The Picasso Scam (5 page)

‘ABC Security, well done.’ I’d seen their vans occasionally. They seemed to have sprung up in the last couple of years. I didn’t attach any significance to the name: every category in the Yellow Pages has somebody called ABC listed. A part of me was also beginning to think that perhaps Gilbert Wood was right. I could do without all this. I’d have one last throw, though.

‘Get some background on ABC,’ I told him. ‘Find out what sort of company it is and who the registered owners are. But don’t let them know we are asking. And if the Super asks what you’re doing, tell him you’re looking for a lost gerbil.’

It was decision time. What to have for lunch. I didn’t fancy the canteen and I could use some fresh air, so I decided to wander down to the New Mall and eat there. The opening of the New Mall had been a bit of a renaissance for the centre of Heckley. We’d gone through the black-hole-in-the-middle period and, hopefully, were now entering a new, more prosperous phase for the town’s traders. It was a rather grand place, and had been well accepted after many early misgivings. It had a posher name, but all and sundry referred to it as the New Mall. Unfortunately it had become a happy hunting ground for petty thieves. Today the local radio station was holding some sort of fundraising event there that
would provide riveting listening for its countless dozens of fans. For some strange reason this was expected to attract people to the mall, not drive them away, so it could be a good day for picking a pocket or two. We’d got everybody available mingling with the throng of happy teeny-boppers.

Normally, I wouldn’t become involved at this level, but the council elections were imminent, and one of the candidates was floating his campaign on the crime wave in there. My plan was simple – I’d eat, look at the girls, nab a couple of villains, then come back to the office. When the others returned empty-handed I’d give them hell and go home with a nice self-satisfied feeling.

The multi-choice, serve-yourself restaurant is on the third floor of the mall. The disc jockey was strutting his stuff on the ground floor, but it was still too close. I was tucking into my pizza when Sparky joined me. One-up to him: he’d found me before I found him.

‘Any action?’ I asked.

‘A definite possible,’ he told me. ‘Mad Maggie has her eye on three girls who are acting a bit strange. At least three of the women who lost handbags were sitting over in that far left-hand corner when they realised their bags had gone. It’s a bit more secluded there, lots of plastic palm trees. These girls keep returning to the spot, looking for a vacant table. Done it about six times so far. Why are you eating pizza? You always say you don’t like it when we send out for some.’

‘Good for Maggie,’ I said. ‘Set a woman to catch
a woman. We’ve too many old-fashioned ideas about villains; we’d have been watching the blokes. I don’t like pizza – the girl behind the counter looks like Steffi Graf.’

‘Speak for yourself, I’m younger than you. How long have you been a Steffi Graf fan?’

‘About half an hour.’

‘You should try the roast beef stall, I always go there.’

‘What’s the waitress like?’

‘Henry Cooper, but the beef’s good.’

Sparky took me to where DCMargaret Madison was looking at a closed-circuit television monitor, focused down on to the corner of the restaurant where the action was.

‘Hi, boss,’ she whispered, somewhat unnecessarily, and gestured with an inclination of her head. ‘They’re back, and they’re sitting behind that woman who’s put her handbag on the floor.’

The three girls were at a table in the corner, facing outwards. They had a commanding view of the immediate vicinity, but could not be observed themselves. Except by us.

‘Can you record this?’ I asked Maggie.

‘It’s in the can, sweetie. Sorry, boss – film producers’ jargon.’

A middle-aged woman was at the next table to the girls, with her back to them. Maggie juggled with the camera’s remote control and showed me the woman’s
handbag on the floor. As we watched, the bent end of an umbrella came into view and slowly hooked itself through the strap of the bag. Maggie pulled the camera back into wide angle. The girl on the left gently drew the bag towards her. When it was within reach she picked it up and put it over her shoulder and all three of them stood up and calmly walked away.

‘Dave, you go up and collar the woman, and radio the others to join us at the ground-floor exits.’ I was speaking as we dashed out of the monitor room. We were already on the ground floor. A couple of the mall’s own security people were with us. I told them to get to the Ladies’ toilets in case the girls went there with their spoils. Maggie and I stood at the foot of the staircase, from where we could also watch the escalator. We tried to look natural.

‘God, you’ve got beautiful eyes,’ I told her. ‘Why don’t you let me take you away from all this?’

‘You say the nicest things, Charlie. What will we do about Robin?’

‘There’s always a snag. We could poison him, does he like mushrooms? Don’t answer that, they’re coming down the escalator.’

We walked to the foot of the escalator and it delivered the three girls, as pretty as a postcard, right on to our doormat. ‘Police,’ I said. ‘You’re under arrest for sus—’

The front one’s face registered horror for a split second, then she burst between us and fled. The second
girl tried to follow but I grabbed the sleeve of her baseball jacket. The other one turned back up the escalator with Maggie in hot pursuit. The girl I’d grabbed tried to slip out of her jacket and run, but I managed to hold her arm. She started to thump me with her free hand and kick me.

‘Help!’ she yelled. ‘Help me! He’s attacking me! Rape!’

I managed to get her in a bear hug. She was kicking and spitting and still shouting for help. From up the escalator I could hear her pal yelling: ‘Get off me, you cow. Let me go!’ A crowd started to gather. It looked as if they might join in – on the girls’ side.

‘I’m a police officer,’ I shouted above her screams. ‘She’s under arrest for suspicion of theft.’

‘Do you have to be so rough with her?’

‘Bastard pigs, that’s all you’re fit for.’

Maggie appeared with her girl in handcuffs, closely followed by Sparky and the lady with no handbag. We got the cuffs on my girl, but not without a struggle.

‘Take them in,’ I told Maggie and Sparky, loosening my tie and brushing the hair from my eyes. ‘I’ll try for some Brownie points in PR.’ I turned to face the crowd and held up my hands. A big youth with a beer gut testing the tensile strength of his T-shirt stood at the front of the crowd, together with a young woman wearing a baby round her neck in a sling, as if it were the latest fashion accessory. They’d done most of the protesting, so I addressed them directly.

‘Look, I’m sorry if we appeared rough, but the girls were given plenty of opportunity to come quietly. The third one did escape. There’s been a spate of
handbag-stealing
in the mall recently, and we have good reason to believe that those girls were involved. Now will you please all go back to what you were doing.’

Most of them started to melt, away. Some of the troops had been mixed in with them, keeping an eye on things, and they drifted off. The woman with the baby held back.

‘Typical police bullshit,’ she snorted. ‘Your behaviour was disgraceful. I’m going to take this further. I demand to know your name.’

‘Priest,’ I answered wearily. ‘Inspector. Try to have a nice rest of the day.’

Another woman, a little older, appeared in front of me. She was offering me a tissue. ‘She scratched you, Inspector. Your cheek’s bleeding slightly.’

I took the tissue and wiped my cheek. ‘Thank you,’ I said, smiling so wide it hurt my face. ‘You’re very kind. Could I possibly repay you by buying you a coffee?’

‘I’d prefer tea,’ replied Annabelle Wilberforce.

We went back upstairs to the restaurant and had a pot of Earl Grey and a Danish pastry each. It was unreal after the unpleasantness of a few minutes earlier. ‘Did you see it all?’ I asked.

‘Yes. I’d just popped in to buy a few things and I walked straight into it. Do you often have to put up with such abuse?’

‘Oh, now and again.’

‘Will that woman really report you? It’s people like her who give the left a bad name.’

‘I doubt it, but it will be tricky if she does. Manhandling a sixteen-year-old girl could be construed to my disadvantage.’

Annabelle looked grave. ‘Oh dear. I hope you are not going to be in trouble. I saw it all – I could make a statement on your behalf.’

I laughed. ‘Thanks for the offer, but don’t worry about it. She said her piece in front of an audience, that’s probably all she wanted.’

Annabelle went off to do her shopping and I scrounged a lift back to the station. It had been a mixed sort of an afternoon, and it wasn’t over yet. My reputation had preceded me.

‘Hey, who’s the stunner you were seen with? You’ve been keeping her under wraps, you crafty so-and-so,’ were DS Willis’s opening words.

‘Oh, just a friend, Tony. Any messages?’

‘Only a note from Jeff Caton for you. It’s on your desk somewhere.’

I found the note. It read: ‘ABC Security is a privately owned company, founded four years ago. Head office at ABC House, Welton, Lancs. Managing Director named Miss Eunice Grimes.’

Big bells were ringing in my head. I was riding on a lucky streak. Time to spin the wheel once again, but this time we’d do it the easy way. I rang Oldfield CID. There was nobody in that I knew. Eventually I persuaded a young DC to make some enquiries for me. He rang me back, true to his word.

‘ABC Security is owned by Eunice Grimes, as you said, but her married name is Cakebread. She’s just a front for her husband. He has his finger in all sorts of pies, but he’s got a record, so that would rule him out of owning a security company.’

‘Aubrey Bingham Cakebread?’

‘That’s the man. His wife’s supposed to be an
ex-beauty
queen, and she breeds dogs as a pastime.’

‘Dogs? What sort of dogs?’

‘Some fancy little foreign things.
Shites-something-or-
other.’

‘Shites-on-the-carpet?’

‘Not quite, sir, but something like that,’ he chuckled. ‘How about shih-tzu?’

‘That’s it, sir! Shih-tzu.’

‘Thanks, pal, you’ve been a big help. I’ll keep you informed.’

I went home. The reasonable day had turned into a good one, and I had discovered that wrestling with a nubile schoolgirl was no big turn-on. I was pleased about that, too.

Mad Maggie announced that she had a copy of the incriminating video set up in the conference room, and would show it to us if we cared to proceed there forthwith. I was delayed on the telephone, and when I reached the conference room it was heaving with bodies. I was amazed by the interest she had drummed up. Everybody, from the canteen ladies to the SDO, seemed eager to view the evidence.

It was a superb piece of camera work. First there were wide-angle shots, showing the overall scene, then close-ups of each of the three girls’ faces. I’d seen the next bit, where the umbrella neatly hooked the handbag. It was all done without breaks, joints
or patches; as evidence it couldn’t be faulted. When I thought it had ended I stood up to leave, but somebody said: ‘Wait, there’s some more.’ After a few seconds of snow-storm an overall view of the restaurant came into view. A couple were just taking their places at a table in the middle. The male was being very attentive. The hairs on the back of my neck were already prickling like a bilious porcupine when the camera zoomed in.

‘It’s Mr Priest!’ somebody exclaimed.

A cheer went up all round the room as they recognised me, followed by wolf whistles when they saw Annabelle. ‘Never mind him! Who’s she?’

‘The jammy sod, nabs the villains and gets the woman!’

I was due in court at ten o’clock, but before that I had arranged for one of the Traffic drivers who had been on the Art Aid convoy to come to see me. I knew him reasonably well, and he had a reputation as a
no-nonsense
officer.

‘Cast your mind back about six months,’ I asked him, after I’d given him his compulsory mug of coffee, ‘to the time you escorted the paintings for the Art Aid exhibition. What can you tell me about the job?’

He thought for a moment, then said: ‘Not much to tell, really. It started out pretty routine; we thought there was a touch of overkill, but I suppose you can’t be too careful with money like that involved. We waited in
the big lay-by on the Lancashire side of the border and took over from the West Pennine boys. Then, coming down this side, the armoured van broke down. We were suspicious, but not worried enough to sign out the gun we were carrying. The chopper had been standing by, so we whistled it up for extra cover. We hung around for two hours until a breakdown truck arrived, then towed the lot straight to the Leeds Art Gallery. It was a bit ball-aching: we were only doing twenty miles per hour, and trying to watch every which way at once. The pictures weren’t transferred to another vehicle or anything like that. They stayed in the armoured van throughout.’

‘This was an ABC Security armoured van?’

‘That’s right,’ he replied. ‘Up to breaking down they’d been very impressive. Well drilled – everybody seemed to know what they were doing. The breakdown cocked it up, though. We were about three hours late when we finally arrived.’

‘Did anybody try to find what the trouble was?’

‘Yeah, I’d forgotten that. The driver had a look under the bonnet. The oil filter had fallen off and wrecked the engine. He was well watched. I can guarantee that he didn’t squirm down the prop shaft, up through a hole in the van floor and swipe a couple of paintings. He just pronounced the vehicle unrepairable and radioed for help.’ He shrugged his shoulders as if he had nothing further to offer. ‘What’s the problem, Mr Priest? Has a picture gone missing?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I replied. ‘I think there may have been a switch, but so far I’m crying in the wilderness. I take it someone rode in the back of the armoured van.’

‘That’s right. Two ABC guards. I saw them when they unloaded.’

‘Can you remember what they looked like?’

‘No. They were wearing helmets and visors. One was fairly small, though, and the other was about my size. We were keeping our eyes on the cargo.’

‘Mmm. Well, thanks for what you’ve told me. Sorry to keep you away from swanning up and down the motorway. If you think of anything else I’d be glad if you’d let me know.’

He thought for a few seconds. ‘Just one small point,’ he said. ‘The two in the back liked country and western music. Played loud. All the time we were waiting it was coming out through the ventilators. Nearly sent me barmy.’

I drove down to the courthouse and parked in the reserved parking. I was early, but I’d wanted to escape the distractions of the office. I sat in the car and took stock of what I knew so far. It didn’t amount to a shoe box full of polystyrene beads. Truscott was linked to the paintings, and ABC had moved them. I’d always imagined Truscott to be a non-smoker, he was so fastidious in other ways, but he’d had a small cigar when I saw him at Beamish, so he could have set fire to his own armchair. True, he was small, like
the security guard, but lots of men were small. Small people weren’t usually attracted into the security industry, though. He definitely wasn’t a country and western lover: he probably thought the term referred to Cornish folk dances. String quartets were more his style. I thought about our meeting at Beamish and went through it, step by step, word by word. Something didn’t gel, and eventually I thought I knew what it was.

I’d left the rest of the day free for the trial, but I’d been given an inkling that it wouldn’t take long. At the last minute the accused changed his plea to guilty, so there was no need for me to tell the court how I’d arrested him with the left halves of ninety-six pairs of expensive training shoes in his car boot. I came out and gunned my car over the hill into Lancashire. It was time to have a look at Mr Breadcake on his own territory.

Forty minutes later I was sitting outside ABC House, nerve centre of the Cakebread empire. The building was an old warehouse, the side of which gave directly on to the pavement of a narrow cobbled alley. There was a big sliding door, with a small door let into it, otherwise it was just a huge, blank brick wall. The small door had a Yale lock and a deadlock. Round the front it was much more open. The building was set well back from the main road, with a tall mesh fence enclosing the area to the front and other side. At the side were parked several security vans with the ABC logo on them. In
front were presumably the staff’s cars. The entrance to the compound was protected by a lowered barrier controlled by a gatehouse. Prominently situated, as close to the door as it was possible to park, was the familiar Rolls Royce with the personal registration number.

I’d no plan. I just wanted to get the feel of the place, so that if I ever came back it wouldn’t be a surprise to me. I’d hang around a while, then maybe look for his home, The Ponderosa. What other names could he have chosen for his mansion, I wondered? A combination of their respective monickers would be about right. Eunaub had a certain style to it. Or maybe they’d prefer something a little more up-market, like … The Summer Palace.

Suddenly he was there, getting into the Roller. He was even fatter than I remembered him. The gate man came out of his little office and raised the barrier and the Rolls swept imperiously through, the way that Rollses do.

He could have forgotten his cigar clipper and come back for it, so I waited ten minutes before driving up to the little gatehouse that stood between me and the secrets of the Cakebread empire.

‘I’ve come to see Mr Cakebread; he is expecting me,’ I told the gateman.

‘I’m afraid you’ve just missed him, sir, he left a few minutes ago.’

‘Oh dear. I’ve a rather important message for him.’ I
tried to look suitably downcast and waved my ID card in his direction. ‘Do you think I could have a word with his secretary?

‘Certainly, sir. Do you know where to find her?

‘Yes, I think so, thanks.’

He raised the barrier and I was through. I tried to watch him in the rear-view mirror but didn’t see anything. He hadn’t had the opportunity to read the name on my ID, but it was a fair bet that he wrote my registration number in his log book.

What the hell, I thought, no point in letting it grow cold, and parked in the spot marked ABC, so recently vacated by the man himself. Just inside the front entrance was a receptionist’s desk, combined with a switchboard. I gazed at the blonde sitting behind it with awe. Geological forces were at work underneath her blouse. The thin material was struggling to conceal a demonstration of plate tectonics. Continents were in collision.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked with a brassy smile, as she looked up from her
True Romances
.

‘Er, yes,’ I stumbled out, endeavouring to hold her gaze. Oh, to have the eyes of a chameleon, one to look here, the other to look there. ‘I, er, was hoping to see Mr Cakebread.’

‘Oh! you’ve just missed him. He left about five minutes ago, for the airport. He’s flying to Spain. He has his own plane, you know, flies himself all over the place. I think it’s ever so exciting.’ She went glassy-eyed
with the romance of travel, then the receptionist training resurfaced: ‘Would you like to speak to anybody else, Mr …?’

‘No, it had to be Aubrey. I’m a policeman, and I needed a word with him. Any idea when he’ll be back?’

A look of shock spread across her face, and she exclaimed: ‘Oh my God! The policeman, where did I put it?’ and started rummaging frantically in her desk. ‘Here it is!’ she cried triumphantly, holding aloft a manila envelope. She looked at the front of it and read: ‘Mr Hilditch, is that you?’

‘Yes, that’s me,’ I lied, taking the envelope and putting it in my pocket. ‘Now you know my name, you have to tell me yours.’

She gave me the warm, confident smile of someone who has narrowly missed making a cock-up and doesn’t yet know they have made an even bigger one. ‘Gloria,’ she told me, coyly.

‘It suits you,’ I said. ‘How long have you worked for Aubrey?’ We were interrupted by the telephone. While she tried to connect somebody I had a glance round. No Van Goghs or Monets were hanging on the walls, dammit.

‘Only about a month, well, this is my third week. I started in the office, then he made me his receptionist.’

‘Do you like working for him?’

‘Ooh yes, ever so much. Did you know he’s a multimillionaire? He’s got a plane and a boat, and flats
all over the place. Says he’ll take me on his boat one day.’ She was looking dreamy again.

‘Whereabouts in Spain has he gone? Do you know, Gloria?’

‘Marbella, I think. He’s got a boat there. Don’t know where it is but I’ve heard of it. Sounds ever so romantic. Do you ever go to any of his parties, Mr Hilditch?’

‘It’s Ernest, you can call me Ernie. Yes, I’ve been to a couple at The Ponderosa. Old Aubrey certainly knows how to throw a party.’

‘Oh, I’d love to go to The Ponderosa. I meant the parties he holds here, in his suite upstairs.’

‘No. To tell the truth, I didn’t know he had a suite here. Crafty so-and-so’s kept it a secret from me. Probably scared I’ll pinch all the girls.’

‘It’s fabulous,’ she gushed, ‘carpets up to your knees, and the colours are gorgeous – everything matches. He showed me round it once. Says he’ll invite me to the next party.’

‘I might see you there, then.’ The clock behind her head showed a quarter to twelve. ‘How about letting me take you for a bite of lunch? What time are you free?’

Her smile looked almost demure. ‘That will be lovely,’ she cooed. ‘About half past twelve; is that all right?’

‘That’s fine. Where shall I pick you up? Can you get out of the door at the side?’

‘No, I don’t think so. I’ll meet you just outside the gatehouse, if that’s OK.’