She stood, arms folded, looking out of the bedroom window and listening to the Elvis song coming from the living room:
Renee carried the hard-backed chair by her bed over to the wardrobe, opened the door and got up on the chair. She had to stand on her tiptoes to reach for the hat box at the back of the shelf behind the shoeboxes. She eased it out and unsteadily got down before sitting on the chair and opening the lid. She lifted the soft tissue paper and removed the pristine white gloves, followed by the dark navy straw hat which had a yellow rose sewn onto the headband. She had worn it to a wedding twenty years ago, but not since. Now that the hat box was empty she pushed one side of the flat base up from the outside so she could remove the false interior bottom.
The notes were all ironed flat, and covered the entire secret compartment. She didn’t touch them but stared at the thick neat rows. Some of the money she had discovered in the airing cupboard after Clifford’s arrest. She had lied and intimated that the detectives searching the flat must have nicked it, which her husband and John had accepted. Now Clifford was home she wondered if the money would be safe in the hat box, but she could think of nowhere better to conceal it. She thought about what David had said about the £5 notes and began to sort them out, stacking them on the bedside table one by one.
Renee returned the other notes to the hat-box compartment, put back the false base, then carefully replaced the hat and gloves and the tissue paper before concealing the hat box once again behind the shoeboxes in the wardrobe. She began to count her £5 notes but stopped abruptly when she heard Clifford shouting for her.
‘Eh, where are you at, Renee?’
She quickly stuffed the notes into her underwear drawer and covered them with stockings and panties.
‘Renee, what yer doin’?’ he shouted.
She stared at her reflection in the dressing-table mirror. ‘Wishing I’d run away,’ she said softly to herself.
She went to the lounge where Clifford was standing, legs apart, a large tumbler of Scotch in his hand, as he chatted to two friends who were sitting on the sofa drinking port and brandy mixers.
‘We’re starvin’ – fry us up something.’
‘Where are the boys?’ she asked.
‘Takin’ some pals home and then goin’ out to a club.’
‘Bacon an’ eggs, sausages and baked beans do?’
‘Yeah, and do some of that fried bread, luv, and a pot of tea.’
Renee gave a smile and walked out. It was almost 9 p.m., and it surprised her that David had gone out clubbing – after all it wasn’t as if he could dance.
It was almost 10 p.m. by the time John finished fixing the brake on David’s wheelchair and dropped him off at the top of the multistorey car park, as the lift was still broken. David sat in the chair, put on some gloves, and wrapped the blanket he’d brought with him around his knees. John handed him the walkie-talkie and a small bottle of whisky.
‘Don’t go drinking it all and falling asleep on us. Just take a wee sip if you feel cold.’
‘Cold? It gets bloody freezing up here! I’ve had to put on long johns, a vest, two jumpers and a thick coat to try and keep warm.’
‘Good, then you won’t need to drink too much of the whisky,’ John said cynically as he closed the rear door of the van.
‘God, it stinks of piss up here,’ David said, pulling a face.
‘Yeah, the tramps take a slash down on the first floor and the smell travels up the stairwell. You’ll be OK now. Only make contact if you see someone or something suspicious. And don’t use names, all right?’
‘Yeah, don’t worry ’bout me, I’m good.’
John drove down to the exit, turned right and passed the café and the bank before taking a small turning into a narrow lane behind the buildings. He pulled up by the café’s yard, got out and opened a tall double wooden gate, then drove the van inside, parked up and closed the gates. Silas was waiting by the back door. The small yard was piled high with garbage and John noticed a few rats scuttling amongst the bags of waste food.
‘Lookout’s in place,’ John said quietly, and went down to the basement followed by Silas.
Pots of paint, brushes and dust sheets were laid out and the fake painted plasterboard had been removed revealing the hole in the wall. John could see that Danny had dug a hole under the bank’s basement to get access to the bits of the iron bars that were embedded underground, which he had now cut away with the oxyacetylene torch. He told John he had done an electric-circuit test on the bars and they were rigged up to an alarm, but he had managed to bypass it.
‘I reckon our best bet is to dig the tunnel wide and deep enough for us to get in and out easily,’ Danny said.
‘What about the fat Greek?’ John smiled.
