Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? (3 page)

‘Noted. I’m now texting back that second undercover should work on Fitzherbert.’ Staverton remembered from the briefing that Lacey Fitzherbert was the junior manager
who’d been turned to the dark side through family pressure. She’d passed on to Ballard’s people the list of which safe deposit boxes belonged to which customers. Her testimony, it
was said, would help in making sure the charges against the patron stuck, though Staverton was still puzzled that the weird little squad feared they might not. Ballard was here personally,
wasn’t he, actually supervising a drilling team? He was being that stupid. What sort of conjuring trick did they think he was going to pull? At the briefing, they’d been told how this
operation had come about. One of the undercovers, a detective sergeant, had his previous criminal life maintained by SC&O10, with contact details such as phone numbers and email addresses with
someone always briefed to answer correctly at the other end of them. He’d thus been approached by one Mark Ballard, who’d been a suspect in the funding of a couple of high-end
robberies. The DS, now the first undercover in Operation Dante, had met with Ballard, who had offered the DS certain subcultural cues about the nature of which DI Quill had been strangely vague.
That contact had been spun, by this incredibly small team, whose lack of official mission statement must mean they were something to do with intelligence, into Operation Dante.

‘OK, Lisa,’ she said, noting a new message on her own laptop. ‘I just got an email from Silver saying they’ve given the order to start moving in the cordon, putting all
the expected details of a siege situation in place, so Ballard’s going to hear all the right things from the media.’

‘Noted,’ she said. The tone in her voice was not an invitation to conversation.

‘Why the stormtrooper thing, do you reckon?’ asked Kevin.

Lacey knew stress affected different people in different ways, but she was now wondering what she’d done in a previous life to meet, at this point of sheer terror for her, someone who
reacted to it by getting laid-back and chatty. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe they’re into
Star Wars
.’

‘I think it’s something you could sell to the media,’ said Kevin, ‘as a thing a group of experienced bank robbers might do. It sounds kind of smart, because we’ve
all seen those guys who make their own stormtrooper outfits out and about, collecting for charity. They can just walk into a bank carrying guns and nobody blinks an eye.’

‘But . . . ?’ There was something about the sheer calmness of him now that was deliberate, wasn’t there?

‘But they’re also memorable,’ Kevin continued. ‘SCD7 – sorry, that’s the Serious and Organised Crime Command – will be able to fill in the CCTV trail of
how they got here with witness testimony. Also, how many of those costumes exist? The hobbyist community and specialist shops would be able to trace all the buyers within, let’s say, two
days.’

Oh God. Oh God, who was he? ‘Well, we already know this lot are a bit shit, don’t we? They panicked and went into siege mode when—’

He shook his head and sighed. ‘Don’t do that, Lacey. Don’t lie to me. You’re no good at it.’

‘I’m not!’

‘They turned down my kind offer of a guided tour and folded at the slightest resistance from you. They could have used me to get at least a couple of specific items on their shopping list
and got out before the first marked cars arrived. That’s what almost any gang would have done.’ Lacey felt a horrible tightness in her guts. She hoped he knew all this because he read a
lot of true crime. ‘We think this lot are either being paid a great deal of money to take some jail time or they’re expecting to get out of here in some extraordinary way.’

‘We?’

‘You realized I was a copper a few moments ago, but you didn’t call one of the stormtroopers over to blow my cover.’ Lacey felt her breathing get faster at the thought that
just by sitting here she’d made a decision, a decision to let down the people who could hurt her mum and dad. She tried to keep her expression steady. ‘That’s a good sign. You
probably haven’t been paid to take a fall.’ Lacey closed her eyes and shook her head. She wanted to scream. She was being crushed between enormous forces she hadn’t summoned.
‘So you’re doing this out of love – we get that.’ She was going to snarl at him that he had no idea when she felt his hand on her arm. She opened her eyes and saw that he
was offering her his phone. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘text your mum.’

Lacey saw a text balloon already on the screen, just a ‘Hello?’ She recognized her mum’s number. ‘How—?’ she began.

‘She and your dad are heading for an undisclosed location, in the back of a heavily armoured police van,’ he said. ‘I think she could use some moral support.’

Ballard watched as Tony and the team quickly shovelled enough of what remained of the wall out of the way to let him pass. Tony straightened, nodded to him. Go on, mate, crack
a smile, while you still can. No? No.

Ballard walked to the metal edge of the vault itself, took the chalk from his pocket and drew the shape of a door there. He stretched out an arm, felt a terrible dreamy need to close his eyes,
as if an adult shouldn’t see things like this, and pushed his way through into what now felt to him like soft fronds of . . . Christmas. The inside of the wall of a bank vault smelt of
Christmas. Perhaps that was just the associations in his head, ideas of plenty and panto scenes of Aladdin’s cave, when to the Sighted, well, who knew what extra dimensions such an experience
held for them? That was all he had time to think before he was pushing his way out of the other side and calling for the others to follow. Ballard opened his eyes to see Tony coming through
immediately, at a run. The other three took longer, and the look on their faces was deeply scared. They’d seen something that made them wonder about the fundamentals of the world in which
they lived. Ballard would have lied to them, given them a cod-scientific explanation, but he wanted them to stay in awe of it. If he was doing this by mere gadget, their thoughts might have gone,
then it must be the most valuable gadget in the world, and why were they bothering about a bank when he was right there and vulnerable, and they could raid him instead?

Ballard took a look around. The interior of the space was lit by motion-sensor lights, which were now just coming on. Literally every alarm in the building would be silently blaring. The vault
interior, as he’d known from pictures he’d bought from a source at the architect’s, resembled nothing more than a high-end self-storage facility, metal boxes on shelves, all
requiring two keys. Inside each was a further locked casing that would slide out as a drawer. There were metal boxes with ladders leading to them, and a handful of metal boxes that could be walked
into as small rooms. ‘Targets,’ he said. The team had each memorized two numbers, and had all seen the plans. They headed off towards their targets and Ballard followed. He’d left
the biggest target for himself.

Lacey looked up from the phone and rubbed the tears from her eyes. ‘I didn’t have any choice,’ she said.

‘We know,’ said Kevin, if that was his real name. ‘Your family are safe now. You can be too. We can keep people safe. I’m proof of that, OK? I’ve been half a dozen
different people, all around the country, but I’m still here.’

There was something incredibly reassuring about him, now he’d dropped the acting. It was like he’d seen terrible things but was still hanging on, still a nice guy. ‘What do you
want me to do?’

‘We know who’s behind this. He’s in the building now. Once we’ve got him into an interview room, we need to be able to threaten him with your testimony on an honest
basis, because—’ He was silent suddenly as one of the stormtroopers ran past, grabbed a desk, then ran back to add it to the barricade. ‘Because he might be able to tell if
we’re lying.’

‘What?’

Kevin waved that aside. ‘But we’re hoping this won’t come to court. We’re hoping to turn him, and if we can do that, then even if they could ever find you, you’d
have nothing to fear from his organization.’

Lacey had heard a tone of relief in her mum’s texts, that this was over. Even if her father was yelling and denying everything, like he so would, he’d still got into the back of that
van. She looked up to where the stormtroopers were now lined up behind their barricade, aiming at where police would come crashing through the doors.

The phone on one of the desks rang. ‘Right on time,’ said Kevin.

‘Is that a negotiator?’

He just smiled in response, watching for what happened next. The leader of the stormtroopers had gone to the phone and was awkwardly looking between it and a CCTV camera.

‘He doesn’t want to take his helmet off to answer that,’ said Kevin. ‘So they’re hoping to get out of here. Which is good news. Also, they hadn’t anticipated
still being here when the police got to the negotiation stage, which seems to have happened really quickly, so they’re hoping to get out of here
soon
. Also good news.’ He started
texting again.

The stormtrooper finally just smashed the phone off the desk, stuck one finger up to the CCTV camera and ran back to the barricade.

‘Why did the negotiator call so early?’ whispered Lacey.

‘It wasn’t the negotiator,’ said Kevin; ‘it was a mate of mine called Lisa, who wanted to learn those two things.’

Ballard stood in front of his target safe deposit box – one of the large, walk-in ones – the diamond drill in his hand. He possessed an object that could use
London’s power against concrete, but not against aluminium and twelve-gauge steel. He was also at the stub end of his stick of chalk and wanted to keep some in case he needed an emergency
getaway. Still, doing this the old-fashioned way, with only two boxes per worker, they’d be out of here within the hour. The police, following standard negotiating practice, would keep the
robbery team waiting longer than that before even making contact. He started up the drill and began to cut round the first lock.

Alex Kyson was getting bloody hot under the stormtrooper helmet. He was a career criminal in his thirties, the sort of lad who lived in the sort of pubs where if you worked out
and had a steady nerve in the back-room poker, you got offers to step over the line. Each step took you further, and hopefully none of the steps were anything you couldn’t step back from.
This bank job was the furthest he’d ever stepped. He knew blokes who’d turned it down, because they didn’t trust the patron, but, as a result of how difficult recruiting for this
gig had turned out to be, the patron had given him a little demonstration of what he could do, and from that moment, Alex was in. The stormtrooper bit had been his idea, the sort of flourish that
got you talked about by the right blokes, got you into the true-crime books. It had been going great, apart from that unexpectedly helpful bank worker, but now the timeline was getting a bit
dodgy.

He leaned heavily on the barricade, glancing back to the hostages every now and then to make sure they were busily texting away. That phone call coming so early was worrying. It wasn’t as
if it could have been someone calling about their mortgage: all the regular calls to the building would have been blocked. He looked to the doorway that led to the stairwell down to the safe
deposit vault. That was the direction from which salvation would come, and it was meant to be coming soon.

‘You reckon the boss has burned us?’ said Van, his Dutch accent making the concept sound almost gentle, even through the helmet.

‘We don’t have any reason to start thinking like that. Not yet.’ He looked back to the front door and saw through the glass that a figure was standing outside, a small woman in
a business suit. She had her hands up.

‘More negotiations?’

‘Let her in.’ They could buy time by talking.

Van did as he was told. With the other stormtroopers covering the move, a slight, smart woman was pulled inside the building and over to the barricade and the doors locked again behind her.

She regarded Alex with a sighing detachment. ‘Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?’

Alex stifled a laugh. ‘Who are you, then?’

‘Metropolitan Police Detective Superintendent Rebecca Lofthouse. I believe I used the
Star Wars
quote wrongly, though.’

Alex knew his movies. ‘I don’t think so.’

From behind him, he heard the sound of doors swinging open. He looked over his shoulder to see that every bank worker he’d had chucked into one of those offices was now standing or
crouching, holding in firing postures the guns he hadn’t found, because, having planned to leave these guys with their phones, he’d had no call to search them. The odd one out was the
cooperative one, who was standing back with their inside woman. The shooters had the drop on every one of his men.

Alex also knew that plastic stormtrooper armour wouldn’t protect him and his team from real-life gunfire. He swung back to cover Lofthouse.

Her sigh had become a benevolent smile. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘that
I’m
here to rescue
you
.’

Ballard felt the second lock give and heaved out its mechanism. Where were the others? They should have achieved their targets and returned by now. It wouldn’t be long
before they’d have to go fetch the stormtroopers and get them out down here, the final move in the trick, like pulling the tools out of the bottle in which he’d made this elegant model
ship. It was always the fucking
people
that let you down. He’d finish this, then go to help them. He pulled the crowbar from his coat, shoved the sharpened end into the third lock and
started to throw his weight against it.

Mitch Daniels, who was enough of an old jailbird to have taken this job because it didn’t have ‘business as usual’ written all over it, looked over his
shoulder from his second target safe deposit box, also one of the walk-in ones, as Tony appeared, a lever-arch file, presumably the contents of one of the smaller boxes, in his hands.

‘You had a look inside?’ Mitch asked with a laugh. He hadn’t done so with the similar file he’d found in the box he’d already opened, but he’d been tempted.
More things in heaven and earth, my son. Who’d have thought it?