The Perfect Crime (10 page)

TWENTY TWO

BBC News item, Friday 4th February 1972.

‘
At
5
:
30
a.m.
this
morning
,
the
postmaster
of
the
Nottingham
Road
Post
Office
,
Spondon
in
Derbyshire
,
discovered
that
during
the
night
,
the
premises
had
been
broken
into
and
the
safe
raided
.
The
thief
had
found
the
keys
and
,
without
waking
the
occupants
,
made
off
with
cash
and
property
valued
at
nearly
two
and
a
half
thousand
pounds
.
A
police
spokesman
said
that
this
was
the
latest
in
a
series
of
similar
crimes
sweeping
across
five
or
six
police
areas
in
the
country
.
’

*

Gloria answered the phone. “Good morning; Worldwide travel agents.”

At first the caller sounded Scots, then the voice transmuted into South African, or was it a Norfolk burr? It was a nightmare, like those poor souls she had seen on the TV, evacuated from the island of Tristan da Cunha hours before the volcano erupted in 1961. Virtually untouched by modern civilisation, their accent was probably as it was in England two or three hundred years ago, and nothing like any now to be heard.

“Are you wanting to book a holiday, or just a flight?”

“I do not want anything from you, madam, but your attention.” The voice now took on something of the Irish, with touches of the sing song lilt of Welsh, or Chinese.

Gloria frowned, concentrated on understanding.
Get
rid
of
him
as
soon
as
possible
. “What do you mean?”

“I represent Spanish Overseas Properties, a subsidiary of BOAC. We are contacting travel agents to find out if you would be willing to carry some of our brochures advertising our property developments in Spain.”

That
was
it
,
he
was
foreign
.
That
was
all
right
then
.

“Why would we want to do that?” Gloria managed a travel agents, not an estate agents, her work cut out with ensuring the smooth running of that business, organising her staff – as well as her own discounted holidays – without some stupid idea of people wanting to buy houses in Spain. Many people could not even afford to buy houses in England, with inflation running in double figures as it had for several years now, house prices doubling, gazumping rife.

“It has vast potential.” The man said, now sounding like Michael Bates’ Asian character Rangi Ram, in the new BBC comedy series her husband liked so much, ‘It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum’.

“Like what?”

“Like people being offered cheap flights to go and see the properties and getting the cost refunded when they buy. BOAC get the extra flights and you get the commission on them.”

Gloria sighed, “Why on earth would anybody want to go all that way to buy a house in Spain?”

The salesman pressed on, “We’re not only talking houses with swimming pools, we’re talking flats, apartments, condominiums. Tell me, what’s your average semi cost in England today?”

Gloria dragged herself slowly into focus. Their first house in Leytonstone back in the sixties cost them less than £2000. They’d sold that over a year ago for ten times that and bought their rather superior semi in Loughton for £25,000. Nationally, certainly outside London, prices were not so astronomical.

“I don’t know. Ten, fifteen thousand? More in London, but I’ve heard you can still get older properties for a lot less in the sticks.”

“Yes, but a brand new four bedroomed detached villa with extensive grounds and a swimming pool… for the equivalent of two and a half thousand pounds? A luxury apartment for under fifteen hundred? That’s what we’re talking here and anyone who gets in quick will be bound to make a killing.”

He slipped her the crippler, “Some investors have seen a tenfold rise in the value of their properties once the development has been completed. But people will have to get in quick. They’ll be beating a path to your door once the advertising campaign gets underway on the telly.”

He blathered on about what a good way of increasing the turnover of the agency it would be and how they would easily exceed their targets, if they agreed to be one of the lucky sites to accept the supply of brochures and the attractive display stand. She ignored the twinge that the voice gave her every so often; she was distracted, it was of no importance. She was in Spain, living in sunlit luxury in a large detached property, with a swimming pool and grounds stretching away as far as she could imagine. All owned by her and her husband, their already handsome joint income boosted miraculously by the rents from their block of apartments.

No more two week vacations, they could stay there as long as they wanted and when they didn’t need the place, it could provide them with yet more money. From somewhere far away, she heard herself say, “Yes, all right. I suppose we could let you have a small space, somewhere in the shop.”

*

Dr H Milne – Notes of interview.

You were saying that the plan had to change, or you were going to move on to ‘Plan B’?

Well, it had to really.

So what did you do?

At first, all I knew was that I needed a big hit, a really big haul, but I had no clues as to how to go about it. Didn’t even know what ‘it’ might be. I told you, bank robberies and that sort of caper were out of the question, so what was I going to do?

Go on.

Well, like I had a lucky break with screwing that first post office – the one I thought was a house – I had another piece of luck. I read a book called ‘Murder in the Fourth Estate.’

The Muriel McKay kidnap.

That’s the one. What a carve up. The police couldn’t have made more mistakes if they had wanted to. Mind you, the Hosein brothers kidnapped wrong person in the first place – they thought they were kidnapping Rupert Murdoch’s wife, Anna. But the investigation was one horrendous cock up from start to finish. They never found her, you know. Reckon they chopped her up and fed the bits to the pigs.

So what did you get from this?

I decided to kidnap someone, didn’t I.

Go on.

Well, one of my principles has always been to learn from mistakes I might have made and also from what the police do, so I read the book from cover to cover to learn as much as I could. All I had to then was find someone with enough money and plan the whole job. God, that was good. A proper project again, using all my skills, abilities and experience. A real campaign, along strategic military lines. What a buzz. Felt really good about it.

TWENTY THREE

Groat was sure he did not want to know any more about Olivia. He knew quite enough – more than enough already. Certainly didn’t want to pile on more details to add to his misery at that precise moment. Especially the part about her idea, which sounded dicey. He possessed an instinct that alerted him to dicey. Unfortunately, for some reason it didn’t seem to function when an attractive woman formed part of the equation.

She told him that she lived in the flat with her mother until she died a few years previously. She’d worked as an admin assistant in the city. Unexciting, dead end. Work in an office until sixty and retire to what? There’d been boyfriends, but no one special, or really serious. After her mum died, she’d been strapped for cash. The rent wasn’t too much of a problem, but the place was shabby and even when her parents originally furnished it, they were not been able to afford quality, and certainly nothing to her taste. She tried to think of a way to improve her lot, maybe even have a holiday, but couldn’t see that she would ever be able to afford it.

One evening her doorbell rang. A smart, middle aged man dressed in a dark suit smiled at her as she opened the door.

“Oh. Hallo, er, is this the right place?” He looked past her into the flat, an uncertain air about him.

Olivia regarded him in an amused fashion. “It depends on what you mean right. Right for what?”

“Is this where,” he hesitated, “where the girls are?”

Often since, she had attempted to work out why she didn’t tell him to push off and shut the door. But she hadn’t. She could not explain why she said and did what she did.

She said, “This girl’s here.” Then, as though from a great distance, she heard a voice that sounded like her, but surely must have been someone else. She knew that was stupid, though, because she was the only female there. The voice inexplicably said, “Would you like to come in?”

Groat removed his face from where he was snuggling in the top of her cleavage. “You didn’t just…”

“Sshhh.” She said and started moving a little faster to distract him. “Yes. Well, eventually. And when he had gone, I found twenty pounds left on the side.”

“Jesus.” Groat’s voice was muffled. He very nearly added, “
Twenty
quid
for
one
shag
?”

“He came back every so often and one day he asked me if he could give my number to friend of his. I was very, very reluctant at first, as you might imagine, but he told me that his friend was someone a lot like him, discreet – and very wealthy.”

“So he came to you?”

“Yes – and as well as coming here, every so often he takes me out. Dinner in the best hotels, little presents and the better the places we went, the more he would give me. I’ve even been on holiday with him. Last year, he gave me five hundred pounds for spending two weeks with him in the Bahamas.”

“Jesus Christ,” Groat spluttered. “That’s as much as my compensatory grant.”

She kissed him to shut him up.

“All my gentlemen have come from that one chance contact. Have you any idea who he might be?”

“Sounds like a bank manager or something.”

“He was – and for all I know, still is – the Bishop of Brixton.”

The effect on him of this revelation was not as dramatic as it could have been, because whilst she was speaking, she also kept up her rhythmic movement. Groat was away in his own ephemeral world of ecstasy, aware of little outside their embrace, the heavenly weight of her on him, the caress of her breasts, the warmth and scents of her body, his now rapidly ebbing climax.

“Better?” She beamed sunshine at him.

This time he mustered a brief, small smile in return.

They lay side by side once more and she continued, “By now I was earning good money and it was regular enough for me to pack up the office work. I was taking at least twenty to thirty pounds a day – sometimes more – and I was able to stabilise my number of gentlemen at around twenty. Sometimes they stop coming for one reason or another, but usually another comes along to fill the gap.”

Groat was performing rapid mental arithmetic. Twenty to thirty pounds a day – even if she only performed on weekdays – was £100 – £150 per week, which was a good £5,000 – £7,000 a year without the odd £500 bonus and, he thought ruefully, she did not have to pay income tax, national insurance, nor a hefty percentage towards superannuation like he did.

Hell
.

Eventually he said, “Do you realise that because you don’t have to pay any deductions, you probably earn effectively over three times as much as I do?”

She sounded suddenly business like, “Yes, but what do those deductions pay for?”

“Not a lot.”

She looked at him, a stern expression on her face. “Really.” It was not a question.

He said, “Oh, all right. Sick pay, pension, that sort of thing.”

“Precisely. And this is where my idea comes in. All right, I’m earning good money now, but I can’t keep on with this until I’m sixty, can I? If I get sick, I can’t earn and I won’t have enough to retire on, even if I do save as much as possible. And no pension.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“We. I can’t do it by myself.”

Alarm bells started a muted but concerted clamour, “What are you on about?”

“Well, all of my gentlemen are well off and I’m sure that they would want me to have a comfortable old age.”

The alarm bells were gradually becoming louder. “I’m sure they would.” He said unhappily.

“So if I asked them all for a contribution, say a thousand or two each…”

The bells mustered for a crescendo, “Would they just give you that sort of money?”

“I suppose some of them might need a bit of persuading…”

Alarm cacophony. He swung his legs out of the bed and stood up, yelled at her. “Sweet Jesus, Olivia, that’s blackmail. Are you really proposing blackmail to me, a serving police officer? Are you fucking crazy? Anyway, what’s it got to do with me? Any more of this and I might end up having to arrest you.”

“That’s an awful lot of questions, Lester.”

He looked at her, surprised by her low, calm – dangerous – tone of voice. “Well?” he continued, unabashed, “Try answering some of them.”

“All right. You were the one to call it blackmail. I would call it a state of mind. All I need is to show them how grateful I would be, if they were to help me. I wouldn’t ask any more than they could afford and in return I would treat them well. I want to go on living the rest of my life with all my creature comforts and surrounded by whoever I choose. In return I would offer them precisely the same. Quid pro quo. Now then, what came next? Oh yes. No, I am not fucking crazy. And what has it got to do with you? I need help, protection. Hopefully not of the physical kind, as I don’t suppose my gentlemen would stoop to physical violence – although you never know. Mainly I will need your inside knowledge. For a start, I have contact numbers, but it’s usually a work number and to do what I need to do effectively, I need addresses, home addresses, names of wives, kids, the family dog, details like that.”

Groat’s eyes were starting from his head and the alarms had long since pealed their way frenetically off the high end of the intergalactic scale. “You’re mad. Mad, mad, mad, mad, mad, mad, mad. You’re mad if you think that it would work and even madder if you think I would have anything to do with it. I ought to turn you in right now.”

“Lester. Lester.” She made calming gestures towards him. “Come on, come back to bed.” She tweaked the covers and patted the bed beside her, inviting him to return. Her action also exposed the upper part of her perfect body. She fondled her right breast suggestively.

Drawn back to her by overwhelming sexual gravitation, he allowed her to kiss him softly, then with more determination. Open mouth now making love to his, she laid on her side next to him, one leg over and rubbed herself gently up and down against his thigh.

She knew
precisely
what effect she had on him.

She nuzzled into his neck. “I wanna tell you how it’s gonna be. You’re going give your love to me. I’m gonna love you night and day, ‘cos love is love and not fade away. Seriously though, I suppose some nasty person or someone in a position to make life uncomfortable for me might – might – call it blackmail. I need you to help me, guide me through it. Get me the information I need. Stop me making mistakes. If you must look at it in those terms and be so bloody melodramatic, you are going to help me commit the perfect crime.”

Groat was starting to wriggle uncomfortably, in spite of her pressing herself against him, nibbling his ear, nuzzling him with her face, her mouth, her all.

“Listen,” she commanded, “I’m determined and you ought to know how very determined I can be.” She drew away from him and propped herself up on one elbow again, making firm, unwavering eye contact. “We can do this in a very grown up, amicable, mutually beneficial way. You help me and I will be as good to you as you know I can be. You can have me, virtually any time and in any way you want. I mean,” she kissed him, felt him up, slowly caressing him, “your Gloria. Is she good with blow jobs? Would you want her to find out how much you like them? Or how many times we can make love in one session? And tell me, how open minded
is
the job where shagging on duty is concerned – especially with someone like me, a person in my situation?”

*

Dr H Milne – notes of interview.

You were telling me about the kidnap plans.

Yeah, well I used to take Readers Digest. In 1972 – I think it was the May edition – there was a story about the daughter of this wealthy American property owner. One night she was snatched at gunpoint from a motel in Georgia. She were buried in remote woodland, underground, in a box, with only some water and a pump supplying her air. They demanded a kidnap ransom of $500,000. There were cock-ups there, too, but eventually the ransom was paid and the girl was saved. The FBI put an electronic bugging device with the cash and the kidnappers were arrested attempting to escape by boat. So apart from making sure any money I got was not bugged, that whole set up sounded about right to me.

Go on.

Well, around that same time I read a story in the Daily Express about this bloke in Highley in the West Midlands, he died leaving over £300,000. Right evil swine he were. He left his wife for his secretary and cut her off with barely a penny. He fathered two bastards by the secretary and when he died, left everything to them. I thought that they could spare £50,000 out of that lot and the mother would pay up like shot to get her son back – or vice versa.

So how come you didn’t follow your plan?

That’s a long story. Can we take a break?