Chapter 18

Unless, I suddenly thought, they were there to be sold, or possibly only rented to other criminals at a profitable price; unknown weapons that would be handed back after use and remain out of sight and beyond the clutches of the police.

However, I was here to find where cash was tucked away. I headed for the desk and began opening the drawers one by one. The contents were pretty innocuous, being mainly things that you might want handy at a desk such as a supply of writing paper, pens and pencils, adding machine, a couple of rubber erasers, keys and some paper file folders. The files inside might be interesting if I could spend time reading them, but time was short, so I moved on. After the desk, it was the standalone chest of drawers that got my attention. The drawers that I looked inside all contained one or more types of goodies: ten pound notes, five pound notes, one pound notes; silver coinage, and even some copper coins. Something finally registered with my mind: Not all the cash was British money.

A quick revisit showed that as well as UK currency there were Irish pounds, U.S. dollars, German reichmarks and French francs. Odd ... but a burglary might net a thief some foreign notes which would be difficult to get rid of. Most thieves would probably have no idea of the true monetary value of foreign banknotes. Deutschmarks at the end of the war were little more than wallpaper in value. It was changed now.

Another drawer contained jewellery of various kinds, but I had no idea what were paste gems and what were genuine jewels, so my mind simply listed it all as jewellery and I moved on with my perusal.

A final drawer contained other paper items. My quick survey classified it as share certificates and negotiable bonds, British and American. If my guess was right, that load of paper could be more valuable than all the cash in the other drawers. I closed the last drawer and checked my watch. Time was nearly up, so I took a quick glance around: nothing different that I could see, then I was off.

Sandy demanded an immediate debrief while my memory was clear about the event, so I sat down with her and went through it moment by moment, so that she got a sense of where everything was in the basement, and the distances between each item of furnishing. Then she got excited by my description of the finds on the shelving and in the drawers. “We need to get hold of samples that we can examine at our leisure!” she told me. I was wary however, saying, “If the criminals notice something is missing, they will do something to protect themselves. It could do something as simple as sprinkle broken glass on the floor as a security measure. Admittedly they would have to sweep it up each time they wanted to use the place, but it would still be an effective means of protection.” She was not put off as she argued, “If you take a single document out of a pile of documents, or a sheet out of a file, that would not be noticed, surely?” I agreed, so we decided I would go back as soon as the battery had sufficient charge, and snaffle a couple of items. Then I had another idea.

“What if, when we decide to steal cash from them, that we also remove all the weapons? That would leave them without any to use against the police or anyone else.” “Weapons? Here? What the hell would we do with them, my love? I don’t want them lying around in our home.”

“Ah.” I quickly thought about that. “We can dump them somewhere else.” “Where?” She wanted to know. “Um ... police station? A scrapyard? Dump them in the Clyde? Anywhere that will stop these weapons being recovered by the criminals.” I offered.

“Okay, something of that nature would be satisfactory,” Sandy accepted. “First things first,” I reminded her. “We need to find when the cash held there is likely to be at its maximum. Ask your dad if he can get an idea of when that might be, please.” This would be him again speaking with the Assistant Chief Constable, who would then ask his force about what was suspected, and report this back to Daddy Thompson. Then it would be a case of wait until that occurrence happened. I had plenty to keep me busy for the moment.

Oh, and I got some feedback from the church. The Kirk Session decided that one of their factors to be applied in the choice of a new minister was that he had to be willing to accept any and all existing congregation as members in good standing, and not to say anything against anyone with the approval of the Kirk Session. That had me almost in stitches, as it showed that the Kirk Session was pragmatic in its decision-making. Money talks, my friend, and so does the financial viability of a church. Far too many churches in this country have closed due to lack of financial support and not through a lack of members. Historically in Scotland the Church of Scotland, the official national church, got financial backing from the major local landowners, known as heritors, who in return for paying the minister’s salary had a prime say in appointing the new minister. In 1843 a major schism resulted when many congregations objected to having a minister imposed on them without their approval. Even the original national church body slowly moved in the same direction. The breakaway congregations formed themselves into the Free Church of Scotland, and were a strong body for many years, despite later legal determination that their own church building still belonged to the Church of Scotland, whether it had any of its own members to use it or not. To me that smacked of continued failure to listen to your members, past or present, demanding that they depart from a building that the established church was no longer using and had no intent to use. It was simple spite, and possibly an empty building to sell. That was my personal internal rant about history and the legal establishment supporting the religious establishment instead of the victims of bad policy, but it takes decades, sometimes centuries, for the powers that be to listen to the people. It was that sort of unthinking attitude that led to the American Revolution, and also caused an interminable delay in getting universal suffrage in Britain’s electoral system. Landowners preferred to have the high income standard for getting to vote, as this maintained their power in the land.

It took another week or so before we got meaningful information back from our police source, They could not state positively that the buying of illegal cash was at its peak, but they suggested that around this time there was loose talk of another visit to the accountants in the near future.

That made up our minds for us, and we finalised our preparations. First, I confirmed that the power level was back to full, then I asked at a local grocer’s if they had any empty sacks for disposal, as I could do with one for a garden job. I was shown a pile in the back shop, and told to help myself, as I was a known customer for the potatoes, neeps and carrots that came to them in these large sacks. I thanked the shopman and took two, as I reckoned these would satisfactorily hold all the weapons we intended to remove. We planned for a suitcase to hold the paper money, and I would just fill my pockets with silver coins. If the worst came to the worst, and there was too much to carry, I could make two trips to the basement store. The previous double trip showed that was possible.

By this time the measles had come and gone. If I was still infectious, then the criminals were welcome to receive a dose in their basement air. All the location settings were already established, and there was no major time factor involved, so it was just a case of making the trip around midnight and start collecting. In expectation of an unoccupied basement, I set the timing for three minutes, and engaged the device, while Sandy remained behind to collect the spoils when they arrived. We were also averse to her making use of the machine while she was pregnant, in case any harm might come to the fast developing baby. There was no way we could do a test in any risk-free form.

I appeared silently, torch switched off until I could confirm the place was empty. I listened and there was no sound at all, so I switched on the torch to see what was what. Everything looked unaltered, so I walked over to the chest of drawers and with my gloved hand opened the drawer which should contain high-value notes. The drawer was about half-full of notes in bundles held together by rubber bands. That was helpful of them! I swiftly took the sacks out of the suitcase, and transferred bundles of cash into the suitcase, and soon emptied the drawer. There was plenty of space in the suitcase, so I moved to the next drawer and emptied it as well, then closed the suitcase and picked up the first sack. Into it I added the jewellery from the next drawer, then placed some of the larger knives into it, trying to not make noises as metal struck metal. Mostly it was solid clunks that I heard, and not loud either. The weight was not too much, so I started on the second sack and added some revolvers, or whatever the guns were, and then the remaining knives, some of them folding knives, until I felt I had enough to move home safely. I held the sacks together tightly with one hand, and the suitcase handle in the other. It was then just anticipation of departure. I had judged my time well, for I was whisked home about ten seconds later, and Sandy reached out to take the sacks from me and drag them over to a corner of the vestibule, out of range of the device. She emptied out then handed me the second sack, asking me, “You going back for anything else, Bob?” “Yes, there are more knives and what looked like knuckle-dusters. I also have to collect as much as I can of the silver coins that they have there. I forgot about those. Is the machine ready for another trip?”

Sandy peered at the control panel for a few moments, then decided, “Yes. It appears to be ready almost immediately, provided the power level is adequate for the trip there and back. As long as it is more than half full, it seems to be fine for any trip.” So I went back again with the sack, and proceeded to clear the remainder from the shelving, then moved to the drawer holding the silver coins.With that lot emptied gently into the sack, to cause as little noise as possible, I looked around to double check the basement. My torch beam fell upon a still camera sitting innocently on a chair, facing towards the desk and chest of drawers. With suspicion in my mind, I picked it up and added it to the sack for examination at home. We could remove the film and expose it to light, thus clearing out anything it might have taken with a low light setting. There would be no flash involved, as that would alert anybody to its presence. It might have been there as a precaution of some kind, but I was also removing it as a precaution of my own.

With everything bagged, I waited for my return. There was no noise from above, so the residents, if any, remained sleeping, unaware of their lair being plundered. I left, satisfied that we had achieved some success.

From the enclosed vestibule, I dragged both sacks round to our front door and inside the new vestibule, while Sandy kept watch in the quiet darkness which was only lit to a marginal extent by infrequent streetlights. Five or ten minutes later, we had both sackfuls into the house and started moving the loot towards the locked room where the transport device’s innards were housed. I took the filled sacks and Sandy collected the suitcase of notes. It all went into the locked room and was dumped. At last, when the doors were all locked again, we went to bed, exhausted.

In the morning, when I woke with the alarm going off, I found myself with Sandy on one side of me and Georgie on the other, both snoring away until they came to, with the alarm’s increasingly strident buzzing. It was one of these new alarms that increase their noise every ten seconds or so until you switch it off, thus proving that you have been woken up. I leaned over and kissed Sandy then kissed Georgie, and murmured, “Morning, my loves.” Sandy complained, “I feel as if I have just dropped off to sleep!” and I pointed out that we went to bed at least six hours ago.

Georgie said, “Yes, where were you last night? I looked in soon after midnight, and this room was empty. You were here when I looked in later after I had been to the loo, so you must have been gallivanting in the dead of night. Bob didn’t open his eyes when I joined you, never mind fucking me; I felt deprived.” Sandy said sharply, “Sister, you always feel deprived if Bob is not available to fuck you. How many kids are you going to have until you stop wanting to be fucked?” Georgie shrugged – I could feel it – and retorted, “Oh, five or six, I think, as long as we have Naomi or some other nanny to help out.”

That made me think, and I blurted out, “Talking about Naomi, did you note how interested she was in George Bryson? Any time he looks in at the nursery, she is all over him.” “So? George has already been snaffled by Alice, by the looks of things,” Sandy observed succinctly, not even bothering to be disparaging.

“No doubt about that, my love, but if I can have more than one love in my life, why not George? That is, if Alice can live with George having a second, younger, woman in his life.” Georgie giggled, “Good God! You think that might work?”

I replied, “Georgie, most men are not averse to the idea of having a second woman in tow. Men are generally like bantam cocks that way; wanting to bed other females to increase their offspring. Woman have a different biological perspective. It is always about whether the first love can abide the second and let her have his children as well. You had a head start because Sandy wanted you to have what she had; my other loves simply wanted to be happy, and are so.”

“Perhaps, but all the others were added almost by accident.” Sandy looked thoughtful and remarked, “We should get Alice to talk with Naomi, woman to woman, and get to know her properly. Naomi is much younger so will almost certainly be willing to look to Alice as her leader, so perhaps as first wife. Naomi is used to the general idea, having seen us in action as a group family.”

We all had to get up and dressed, and off to work, so it was left until the evening for Sandy and I to show the other wives what we had purloined from the local criminal element of the Greenock area. They all participated in counting the paper money and separating it into national notes and specific denominations. Once it was all placed in piles, with counts for each pile, we could get an estimate of what we had. We were shocked at how much it was: £3,000+ in UK notes, over £200 in German and French currency, and around $650; a total that we could not immediately calculate in pounds. The silver was almost all UK coins, and came to over £40 value; not bad.

The jewellery was not something we could put a value on, but Phyllis suggested that several of her English-based clients who had stalls at the antiques market might be interested in purchasing the jewellery at a cut-price rate for reselling it in England at a later date. It was almost certainly stolen property, but we were not in a position to return it to unknown owners, so the jewellery would probably be dismantled and sold as loose stones, plus silver and platinum and gold settings that jewellery manufacturers would happily purchase as ‘antique fittings’ for new jewellery.

The weapons were a different matter entirely. The ladies at first wanted to condemn all the nastier blades and wanted them bent or cut up to render them useless, but Phyllis recognised some of them as old and potentially valuable fighting blades that she could also feed into her antiques market one at a time as items ‘found in a house clearance’. We agreed with her, and she set them aside.

Banking the cash, while simple in principle, might be awkward if the criminal group got wind of this large deposit, so it would be better dealt with at a bank in Glasgow. Sandy agreed to take it there on a business trip, open a new account in the name of Sandy McIntyre, and deposit all the UK pounds. She would then take the foreign currency and get it converted to pounds at a bureau de change, prior to depositing the resulting amount in her account. It was highly unlikely that this deposit would ever come to the attention of the dispossessed criminals. The camera I had picked up in the basement, was disposed of efficiently; the film taken out and exposed to light, and then the camera itself in a carrier bag slipped into a rubbish bin at the town centre as if a bag of refuse.

Two days later, Daddy Thompson got a visit from his Assistant Chief Constable friend, who had some news for him. “Thompson, somehow or other some sort of disaster has befallen our local criminal hierarchy. It appears that someone got into their secret store and cleaned them out of cash and other valuable, and apparently a cache of weapons for hire that we didn’t know about and explains some anomalies about certain crimes around Clydeside. It looks like they operated a clever hire scheme for weapons used in local crimes of violence: hire the weapon for your attack, and return it afterwards so it would disappear from sight, leaving the police force without physical evidence of the weapon used.”

Daddy simply raised his eyebrows and said mildly, “Is that so, Fred? Amazing what some people will do!” The police chief met this lackadaisical response with a new query. “Do you know anything about this, Thompson? You act as if you had some insider information.”

“Do I? I can assure you that as a solicitor I have no involvement with whatever happened to these unfortunates. I merely reacted with pleasure at their discomfiture.” “Is that so? You were the one who wanted me to speak with your son-in-law about this criminal gang.”

“That is so. Robert has a fascination for crime and is a bit of an armchair detective, so he may have come to some conclusions about your problem with local criminals. He is in no position to directly counter that criminal element, but he might have been able to pass on some ideas to someone in a better position to do something about it. But, as I say, it has nothing to do with me; I am an arm of the law, just as you are, my friend.”

“Hmm ... So, if I had a word with him...?” “You would get a similar response, as he is not going to get someone else into trouble for helping law enforcement in their hour of need, eh? I am sure you agree. Help might repeat in the future if you don’t rock the boat, and that is not to be sneezed at.”