Free Royal Heist by Lynda La Plante Page A

catching trains to stop one!”
    “We spent hours up at that railway bridge too. And it wasn’t Eddy’s idea about fixing the signals, it was mine.” Wilcox lit a cigarette.
    “But he worked out how to move the mail train into a siding.”
    This annoyed Wilcox. “You owe me just as much. I agreed to split that cash three ways as well. Look, you just did the route for that. Anyway, I don’t call twenty grand in cash a big deal or any reason to feel you owe him for the rest of your life.”
    “All I’m saying is, he didn’t always have to cut it three ways.”
    “Just think about his reasons. The others got thirty years apiece, right? And when they questioned us we could have put him in the frame with them. We were lucky they thought we were just dumb kids.”
    “Not that dumb. We got away with it.”
    “Yeah, yeah, yeah. And here you are, Christ knows how many years later, bleating on about how much you owe him. That’s why he always did a three-way cut.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “So we’d feel indebted to him,” Wilcox snapped.
    “So you do feel you owe him, then?” Driscoll asked, surprised.
    Wilcox sighed with exasperation. “No. We all took the risks. It was only fair to cut three ways.”
    Driscoll opened a bottle of gin from the minibar and yanked out the ice tray. “Not the same on the last caper, though, was it?”
    Wilcox tensed and opened another bottle. “I was up for it,” he said shortly.
    “Yeah, but the last time it was a big number.”
    “All right, I hear you.”
    “Yeah, stealing fucking gold bullion, Jimmy. If we’d been copped that would have been thirty years. Without Eddy we’d never have got away with it. It wasn’t you or me that found out how to launder the cash.”
    “And it was almost a fuckup. He didn’t have any idea how much there was.”
    Driscoll laughed. “Three tonnes of gold. Worth twenty-five million pounds. Damn right we owe him.”
    Wilcox reclined, his eyes drifted upward. Most of the gold had been melted down and moved abroad fast with the assistance of de Jersey’s friend’s helicopter and yacht. The robbery had been almost effortless, but moving that volume of gold had been a nightmare. De Jersey had deployed everyone he could think of to melt, move, carry, and shift the bars. Some were melted in a private kiln in a jeweler’s garden; others were buried around London, carried out to Spain in suitcases, or even left in safety-deposit boxes. De Jersey shipped some to Africa, then brought it back into England after purchasing a smelting plant; there he altered the hallmarks and later sold it on the open market. The largest amount, however, had been stored in a small jeweler’s workshop in France.
    There was a rap at the door, and Driscoll got up to take in the hamburgers. He handed one to Wilcox and unwrapped the other.
    “He moved those gold bars around,” Driscoll said. “Turned them into cash.”
    “I don’t know how he bloody did it,” Wilcox said.
    “He used assumed names and identities. He told me he’d worked out a system of depositing cash into high-street banks, in amounts as large as eight hundred grand.”
    Wilcox unwrapped his hamburger.
    “It wasn’t just us he took care of. Those ‘soldiers’ who were picked up, he looked after them. They never put any of us in the frame.” Driscoll tried to open his ketchup packet; he swore as the ketchup spurted over his T-shirt.
    Wilcox remained unimpressed by the argument. “Well, they wanted their payoff when they came out of the nick.”
    Driscoll peered at his hamburger. “You know Scotland Yard officers recovered eleven melted-down bars in 1985. None of the remaining stolen ingots has ever been found. Have you got a raw one? This is like old leather.” Wilcox passed over his untouched hamburger, opening another miniature vodka instead.
    The two men fell silent, Wilcox drinking, Driscoll stuffing french fries into his mouth.
    Under de Jersey’s orders, Wilcox and Driscoll had