with the bank. I rang it, and one of the robbers answered. But he didn't want to listen to what I had to say. In fact, he demanded to talk to you.'

‘To me?' Woodend said, astounded. ‘To me
personally
?'

‘That's right. He was quite explicit.'

Woodend turned to his sergeant. ‘Well, what do you think of that, Monika?' he asked. ‘Fame at last, eh?' He returned his attention to the superintendent. ‘I'd better get on the blower to him, then, hadn't I?'

‘He … er … doesn't want to talk to you over the phone,' the superintendent said awkwardly. ‘He insists on a face-to-face meeting.'

‘My place or his?' Woodend asked.

‘Pardon?'

‘Is he comin' out – or does he want me to go in?'

‘He made it pretty clear he wants you to go in,' the superintendent said grimly. ‘Look, Charlie, I can't
order
you to go in there. In fact, I'd quite understand if you refused.'

Woodend lit up a Capstan Full Strength, and noted as he did so that his hand was shaking slightly. ‘How many people are this feller an' his gang holdin' hostage?' he asked.

‘It's impossible to say with any degree of accuracy,' the superintendent admitted. ‘We know there are seven bank employees, for certain, but as to the number of customers … well, on a busy day like this there could have been anything up to a couple of dozen of them there when the robbers burst in.'

Woodend took a deep drag of his cigarette. ‘I'd better go an' talk to him then, hadn't I?' he said.

‘Are you sure?' the superintendent asked.

Woodend forced a grin to his face. ‘Of course I'm sure,' he said. ‘Why wouldn't I be?'

‘Well, the gang are armed and dangerous and—'

‘Don't worry about it, sir,' Woodend said, maintaining his grin with some difficulty. ‘This kind of thing happens over in America all the time. Heaven knows, I've seen it in enough Hollywood films. An' the thing about those films is that whatever else happens, the hero – which in this case appears to be me – never,
ever
, gets killed.'

T
he Lancaster Cotton Credit Bank was one of the older banking houses in Whitebridge. And that showed in its layout, for whereas the newer, more ‘modern' banks had a warren of small offices in which to conduct their affairs with discretion, the LCCB devoted most of its floor space to one large room in which business could be transacted and seen to be transacted.

Standing in the doorway – still not sure how to proceed – Woodend studied that room. It was square, and lined with second-grade – but still respectable enough – black granite. A long counter, with elaborate scrollwork grilles, separated the third of it in which the clerks worked from the two-thirds where the customers waited to be dealt with. On the wall, an enormous nineteenth-century clock loudly ticked away the seconds, as if to remind those who heard it that time was money – and money didn't like to be kept waiting.

The room was empty, though the discarded morning newspapers on the floor and the smell of cigarette smoke which still hung in the air were evidence enough that it had been recently occupied.

This was just like the bloody
Marie Celeste
, Woodend thought.

‘Come out, come out, wherever you are!' he said aloud.

It was then that he noticed the camera. It was crudely mounted on the wall close to the counter – there was evidence of plaster dust on the floor beneath it – and was pointing at the door to the street.

Closed-circuit television! Woodend told himself.

Jesus!

Equipment like that was being used, as an experiment, at a few of the underground railway stations in London, but as far as he knew, it wasn't operating anywhere else in the whole bloody country.

So whatever else these bank robbers were, they certainly weren't run-of-the-mill.

A door behind the counter swung open, and a man stepped through the gap. He was tall and broad. He was wearing camouflage uniform and a ski mask. And in his hands he was holding what Woodend recognized to be a submachine gun.

‘Come closer,' he ordered.

Woodend began to walk slowly towards the counter. When he was half-way between it and the door, the man snapped, ‘That's far enough.'

The Chief Inspector came to an abrupt and complete halt. ‘Whatever you say. You're the boss.'

‘Have you come alone?' the man with the machine gun asked.

Woodend glanced over his shoulder. ‘Seem to have,' he said. ‘To tell you the truth, this wasn't exactly a popular assignment.'

‘Do you think this is funny, Chief Inspector?' the other man demanded aggressively.

‘Not at all,' Woodend replied. ‘To be honest with you, I'm findin' it so
un
funny that I'm almost shittin' myself.'

‘I'm pleased to hear that. It's certainly the frame of mind I want you to be in,' the man said, and though the ski mask made it difficult to know for sure, Woodend was almost certain that he was smiling.

‘You seem to know who I am,' the Chief Inspector said. ‘Would you care to tell me who
you
are?'

‘You can call me Apollo,' the man answered.

‘Apollo,' Woodend mused. ‘Funny name to choose. Wasn't he the Roman god of the sun or summat?'

‘Amongst other things,' the man replied. Then, as if he had lost interest in the subject and felt it was time to move on, he said, ‘But you seem to have got hold of the wrong end of the stick, Chief Inspector. I'm the one with the gun, so I'm the one who gets to ask the questions.'

‘Fair enough,' Woodend agreed. ‘Ask away.'

‘Did you see active service in the war?'

‘Yes.'

‘So you must have had guns pointed at you before.'

‘Aye, I have. Plenty of 'em. But, in my experience, at least, it's not somethin' you ever get used to.'

‘Were you decorated for your war service?' the man calling himself Apollo asked.

‘Whether I was or whether I wasn't, it's not really any of your business, is it?' Woodend countered.

‘You're wrong about that,' Apollo told him. ‘It
is
my business, because I have the gun and I
want
to know. And it's your business to answer, because I have twenty hostages back there, and if you refuse to co-operate, I just might make them suffer.'

‘I got a couple of medals,' Woodend said reluctantly.

‘The Victoria Cross?'

Despite the situation he found himself in, Woodend couldn't help chuckling. ‘No, not the VC,' he said. ‘I never did anythin' anywhere near impressive enough to merit that.' He paused for just a moment. ‘Now, about these hostages of yours,' he continued.

‘What about them?'

‘Are any of them hurt?'

‘No. Not
yet
.'

‘Then it seems to me you should let them all go, before one of them
does
get hurt.'

‘And what if I don't?'

Woodend sighed. ‘Then that complicates matters. An' I don't see there's any point in makin' things complicated when there's a simple solution to hand,' he said. ‘Let 'em go. You'll feel better once you have.'

‘If I don't release them, you'll try to storm the place, won't you?' Apollo said.

‘I don't know about that,' Woodend replied.

‘Don't lie to me!' Apollo said harshly.