confined space. “Code word, please.”
The driver, whose name was Ron Biggins, said “Obadiah.” The Controller
who had set up to day’s run was a deacon in a Baptist church.
The shirt sleeved man pressed a large red button in the white-painted
wall behind him, and the second steel door slid upward. Ron Biggins
muttered: “Miserable. sod,” and eased the van forward. Again the steel
door closed behind it.
It was now in a windowless room in the bowels of the building. Most of
the floor space was occupied by a turntable. The room was otherwise
empty. Ron steered carefully onto the marked tracks and switched off his
engine. The turntable jerked, and the van moved slowly through 180
degrees then stopped.
The rear doors were now opposite the elevator in the far wall. As Ron
watched in his wing mirror, the elevator doors parted and a bespectacled
man in a black jacket and striped trousers emerged.
He carried a key, holding it out in front of him as if it were a torch
or a gun. He unlocked the van’s rear doors, then they were opened from
the inside. The third guard got out.
Two more men came out of the elevator, carrying between them a
formidable metal box the size of a suitcase. They loaded it into the van
and went back for more.
Ron looked around. The room was bare, apart from its two entrances,
three parallel lines of fluorescent lights, and a vent for the air
conditioning.
It was small, and not quite rectangular.. Ron guessed that few of the
people who worked at the bank would know it was there at all. The
elevator presumably went only to the vault, and the steel door to the
street had no apparent connection with the main entrance around the
corner.
The guard who had been inside, Stephen Younger, came around to the
left-hand side of the van; and Ron’s co-driver, Max Fitch, lowered his
window. Stephen said: “Big one today.”
“Makes no difference to us,” Ron said sourly.
He looked back at his mirror. The loading was finished.
Stephen said to Max: “The gaffer here likes Westerns.”
“Yeah?” Max was interested. He had not been here before, and the clerk
in striped trousers did not look like a John Wayne fan. “How do you
know?” he asked.
“Watch. Here he comes.”
The clerk came to Ron’s window and said: “Move Max spluttered and tried
to cover his laughter.
Stephen went around to the back of the van and got in. The clerk locked
him in.
The three bank employees disappeared into the elevator. Nothing happened
for two or three minutes; then the steel door lifted. Ron fired the
engine and drove into the tunnel. They waited for the inner door to
close and the outer one to open.
Just before they pulled away, Max said into the microphone: “So long,
Laughing Boy.”
The van emerged into the street.
The motorcycle escort was ready. They took up their positions, two in
front and two behind, and the convoy headed east.
At a large road junction in East London, the van turned onto the All.
It was watched by a large man in a gray coat with a velvet collar, who
immediately went into a phone booth.
Max Fitch said: “Guess who I just saw.”
“No idea.”
“Tony Cox.”
Ron’s expression was blank. “Who’s he when he’s at home?”
“Used to be a boxer. Good, he was. I saw him knock out Kid Vittorio at
Bethnal Green Baths, it must be ten year ago. Hell of a boy.”
Max really wanted to be a detective, but he had failed the police force
intelligence test and gone into security. He read a great deal of crime
fiction, and consequently labored under the delusion that the CID’s most
potent weapon was logical deduction. At home he did things like finding
a lipstick-smeared cigarette butt in the ashtray and announcing grandly
that he had reason to believe that Mrs. Ashford from next door had been
in the house.
He shifted restlessly in his seat. “Them cases are what they keep old
notes in, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” Ron said.
“So we must be going to the destruction plant in Essex,” Max said