The Ninth Step - John Milton #8 (John Milton Thrillers) (27 page)

“Have you seen the news?”

“I was just about to call you, sir,” Woodward said.

“Do we know anything?”

“No. I’ve made a couple of calls, but the police are keeping this pretty close.”

“Nothing?”

“No,” Woodward said. “I’m trying to find out.”

“Have you called the vault?”

“First thing I tried. No answer.”

“No clue whether our boxes are affected?”

“None at all.”

“Jesus,” he said. “We need to go down there. Right now.”

“You want me to drive you?”

“Yes. Get here as soon as you can.”

WOODWARD LIVED nearby and he was at the general’s cottage within half an hour. His Audi was a comfortable and expensive car and it ate up the miles as they headed southeast on the A40 toward Gloucester. Higgins glared out of the window, trying to work out what they needed to do.

Woodward glanced over at him. “So, what—we go and see the police?”

“What else can we do?”

“What are you going to say?”

“I don’t know,” Higgins admitted.

“You’ll have to register as an owner of a box.”

Higgins scowled at him. “How can I do that?”

“I don’t understand—”

“Think,” he snapped. “They’re going to ask what I had in the box, aren’t they? If it’s been taken and they recover it, they’ll need to know what I’ve lost so they can give it back to me. What am I going to say when they ask me that? ‘I have some photographs of some very, very senior public figures doing things they ought not to have been doing.’ How can I
possibly
say that? Or tell them about the money that I had there—how am I going to explain where I got it from?”

Woodward was quiet.

“We do need to talk to them,” Higgins said. “Work out how much was taken. Maybe they didn’t get all the boxes.”

“They were saying two hundred. There must be twice that in the vault.”

“There are five hundred,” Higgins said.

“So maybe we’re lucky. Better than fifty-fifty odds that we are.”

Higgins grunted and stared out of the window at the bleak landscape that was rolling past the car. He had a very bad feeling about what they were going to find.

THE INVESTIGATION was headquartered at Holborn police station. It was chaotic. Reporters were setting up outside and broadcast vehicles crammed up against the kerb, and pedestrians were being forced out into the street to bypass the scrum. The atmosphere was fervid, with the more seasoned hacks comparing the raid to other, more famous heists and suggesting that this was a return to a more romantic kind of crime. A victimless heist, carried out with an audacity that some of the reporters were clearly a little breathless to recount.

Woodward and Higgins shoved through the middle of the pack. The reporters and their cameramen were ready with invective until they saw the expressions on the faces of the two men with the crew cuts and military bearing, and then they stood aside. The station was an ugly sixties construction with a flight of stone steps that led up from the street to the entrance. Higgins and Woodward ascended and went inside. Woodward went to speak to the officer at the front desk and, when he returned, explained that he had registered and that he had been told to take a seat. He led the way to a waiting area that was furnished with hard plastic chairs, garishly orange and sticky with the residue of discarded gum. Higgins sat down, feeling the ache in his muscles from his morning run, and watched Woodward as he stood in a corner and made a call on his phone.

Higgins struggled to maintain his composure. The delay was intolerable. He watched the plain-clothes detectives and uniformed officers as they hurried through the reception area, and none of them filled him with any confidence. He thought of his brother. Thomas had served in the Metropolitan Police, but that had been in a different time when officers were unconstrained by propriety and before the shackles of politically correct behaviour had been applied. The line between the police and the villains they pursued was blurred then, and the tactics that ambiguity allowed would have meant that there was a better chance that a crime like this would be solved. Now, though? When the police were staffed by fast-tracked university graduates with no experience and denied the tools that would have generated the quickest results? Higgins was not confident.

Woodward returned and took the seat next to Higgins. Woodward knew the general well enough to see that he was in a foul mood, so he sat quietly with his hands in his lap, fidgeting with his mobile phone. Higgins drummed his fingers against each other until he could bear the silence no more.

“Get the men together,” he ordered.

“I just called them, sir. They’re going to meet us tonight. Usual place.”

Higgins nodded. He looked up at the busy scrum of people at the reception desk. Most of them wore anxious expressions, and several looked anguished. He guessed that some would have been the dealers who stored their diamonds in the vault. That was why the business had been started in Hatton Garden. The local businesses, many of them holding diamonds worth millions of pounds, needed somewhere that they could safely leave their stock. They needed somewhere that could offer them complete anonymity, a place where they wouldn’t be asked questions, somewhere that could guarantee that their valuables would be secure. All of those qualities were, after all, what had persuaded Higgins that the vault was the perfect place to secure the evidence. All of those supposed benefits had been exposed now for what they really were: promises that could not be kept. The thought of it made Higgins sick.

He gazed at the chaos outside. “Could this be more than a coincidence?”

Woodward turned to him. “What do you mean, sir?”

“That our boxes were here?”

“I don’t think so. It’s a vault. It’s been hit for the diamonds. No one knows about us. How could they?”

“Maybe.” He paused, something nagging at the back of his mind. “Who knows that you’ve got a box there? Apart from me and you?”

“Shepherd. And I should never have told him.”

Shepherd liked a drink, and his raucous behaviour during their regular dinners now became a portent for something more ominous.

Woodward saw the concern on Higgins’s face. “He’s a pain in the arse when he’s drunk, but he’s not a fool.”

The general shook his head, not convinced, but let it pass. Woodward fell quiet; Higgins could see that there was something else on his mind. “What is it?” he asked.

“Probably nothing,” Woodward replied.

“There’s something.”

“I can’t get hold of Hicks.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s not answering his phone.”

Higgins frowned. Hicks was the newest member of the unit. The most vulnerable, perhaps. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that they couldn’t find him the day after the general’s safe deposit box was ransacked. Surely it was more likely that the robbery was opportunistic, as Woodward suggested, the chance to get at the jewels and other valuables that were stored in the vault. But Higgins was a careful man, and he did not like coincidences.

HIGGINS AND WOODWARD had to wait an hour before they were seen. They were called forward and directed to an interview room, where they were greeted by a young detective who ticked all of the boxes that Higgins had expected to have ticked: he was young and he looked hopelessly inexperienced.

“What’s your name, sir?”

“Albert Lane. I had a box in the vault.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that, sir.”

“I want to know what’s happened to it.”

“Yes, sir, I’m sure you do. What number was it?”

“287.”

The officer looked down at the sheet on the desk. His face fell. “I’m sorry, sir. That box was opened.”

“Opened? What does that mean? Were the contents taken?”

“It’s a mess down there, Mr. Lane. Some boxes were opened and the contents were left. Others were emptied. We’re still working it out. Can you tell me what was in the box?”

“I’m afraid that’s confidential.”

“You’ll need to tell us. We won’t be able to return stolen property if we don’t know who it belongs to.”

“Yes, I appreciate that. But not until it’s necessary.”

“Fine.” The officer laid his pen across his notebook.

Higgins struggled to remain calm. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“I’m afraid not. The investigation is ongoing.”

“You must be able to tell me
something
.”

The officer shook his head. “Just what has been released to the press. A number of men entered the vault last night. They went down the lift shaft, drilled through the wall and opened a number of the boxes.”

“Do you know who it was?”

“I’m afraid I can’t say any more than that.”

“You have
no
idea?”

The officer stood. “We have your details, sir. We’ll be in touch with everyone who had a box in the vault as soon as we have more information on what was and what was not taken. But you will need to tell us what was inside. We won’t be able to return anything we recover without it.”

Higgins felt himself tremble with rage, but he knew that ranting at this officer would serve him no purpose. The information he had received was almost worse than nothing—he knew now that his box had been opened, but not that its contents had been taken—and now he was being told that he would have to be patient before he was given anything even remotely useful. He knew he wouldn’t be able to reclaim the evidence. If it had been taken, then perhaps it would be abandoned. Perhaps the thieves wouldn’t recognise the significance of the photographs. But even if it was recovered, they would never be able to reclaim it.

But his money… The fruit of his labours since he had left the Regiment, his reward for the operations that, he would have argued, had made his country a safer place—that would all have been lost, too. Higgins looked at the officer, who gazed at him with what he probably thought was understanding and pity, and wanted to smash the man’s face against the wall.

Woodward knew Higgins better than anyone, and he must have seen the signs that usually preceded the eruption of his temper. He put a hand on the general’s shoulder and, with a quiet, “Come on, sir,” impelled him toward the door. Higgins shook his hand off angrily, but he knew his aide de camp was right. He followed him to the door and then out into the crazed bustle on the street outside.

“We need to go and see Isaacs,” he said.

MILTON HAD taken a room in the Premier Inn near Waterloo station. He had no reason to fear that Frankie Fabian knew where he lived, but he was not in the business of taking risks, no matter how small they might be. The room was simple, adequately furnished and clean. There was a sink in the armoury and Milton had used it to wash the worst of the grime and muck from his face and the streaks of Hicks’s blood from his knuckles. He didn’t want to attract unnecessary attention to himself, but his shirt was still damp and he was still dirty.

He stripped in his room’s small bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. His skin was streaked with muck, and his clothes, when he ran his hand across them, left smudges of grime across his fingers. He went through into the bathroom and showered, looking down as the dirty water pooled around his feet and drained away. He scrubbed his skin until he was clean and then emptied the sachet of cheap complimentary shampoo into his hair and kneaded his scalp until the water ran clear. He took his clothes, washed and rinsed them in the shower, and then put them over the back of the heated towel rail so that they could dry.

He wrapped a towel around his waist, went through into the tiny bedroom, and switched on the twenty-four-hour news channel. The headlines were read out at the top of the hour and, toward the end, reference was made to a heist in the heart of London’s diamond district. Milton waited until the newsreader had worked through the prior items until the image cut away to an outside broadcast. Milton took the remote and turned up the sound. The reporter was standing in front of the vault. The doors had been smashed open, and a uniformed policeman was standing guard outside them. The reporter suggested that a heist had taken place in the building overnight, and that goods with an unknown value had been taken. The rest of the information was sketchy, and, as the reporter handed back to the anchor, Milton concluded that there had been nothing to give him particular cause for concern. He had been careful.

Milton made himself busy. First, he took the bag and put it on the bed. The money was still inside, but he left it there and took out all of the photographs and spread them out on the bed. He examined them, one by one. He looked at Leo Isaacs, much younger then, but still recognisable as the man in the Internet news reports that Milton had seen while he was researching him. There was one photograph in particular that he found himself returning to: Isaacs was shirtless, a champagne flute in his right hand as his left arm was draped around the shoulders of a boy, also shirtless. Isaacs was looking right into the camera, obviously unaware that it was there. His eyes were wide, his golden hair was messy and ruffled, and his mouth was open to expose two rows of small, perfectly white teeth. The photograph had captured something in Isaac’s eyes that Milton found disturbing. It was an excitement, a hunger, not yet sated.

The boy was unmistakeably Eddie Fabian.

Milton took out his smartphone and photographed the pictures so that he had backups, should he need them. He emailed them all to his Gmail account so that he had a fall-back should he lose his phone, and then, in an abundance of caution, copied them to his Dropbox. Finally, once he was satisfied with his work, he put the pictures back into the folder and slid them under the mattress of the bed.

He emailed Olivia with the suggestion that they meet that afternoon, and then he lay down on the bed. He closed his eyes and allowed himself a few hours of rest. He was asleep within moments.

MILTON STOPPED at Waterloo Station and checked the bag with the money into a left-luggage locker, paying in advance for a week’s rent. Then he went down into the underground and took the Bakerloo Line north to Piccadilly Circus. Milton made sure to arrive fifteen minutes early and spent the additional time walking to Savile Row and then looping back again so that he could satisfy himself that he had not been followed. He was happy that he had not.