Chapter Eight

Soon after he stepped through the window into the manager’s office, Patsy knew he was in trouble.

The climb itself had not been particularly strenuous. Heights didn’t bother him and the drainpipe had provided secure holds for his hands and feet.

Straddling the narrow window sill forty feet above the river, he had used the coconut mat and bolt cutters as confidently as if he’d been standing on the ground. He had pressed the mat against the glass with his knees and, using the cutters one-handed, had tapped away until the glass beneath it cracked. Lifting the mat away, he’d tapped again. A crescent of glass had fallen inwards with an almost inaudible tinkle. He had listened intently for half a minute or so and then, with no clang of alarms inside the building, had reached down his gloved right hand, had found the aperture and the brass handle and had opened the window outward, letting it swing away.

He slung his bag of tricks in first, then, dipping his body, had nimbly followed, stepping silently on to the carpeted floor of the manager’s office. He had fished his torch from his pocket and had switched it on.

The office was just as he had imagined it, broader than it was long; an imposing teak-wood desk faced away from the window, a swivel chair behind it, two wooden chairs in front of it, metal filing cabinet to the left; a cheese-plant in an enamel pot cast sinister shadows in the far corner. The door to the outer office was panelled with ribbed glass, a name stippled across it at chest height. Patsy paused again, listening again. He could hear no sounds from inside the building, only the sloughing of the wind through the open window. He went to the glass-panelled door, opened it and looked out into the secretary’s office.

It was large, with a double desk, typewriters, telephones and a whole wall of wooden filing cabinets. There was one entrance door, no windows. Patsy walked down the aisle between the desk and the cabinets and tried the door handle. Locked. He returned to the manager’s office, closed the glass door and focused the torch beam on the safe that stood against the right-hand wall.

That was when he knew he was going to have trouble.

Babs Conway hadn’t lied. It was a Hobbs, a big spanking-new Hobbs, a model he’d never seen before, one that hadn’t even shown up in the catalogues. It had a bland look to it, smooth and implacable, without so much as a hinge showing. The shield that Babs had mentioned was a sliding cover behind which lay a combination lock, sunk an inch into solid steel.

Patsy hunkered before the safe and studied it.

There was nothing much to study. He stuck the end of the torch in his mouth and leaned forward. He wrapped both arms around the safe in a bear-hug and tried to move it. It rocked a little, just a little – just enough to indicate that it wasn’t bolted to the floor. Its bulk was enough to protect it. He felt down the back of the brute with his fingertips and found nothing except two slight ridges where the welding had been finished off. He had a feeling that what he was dealing with here was a double-lined safe, a steel box set inside a steel box with some sort of fireproof lining between the layers.

He sat back on his heels and twiddled the lock’s rotating dial. It made no discernible noise, not even a faint click.

Leaning closer, torch at eye-level, Patsy examined the housing of the lock and found it to be as tight as a bloody drum. Even if he had been inclined to rouse the neighbourhood by firing a black powder charge there was no means of setting one. The only feasible way into this brute, Patsy decided, was to attack it with sledgehammers or cut it open down the back seams with an oxy-acetylene torch; not the sort of thing you could feasibly hope to do in ten minutes in the playground at the bottom of Shotten Street.

He should have quit there and then. He should have packed up his gear, climbed out of the window, shinned down the rope, got back into the boat and said, ‘Okay, lads, let’s forget it.’ But there was a recalcitrant streak in Patsy Walsh, an angry little core of Scottishness that made him feel as if he’d been cheated out of what was rightfully his. He’d been born with it in him and it had been fed and nurtured by the culture in which he’d been raised. It was the gene, the mute, unmalleable gene that Patsy shared with the Hallops, with Bonnar and O’Hara and all the other fancy wee fly-men who struggled to earn a fast buck or a dishonest crust; even, for all he knew, with Guido and Dominic Manone, though they were Italians and probably more sensible.

Patsy put down the torch.

He crouched like a wrestler, wrapped both arms round the safe once more and gave it everything he’d got. He strained, he struggled, he lifted the brute a half-inch off the floor and, shuffling, moved it back four or five inches from its original position against the wall. Blood pounded in his head and chest. He felt dizzy, swollen with the excessive effort. He sipped air through clenched teeth, regripped the safe and then, defeated, lowered it to the floor again.

Sweating and shaky, he sat back on his heels.

At that moment Jackie clambered through the open window and dropped to the floor. He was draped like a gladiator in the cargo net, a coil of manila line looped over each shoulder. He was white-faced and trembling; heights were not to his liking. He was also considerably irked because Patsy hadn’t been there to encourage him. ‘Where the hell’ve you been?’ he hissed.

‘Where do you think I’ve been?’ said Patsy.

‘Jeeze! Is that it? Have you no’ got it open yet?’

Impatiently, Jackie untangled himself from the net. He slung it and the ropes upon the desk and, to hide his anxiety, seated himself upon one of the wooden chairs. Panting, he rested his elbows on his knees and glowered at the Hobbs, stark and stubborn in the pool of torchlight.

‘Can y’ not open it, Patsy?’

‘Nope.’

‘You’ll just have t’ blow it then?’

‘Nope,’ Patsy said, still squatting before the Hobbs. ‘We’re gonna have to take it with us an’ open it somewhere else.’

‘Look at the size o’ it, for God’s sake.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

Jackie sighed. ‘Is this Plan B?’

‘Nope, this is Plan Zero.’ Patsy got up. ‘A new plan entirely.’

‘A what?’

‘Somehow or other,’ Patsy said, softly, ‘we’re gonna have to get this brute back to your yard an’ open it there.’

‘Our yard?’ Jackie shot to his feet. ‘Here, haud on a minute…’

‘Or leave it where it is,’ said Patsy.

‘Give up?’ said Jackie. ‘After climbin’ all the way up that bloody wall? I’m not leavin’ here without that safe.’

‘Fine,’ said Patsy. ‘In that case, we’ll have to get it into the cargo net and up on to the window ledge so we can lower it down into the boat.’

‘Can we do that?’ said Jackie.

‘We won’t know till we try,’ Patsy said.

Hands on hips, Jackie did a nervous little war-dance before the Hobbs.

‘What if someone hears us?’ he said.

‘They won’t,’ Patsy said. ‘We’re on the second floor, remember. There’s an empty office between us an’ the corridor.’

‘What about the night-watchmen?’

‘Forget the soddin’ watchmen,’ Patsy said. ‘Gimme that coil of rope. The quicker we’re out of here the less chance…’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Jackie.

‘Jackie?’

‘What?’

‘The rope.’

*   *   *

The Seneca was one of a fleet of twenty-eight steamers and sixteen motor-ships owned by the Danish line of Moller & Kramp. She was 450 feet in length between the perpendiculars, with a dead-weight tonnage of 8,225. She drew twenty-six feet and five inches of water when loaded. She was propelled by a Burmeister & Wain diesel motor operating on the two-cycle, double-acting principle and had an average service speed of fifteen knots. When she eased down past the coal conveyors below the Kingston Dock she was doing nothing like that, of course.

To Dennis Hallop, however, she seemed to be moving at the speed of light, a gigantic block of greeny-grey metal bearing down upon him out of the semi-darkness. He shouted aloud, flung himself into the bows of the longboat and covered his head with his forearms while the Seneca, remote and disinterested, rolled past, and the longboat bobbed wildly up and down on the wash that slapped and slopped against the banking.

Dennis, cowering, heard the creak of mooring ropes, the groan of the little boat’s timbers, the thrash of the cargo liner’s single prop and the gabble of waves all tumbling in upon him. He had never been so scared in his life. He lay in a foetal position for several minutes after the medley had diminished and the vessel had gone on downriver. When he finally looked up the first thing he saw was Tommy Bonnar seated calmly in the stern, oars tucked under his armpits, hat tipped back, cigarette still dangling from his lip.

‘What – what the hell was that?’ Dennis asked.

‘Boat,’ said Tommy.

‘Jesus, I thought…’

Tommy Bonnar laughed, a little croak of laughter, and shook his head.

Ashamed and embarrassed, Dennis elbowed himself into a sitting position. The boat was still rocking and bobbing but the ropes that held her close to the bank under the warehouse wall seemed to have held.

‘It’s all very well for you, Tommy,’ Dennis groused.

‘What is?’

‘I never learned how t’ swim.’

‘Swim,’ said Tommy. ‘Who’s talkin’ about swimmin’?’

‘I thought we were gonna be sunk.’

Shaking his head once more, Tommy nudged the oars and brought the longboat back up into position directly beneath the wall. He glanced up at the second-floor window, at the faint smear of light that showed in the opening, light that moved and darted about but did not appear to become any stronger. Something was wrong. Walsh and Jackie had been inside for the best part of twenty minutes. They had given him no sign, no signal, and he hadn’t heard anything that sounded like a charge going off.

Tommy was a lot less calm than he appeared to be. He was also chilled to the bone; he wore only his old brown suit and trench coat, no jumper or pullover. He wasn’t going to show weakness, though. One jabbering idiot on board was enough to be going on with. He stared sullenly at the stern of the Seneca receding into the distance, at the lights of the ferry scribbled on the rough surface of the Clyde, at the cranes and the lamps that lit the quays on the north shore. At the lights of the city streets pricked out of the night sky beyond. The wind brought the sound of a train, or a tram, rattling faintly across the river, and he shivered at that wan and lonely sound.

‘Where are they? What’re they doin’ up there?’ Dennis said.

‘Search me,’ said Tommy.

He spat the butt of the cigarette over the side and watched the black water swallow up the coal. He crossed the oars over his chest and fumbled in his trench-coat pocket for his packet, his matches. He lit a fresh Woodbine, coughed, flicked the match into the dark water, coughed again.

Tommy knew what it was like to have to wait.

He had been waiting all his life, living with a vague, twisted anxiety coiled inside him, a nameless fear that everything was about to change, threaded with the worse fear that nothing would ever change. Drink didn’t eliminate this feeling of hopelessness. Backing winners didn’t take it away for more than an hour or two, and women – women were too stupid to understand anything. Here, riding on the river as he’d done when he was a boy, he felt despair come in upon him like the wash from something huge and powerful and mysterious, something too big for him to cling to.

Even so he waited with uncanny patience for Walsh to drop a great big bag of money into his lap, for everything to come out right for once.

‘Look,’ Dennis said; without haste, Tommy turned his gaze to the wall just as a rope came skittering down. ‘They’ve got it. By God, they’ve got it.’

*   *   *

Without the crank-jack – and Patsy’s ingenuity – the job would have proved impossible. Even with the crank-jack the safe was almost intractable. The ten or twelve feet between its station against the wall and the edge of the manager’s desk might have been miles for all the headway that Patsy and Jackie were able to make using brute strength alone. Even with the safe roped, they had been unable to shift it more than a quarter of an inch at a time, to grind it over the carpeted floor with the manila stretching and yielding with every concerted tug.

At first they had been stealthy in their movements, then desperation had set in, disregard for the noise they were making. Only Patsy’s experience and self-control had brought him back to reality and, resting, he had applied his brain to a situation that was in danger of becoming a farce.

He sat cross-legged before the safe and glowered at it.

Jackie, still panting, said, ‘We could send for Dennis. He’s strong.’

‘He’d never make it up the pipe.’

‘We could tie a rope…’

‘Forget it.’

‘If we do it this way we’ll be here all bloody night.’

‘I know,’ Patsy said.

‘I mean, even if we get it to the bloody desk, we’ll never be able to lift it.’

‘I know,’ said Patsy again.

‘If only that cow Babs had thought t’ tell us…’

‘Jackie, shut up.’

Jackie was silent for thirty seconds.

Then he said, ‘It’s comin’ up for half eleven, Pat. We’ve missed—’

Patsy uttered a little snarl and leaped to his feet.

Jackie quailed, forearm flying to his face to protect himself. Patsy went straight past him, though, walking fast, hardly seeming to walk at all but floating then flying out of the glass-panelled door into the outer office, torch cupped in one pink fist. Jackie didn’t have the temerity to follow. He waited, leaning against the top of the safe, his fingers curled around its edges as if by some simple act of levitation he might render it weightless.

He was still in the same position when, only seconds later, Patsy returned.

‘We’re in luck,’ he said, and opened his hand.

‘What’s that?’

‘Soap,’ Patsy said. ‘Just one bar but it might be enough.’

‘Where’d you find it?’

‘In the secretary’s drawer. Polly told me that Babs told her that the manager’s secretary was a mean old bitch. So I reckoned she might keep the soap and towels under lock an’ key. An’ I was right.’

His enthusiasm was back, the despair gone out of him. While Jackie watched, puzzled, Patsy cut the bar of soap in half using a penknife from his pocket. He laid the two halves on the desk and, stooping, rolled back the carpet as far as the safe, drawing it to one side and exposing the wooden floorboards.

‘Oh, yeah!’ said Jackie, quietly.

Patsy was already assembling the crank-jack that he had taken from the bag by the desk. He knelt and inserted one of the steel rods into the jaws of the jack and then, with Jackie’s aid, lifted the front edge of the safe just enough to slip the trailing edges of the carpet out. He kicked them away, grunting, and manoeuvred the rod of the jack into place. He locked the lever on to the jack and began to crank on it and watched the front of the safe lift and the angle of balance change.

‘Jackie, the soap.’

‘What?’

‘Put the soap under the front of the safe.’

‘Oh, right.’

Jackie did as he was told to do, nervously slipping the small bars into place under the rim. Hardly had he jerked his fingers away before Patsy reversed the action of the lever and cranked the front of the Hobbs down again.

‘Won’t it crush…’ Jackie began.

‘Won’t matter.’

Patsy darted around to the side of the safe and, with an effort, inserted the steel extension rod beneath it. He cranked, lifted the safe up at the back so that its weight was resting on the forward rim, on the crushed bars of soap.

‘Hold this,’ he told Jackie and carefully transferred the crank handle into Jackie’s fists. ‘For Christ’s sake don’t let it go.’

‘This is very – very technical,’ Jackie said. ‘You sure it’s gonna work?’

‘It had better.’

Patsy doubled a length of the manila rope around his forearm and looped it under the back of the safe, knotted it firmly, then, working fast now, ran the line back over the top of the safe. He pulled on it, taking in all the slack and all the yield. The safe budged not one inch.

‘Not gonna work,’ said Jackie. ‘I could’ve told you so.’

‘Wanna bet?’

Patsy unbuttoned his trousers and made water.

‘Aw, naw!’ said Jackie. ‘That’s disgustin’.’

‘Any better ideas?’

He buttoned his fly, grasped the rope in both hands and drew upon it steadily. After a moment he felt the Hobbs yield and move reluctantly towards him, then, squeaking, begin to slide by little fits and starts across the wet floorboards.

‘Jeeze, I don’t believe it,’ Jackie said. ‘You want me to pee too?’

‘No, thank you,’ Patsy said.

*   *   *

There was no final act, no last bit of manoeuvring that made the rest easy. Even so, as each muscle-racking action was successfully accomplished, the safe jacked up and tilted against the edge of the desk – crushing it horribly – and lifted clear of the floor, Patsy really began to believe that he was going to pull off the coup of a lifetime.

The struggle with dead-weight metal had dulled his caution and his only concern as he fought to fit the Hobbs into the cargo net was that the safe would not go through the window space. He kept his doubts to himself, however, and enjoyed, moment by moment, the succession of tiny achievements. What they would do with the Hobbs once it was in the boat, how it would be conveyed from the riverside at Shotten Street to the Hallops’ repair shed in the heart of the Gorbals was too much for his imagination to cope with. First things first; one step at a time, he told himself, while Jackie, knackered by his efforts, groaned and grunted and complained.

More rolling back of carpet, more laying down of crumbs of soap, more heaving and sweating to shift the desk with the safe on top from its original position and ram it hard against the outer wall, level – dead level – with the window frame. By now the Hobbs was webbed in rope of various textures – hairy hemp and smooth manila – and looked less like a safe than a captured animal, some swart, stocky beast, exhausted by the chase, not dead but resting, gathering its strength for one last effort of resistance.

‘Now what?’ said Jackie, thickly.

Patsy was half out of the window, looking down. He could see the longboat directly below and thanked his stars that Tommy Bonnar was sailor enough to have kept it there for the best part of an hour. He signalled with the torch, a meaningless flash, and received by way of acknowledgement a wave from Dennis Hallop. He wriggled back inside the office and climbed on to the top of the safe, on top of the desk. He had Jackie hold the torch while he separated out one rope from another and ran two double lines of the manila down to the floor. He leaped down, went on all fours and drew the loose ropes under the desk and out again, weaving them – one each – against the desk’s stout little wooden legs.

It was engineering, crude but necessary. He had no intention of losing the lot now, of letting the safe plunge out and down without something solid to brake and check it. The next part, though, would be dangerous and probably noisy, for he suspected that the Hobbs was heavy enough to wreck the framework of the desk. He gathered all the tools and stuffed them into the bag, picked up his cap and stuck it firmly on his head, put on the heavy leather gloves.

It was now exactly a minute after midnight.

If the Manones’ night-watchmen were worth anything at all they would be starting out on their rounds about now, checking the warehouse bay by bay, corridor by corridor, office by office. Rough estimate, Patsy reckoned that they had about fifteen minutes to get the safe off the premises and the longboat downriver. He still nurtured a faint hope that the night-watchmen would be typically lazy sods and that the disappearance of the safe would not be discovered until morning. But things had not been running in his favour so far and he was no longer inclined to optimism.

‘Gimme the jack,’ he said.

Jackie gave him the jack.

Patsy fitted the steel rods back into the crank-jack’s jaws and slid them under the cargo net in which the safe was wrapped. He clambered on to the desk again and pumped the lever, lifting the safe up and forward until it was poised, teetering, on the edge of the window.

‘Jackie, take hold on that rope. That one, yeah. Hang on tight.’

‘Is this it?’

‘This is it.’

‘Okay,’ said Jackie, grim and manly now. ‘Go.’

Balanced balletically on one foot, Patsy gave the safe a single swift kick. As it swayed and began to topple outward, he leaped to the floor and grabbed his share of the rope. He felt vibrations shudder through the framework of the desk, heard the teak crinkle and creak. He saw the desk heel upward and jam itself against the window. For an instant the safe was clearly visible, a great dark hairy bundle clinging ape-like to the sill – and then, unbalanced, it was gone.

Patsy had looped the manila line around his waist and ran it through his hands the way rock climbers did. Even that wasn’t enough. From the corner of his eye he saw Jackie skitter and sidle forward on tiptoe. The desk hopped into the air, its stout little wooden legs breaking off as if made of balsa. Then he was dragged forward too, snatched almost off his feet. He dug in his heels, felt them slither, felt the motion of the Hobbs as it swung in space somewhere outside and heard Jackie screaming as the rope sizzled through his hands.

‘Hold on. For Christ’s sake, hold on,’ Patsy shouted, even as Jackie’s rope snapped and slithered away and, with a flick of its tail, disappeared.

Jackie sprawled across the desk, still shrieking.

For one glassy, isolated moment Patsy supported the full weight of the Hobbs, the ropes angled diagonally away from him, shifting, shifting, shifting with tiny clockwork-like movements, an inch at a time.

It was not that he could not hold it, rather that it would not be held.

He felt as if his spine were being wrenched through the front of his body and his arms torn from his shoulders, then there was nothing – air, emptiness, an absence of resistance – and Patsy, craning backward, fell down upon the floor.

*   *   *

‘It’s comin’, it’s comin’,’ Dennis chanted. ‘They got it. They got it. Here it comes. Here it comes. Hold her steady now, Tommy. Hold…’

It looked almost weightless, like a huge bundle of straw bouncing softly against the wall. It looked as if the wind had charge of it, toying with it and that if it was released it would float away like a balloon, bobbing and billowing to alight intact somewhere about Oatlands. Even when it scraped the wall and flirted away, the cargo net robbed it of density and for two or three seconds Dennis Hallop’s joy seemed justified.

Tommy Bonnar, looking up too, paddled the oars, edging the longboat into position. He was irked at Dennis for shouting but he was also relieved to see the safe, for however dark his pessimism, however deep his melancholy, he had no particular wish to have his throat cut by one of McGuire’s hirelings.

‘Hold her steady now, Tommy. Hold…’

Then it wasn’t floating any more.

It was falling, leaping out and falling, plummeting straight down upon them like a fragment of the dark and starless sky.

‘Oh, Jesus!’ Tommy sighed, a split second before the safe struck the boat and plunged straight through it into the river. ‘Here we go again.’

*   *   *

Dominic had been dreaming of how he imagined Italy to be and, like embroidery around the edges, of being feted by a host of pretty, young signorinas in a sunlit village square. It had not been a sensuous dream, however, for in his subconscious mind he was just a wee bit afraid of the girls, all of whom seemed to have their hands stretched out in gestures more begging than beckoning.

Where the dream would have taken him and how it would have ended, Dominic never did find out.

Stooped over the bed like a stork, Uncle Guido shook him gently.

Dominic snuffled and opened his eyes.

‘Did you not hear the telephone ringing in the hall?’ Guido said.

‘No.’

‘Our warehouse has been broken into.’

Dominic sat up. ‘What did they steal?’

‘The safe.’

‘The safe from MacDermott’s office?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is that all?’

‘That appears to be all.’

‘Idiots!’ Dominic said. ‘Do we know who did it?’

‘Apparently they got away.’

‘How?’

‘In a boat,’ said Uncle Guido. ‘What do you want me to do? Do you want that I should telephone the police?’

‘No, we will deal with the matter ourselves,’ Dominic said. ‘Call Tony and tell him to bring round the car.’

‘What, now?’ said Uncle Guido.

‘Yes, now,’ said Dominic Manone.