He put his hand into the brick hole to feel the thickness of the iron bars and Danny jerked it back almost spraining John’s wrist.
‘Christ, bloody watch it! If they’re on a vibration alarm you could set it off by touching them.’
John took the torch from Danny and soon realized the room on the other side was a dusty basement storage room filled with old filing cabinets, broken furniture and assorted junk.
Danny became jumpy, worried that anyone going down to the bank basement in the day would see the hole. John peered through it and shone the torch to his right. From a distance of a couple of feet he could see the right angle of the wall and more iron bars, behind which was thick concrete with embedded mesh.
He turned to Danny. ‘The concrete base of the vault is about two feet to the right.’
‘So what are you saying… we go through into the bank’s basement and work on the vault base from there?’
‘No, that’s far too risky. We start digging a tunnel from here down under the bank’s basement and then right so we can work upwards under the middle of the vault.’
Danny nodded in agreement. ‘Those iron bars will run at least two further feet into the ground. I can rig an alarm bypass circuit between the bars so we can cut them away.’
‘Do we use an angle grinder?’
‘No, far too noisy. An oxyacetylene torch would melt through the iron bars like butter and with little sound.’
‘I’ll nip out and fucking buy one now, shall I?’ John said sarcastically.
‘I know where I can get my hands on one today. Might cost a few quid, but I’ll have a few hours’ kip, borrow a van and sort it out for tonight.’
Before leaving they concealed their handiwork by putting up partially prepainted plasterboards to hide the hole in the café basement wall. They also took out the bricks in large cloth sacks to the yard and covered them with an old tarpaulin, with the intention of dumping them later.
David had had to continually force himself to keep awake and the effort of staying alert had drained him. With a start he heard the walkie-talkie crackle into life and then heard John say it was ‘time to get up’, which meant that work was over for the night. The lift was broken so he started to walk down to the entrance of the car park, using the wheelchair as a support, but his bad leg was so cold and numb he was in agony. He decided to sit in the wheelchair, but even that had been an effort and caused friction burns on his hands as the slopes required him to slow the wheels so much. He did try using the brake but it was already well worn and not much use. He eventually made it to the ground floor where John was waiting in the van.
John told him Danny had made his own way home as he folded the chair and put it into the back of the van.
David got into the passenger seat. ‘Christ, it was cold up there. I was freezing and me leg’s killing me.’
John rammed the van into first gear. ‘At least you were fucking sitting down all night,’ he snapped. He didn’t even mention the problems they had come across. He was so tired, he hardly said another word for the rest of the journey.
Arriving early at work, Jane was anxious about what had happened, and felt she’d let Bradfield and Gibbs down. She wanted to have all the money taken from O’Duncie’s squat counted, recorded and checked against Mr Collins’ list by the time DCI Bradfield arrived. She really hoped that some of the serial numbers would match against the money Julie Ann stole from her father.
Having grabbed herself a coffee she removed her coat, sat down at her desk and opened the drawer where she’d left her half-completed list. With mounting horror she realized it wasn’t there and she frantically searched through every drawer, tray and file in the office but could find no sign of it.
‘Oh my God, what am I going to do?’ she said to herself, panic-stricken. She took some deep breaths to calm herself. Perhaps the A10 officers had searched the office and taken her list for their investigation. Maybe they’d even seized the money as evidence.
Jane ran down the stairs to the property office, only to find it wasn’t open yet. Desperate to know if the money was still in the safe, so she could continue checking it, she went to ask the duty sergeant for his assistance in retrieving and booking it out from the store. To her dismay it was Sergeant Harris who was on a changeover to early shift after his day off. She found him in the cell area checking on the prisoners with a young PC who was handing O’Duncie his breakfast on a cardboard plate, along with a plastic knife and fork. Harris held out a cup of tea in a polystyrene cup.
O’Duncie saw her. ‘Your boss an’ his sidekick shouldn’t a messed with me. My solicitor’s gonna do ’em and get me outta here.’
