Prized Possessions (19 page)

He slung his bag of tricks in first, then, dipping his body, had nimbly followed, stepping silently on to the carpeted floor of the manager's office. He had fished his torch from his pocket and had switched it on.

The office was just as he had imagined it, broader than it was long; an imposing teak-wood desk faced away from the window, a swivel chair behind it, two wooden chairs in front of it, metal filing cabinet to the left; a cheese-plant in an enamel pot cast sinister shadows in the far corner. The door to the outer office was panelled with ribbed glass, a name stippled across it at chest height. Patsy paused again, listening again. He could hear no sounds from inside the building, only the sloughing of the wind through the open window. He went to the glass-panelled door, opened it and looked out into the secretary's office.

It was large, with a double desk, typewriters, telephones and a whole wall of wooden filing cabinets. There was one entrance door, no windows. Patsy walked down the aisle between the desk and the cabinets and tried the door handle. Locked. He returned to the manager's office, closed the glass door and focused the torch beam on the safe that stood against the right-hand wall.

That was when he knew he was going to have trouble.

Babs Conway hadn't lied. It was a Hobbs, a big spanking-new Hobbs, a model he'd never seen before, one that hadn't even shown up in the catalogues. It had a bland look to it, smooth and implacable, without so much as a hinge showing. The shield that Babs had mentioned was a sliding cover behind which lay a combination lock, sunk an inch into solid steel.

Patsy hunkered before the safe and studied it.

There was nothing much to study. He stuck the end of the torch in his mouth and leaned forward. He wrapped both arms around the safe in a bear-hug and tried to move it. It rocked a little, just a little – just enough to indicate that it wasn't bolted to the floor. Its bulk was enough to protect it. He felt down the back of the brute with his fingertips and found nothing except two slight ridges where the welding had been finished off. He had a feeling that what he was dealing with here was a double-lined safe, a steel box set inside a steel box with some sort of fireproof lining between the layers.

He sat back on his heels and twiddled the lock's rotating dial. It made no discernible noise, not even a faint click.

Leaning closer, torch at eye-level, Patsy examined the housing of the lock and found it to be as tight as a bloody drum. Even if he had been inclined to rouse the neighbourhood by firing a black powder charge there was no means of setting one. The only feasible way into this brute, Patsy decided, was to attack it with sledgehammers or cut it open down the back seams with an oxy-acetylene torch; not the sort of thing you could feasibly hope to do in ten minutes in the playground at the bottom of Shotten Street.

He should have quit there and then. He should have packed up his gear, climbed out of the window, shinned down the rope, got back into the boat and said, ‘Okay, lads, let's forget it.' But there was a recalcitrant streak in Patsy Walsh, an angry little core of Scottishness that made him feel as if he'd been cheated out of what was rightfully his. He'd been born with it in him and it had been fed and nurtured by the culture in which he'd been raised. It was the gene, the mute, unmalleable gene that Patsy shared with the Hallops, with Bonnar and O'Hara and all the other fancy wee fly-men who struggled to earn a fast buck or a dishonest crust; even, for all he knew, with Guido and Dominic Manone, though they were Italians and probably more sensible.

Patsy put down the torch.

He crouched like a wrestler, wrapped both arms round the safe once more and gave it everything he'd got. He strained, he struggled, he lifted the brute a half-inch off the floor and, shuffling, moved it back four or five inches from its original position against the wall. Blood pounded in his head and chest. He felt dizzy, swollen with the excessive effort. He sipped air through clenched teeth, regripped the safe and then, defeated, lowered it to the floor again.

Sweating and shaky, he sat back on his heels.

At that moment Jackie clambered through the open window and dropped to the floor. He was draped like a gladiator in the cargo net, a coil of manila line looped over each shoulder. He was white-faced and trembling; heights were not to his liking. He was also considerably irked because Patsy hadn't been there to encourage him. ‘Where the hell've you been?' he hissed.

‘Where do you think I've been?' said Patsy.

‘Jeeze! Is that it? Have you no' got it open yet?'

Impatiently, Jackie untangled himself from the net. He slung it and the ropes upon the desk and, to hide his anxiety, seated himself upon one of the wooden chairs. Panting, he rested his elbows on his knees and glowered at the Hobbs, stark and stubborn in the pool of torchlight.

‘Can y' not open it, Patsy?'

‘Nope.'

‘You'll just have t' blow it then?'

‘Nope,' Patsy said, still squatting before the Hobbs. ‘We're gonna have to take it with us an' open it somewhere else.'

‘Look at the size o' it, for God's sake.'

‘Yeah, I know.'

Jackie sighed. ‘Is this Plan B?'

‘Nope, this is Plan Zero.' Patsy got up. ‘A new plan entirely.'

‘A what?'

‘Somehow or other,' Patsy said, softly, ‘we're gonna have to get this brute back to your yard an' open it there.'

‘Our yard?' Jackie shot to his feet. ‘Here, haud on a minute…'

‘Or leave it where it is,' said Patsy.

‘Give up?' said Jackie. ‘After climbin' all the way up that bloody wall? I'm not leavin' here without that safe.'

‘Fine,' said Patsy. ‘In that case, we'll have to get it into the cargo net and up on to the window ledge so we can lower it down into the boat.'

‘Can we do that?' said Jackie.

‘We won't know till we try,' Patsy said.

Hands on hips, Jackie did a nervous little war-dance before the Hobbs.

‘What if someone hears us?' he said.

‘They won't,' Patsy said. ‘We're on the second floor, remember. There's an empty office between us an' the corridor.'

‘What about the night-watchmen?'

‘Forget the soddin' watchmen,' Patsy said. ‘Gimme that coil of rope. The quicker we're out of here the less chance…'

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,' said Jackie.

‘Jackie?'

‘What?'

‘The rope.'

*   *   *

The
Seneca
was one of a fleet of twenty-eight steamers and sixteen motor-ships owned by the Danish line of Moller & Kramp. She was 450 feet in length between the perpendiculars, with a dead-weight tonnage of 8,225. She drew twenty-six feet and five inches of water when loaded. She was propelled by a Burmeister & Wain diesel motor operating on the two-cycle, double-acting principle and had an average service speed of fifteen knots. When she eased down past the coal conveyors below the Kingston Dock she was doing nothing like that, of course.

To Dennis Hallop, however, she seemed to be moving at the speed of light, a gigantic block of greeny-grey metal bearing down upon him out of the semi-darkness. He shouted aloud, flung himself into the bows of the longboat and covered his head with his forearms while the
Seneca,
remote and disinterested, rolled past, and the longboat bobbed wildly up and down on the wash that slapped and slopped against the banking.

Dennis, cowering, heard the creak of mooring ropes, the groan of the little boat's timbers, the thrash of the cargo liner's single prop and the gabble of waves all tumbling in upon him. He had never been so scared in his life. He lay in a foetal position for several minutes after the medley had diminished and the vessel had gone on downriver. When he finally looked up the first thing he saw was Tommy Bonnar seated calmly in the stern, oars tucked under his armpits, hat tipped back, cigarette still dangling from his lip.

‘What – what the hell was that?' Dennis asked.

‘Boat,' said Tommy.

‘Jesus, I thought…'

Tommy Bonnar laughed, a little croak of laughter, and shook his head.

Ashamed and embarrassed, Dennis elbowed himself into a sitting position. The boat was still rocking and bobbing but the ropes that held her close to the bank under the warehouse wall seemed to have held.

‘It's all very well for you, Tommy,' Dennis groused.

‘What is?'

‘I never learned how t' swim.'

‘Swim,' said Tommy. ‘Who's talkin' about swimmin'?'

‘I thought we were gonna be sunk.'

Shaking his head once more, Tommy nudged the oars and brought the longboat back up into position directly beneath the wall. He glanced up at the second-floor window, at the faint smear of light that showed in the opening, light that moved and darted about but did not appear to become any stronger. Something was wrong. Walsh and Jackie had been inside for the best part of twenty minutes. They had given him no sign, no signal, and he hadn't heard anything that sounded like a charge going off.

Tommy was a lot less calm than he appeared to be. He was also chilled to the bone; he wore only his old brown suit and trench coat, no jumper or pullover. He wasn't going to show weakness, though. One jabbering idiot on board was enough to be going on with. He stared sullenly at the stern of the
Seneca
receding into the distance, at the lights of the ferry scribbled on the rough surface of the Clyde, at the cranes and the lamps that lit the quays on the north shore. At the lights of the city streets pricked out of the night sky beyond. The wind brought the sound of a train, or a tram, rattling faintly across the river, and he shivered at that wan and lonely sound.

‘Where are they? What're they
doin'
up there?' Dennis said.

‘Search me,' said Tommy.

He spat the butt of the cigarette over the side and watched the black water swallow up the coal. He crossed the oars over his chest and fumbled in his trench-coat pocket for his packet, his matches. He lit a fresh Woodbine, coughed, flicked the match into the dark water, coughed again.

Tommy knew what it was like to have to wait.

He had been waiting all his life, living with a vague, twisted anxiety coiled inside him, a nameless fear that everything was about to change, threaded with the worse fear that nothing would ever change. Drink didn't eliminate this feeling of hopelessness. Backing winners didn't take it away for more than an hour or two, and women – women were too stupid to understand anything. Here, riding on the river as he'd done when he was a boy, he felt despair come in upon him like the wash from something huge and powerful and mysterious, something too big for him to cling to.

Even so he waited with uncanny patience for Walsh to drop a great big bag of money into his lap, for everything to come out right for once.

‘Look,' Dennis said; without haste, Tommy turned his gaze to the wall just as a rope came skittering down. ‘They've got it. By God, they've got it.'

*   *   *

Without the crank-jack – and Patsy's ingenuity – the job would have proved impossible. Even with the crank-jack the safe was almost intractable. The ten or twelve feet between its station against the wall and the edge of the manager's desk might have been miles for all the headway that Patsy and Jackie were able to make using brute strength alone. Even with the safe roped, they had been unable to shift it more than a quarter of an inch at a time, to grind it over the carpeted floor with the manila stretching and yielding with every concerted tug.

At first they had been stealthy in their movements, then desperation had set in, disregard for the noise they were making. Only Patsy's experience and self-control had brought him back to reality and, resting, he had applied his brain to a situation that was in danger of becoming a farce.

He sat cross-legged before the safe and glowered at it.

Jackie, still panting, said, ‘We could send for Dennis. He's strong.'

‘He'd never make it up the pipe.'

‘We could tie a rope…'

‘Forget it.'

‘If we do it this way we'll be here all bloody night.'

‘I know,' Patsy said.

‘I mean, even if we get it to the bloody desk, we'll never be able to lift it.'

‘I know,' said Patsy again.

‘If only that cow Babs had thought t' tell us…'

‘Jackie, shut up.'

Jackie was silent for thirty seconds.

Then he said, ‘It's comin' up for half eleven, Pat. We've missed—'

Patsy uttered a little snarl and leaped to his feet.

Jackie quailed, forearm flying to his face to protect himself. Patsy went straight past him, though, walking fast, hardly seeming to walk at all but floating then flying out of the glass-panelled door into the outer office, torch cupped in one pink fist. Jackie didn't have the temerity to follow. He waited, leaning against the top of the safe, his fingers curled around its edges as if by some simple act of levitation he might render it weightless.

He was still in the same position when, only seconds later, Patsy returned.

‘We're in luck,' he said, and opened his hand.

‘What's that?'

‘Soap,' Patsy said. ‘Just one bar but it might be enough.'

‘Where'd you find it?'

‘In the secretary's drawer. Polly told me that Babs told her that the manager's secretary was a mean old bitch. So I reckoned she might keep the soap and towels under lock an' key. An' I was right.'

His enthusiasm was back, the despair gone out of him. While Jackie watched, puzzled, Patsy cut the bar of soap in half using a penknife from his pocket. He laid the two halves on the desk and, stooping, rolled back the carpet as far as the safe, drawing it to one side and exposing the wooden floorboards.

‘Oh, yeah!' said Jackie, quietly.

Patsy was already assembling the crank-jack that he had taken from the bag by the desk. He knelt and inserted one of the steel rods into the jaws of the jack and then, with Jackie's aid, lifted the front edge of the safe just enough to slip the trailing edges of the carpet out. He kicked them away, grunting, and manoeuvred the rod of the jack into place. He locked the lever on to the jack and began to crank on it and watched the front of the safe lift and the angle of balance change.