Von Joel nodded pleasantly, closed the door and came back. He took the cushions from the couch, put them on the floor and sat on them.
“One good thing,” he said. “You don’t smoke. McKinnes and his sidekick in there, they make me sick to my stomach. Fifty a day or more. Chain-smoking. McKinnes used to cough his guts up every morning. Man, I thought, why do you do it to yourself? Why? He’s addicted to nicotine, of course—”
“You know the routine,” Larry said briskly. “When I set the tape on, you will be recorded. Everything you say will be transcribed, all details fed—”
“I know the score.” Von Joel leaned on the coffee table. “Have you smelt his breath? McKinnes? The thought of having to sit in close proximity to his stench was—”
“You need notebooks, pens? No?” Larry pressed a switch on the base of the mike. “Say a few words, just to see if we’ve got a decent level.”
Von Joel nodded, thought for a second, then began singing If You Want to Make a Fool of Somebody. Larry stopped him after a couple of lines. The intercom squawked for a second, then Shrapnel’s voice came on. He told Larry the level was fine.
“I’m all set,” he said. “Ready when you are.” Larry wet his lips and began to speak. “I am Detective Sergeant Lawrence Jackson. The time is one-nine-thirty-five a.m. I am” — he coughed, cleared his throat — “situated in room 4d secure unit provided by the Metropolitan Police, St. John’s Row station. This is a recorded interview, recorded information to be used by the Metropolitan Police.” He cleared his throat again. “Would you please state your real name, age, and address at the time of your arrest...”
In the radio link room DI Shrapnel sat by the master recorder with a cup of coffee. On the table beside him were sandwiches and a Mars bar. He eased down in the chair as Von Joel began to speak and the needles in the level meters danced.
“Right,” he breathed, “here we go again. All yours, sunshine...”
Several floors above them, the incident room was packed with uniformed and plainclothes officers, plus Flying Squad, Robbery Squad, and Drug Squad personnel. At the table in front of the blackboard DCI McKinnes briefed them.
“The most important part of the operation,” he said, “is coordination. You each have separate sections of Edward Myers’s statements. You will each be allocated your suspect. We go on one swoop. Arresting officers look for cash, but collect any evidence of apparently legitimate spending — receipts, car log books, hire-purchase documents, mortgage agreements.”
He paused to suck hard on his cigarette and blow out a long blue plume of smoke at the ceiling.
“We’ve got five teams and we’ve been allocated four armed marksmen. Rut treat it quietly — it’s imperative we take precautions. Use your special channel radio network and check the coded call signs. We must at all times conceal the scale and nature of the operation. They’ve got VHF receivers and scanners to listen in on our network. Remember that and act with appropriate caution.” He ran his gaze along the rows of intent faces. “Okay? I’m on the big fish, George Minton, because I’m the Guv’nor.”
As the operation got under way, Von Joel sat relaxed in the safe house, his voice soothingly confidential as he beguiled Larry Jackson with more stories from the hoard he carried in his head.
“Willy Noakes arrived in Marbella early summer 1987. June. He approached me because he had been given the tip-off that I was semi-interested in financing deals. To be more specific, Willy was a small-time con artist who on occasions carried messages to Spain from certain other parties. He acted as a money courier and contact man for George Minton.”
In 1988, according to Von Joel, Willy Noakes was in Spain to set up a jewelry robbery at Christie’s, an operation that eventually netted 2.3 million pounds. Noakes approached Von Joel to see if he wanted to be involved, but he declined, mainly because too many people were needed; the more personnel involved, the more danger there was of something going wrong before, during, and even after the event.
“They had to have one driver to block the access,” Von Joel explained. “That meant hiring a big furniture van. They had to have someone inside, maybe two men, acting as possible buyers. They needed a big fence to deal with the stones, and it was at the very least a four-man raid. So all in all you’re looking at nine, ten bodies involved. So I passed on it.”
Kenny Greason, Donald Lather, Roger Fairclough, and Doreen Angel, he added, were the money.
“But the guv’nor of them all, the main man, was Min-ton. George Minton.”
“He financed the robbery?” Larry asked.
“He assisted in setting the robbery up,” Von Joel replied, speaking carefully, underlining the fact that he knew Larry was new to the investigation of crime at this heady level. “They all got a cut of the profits. Main slice went to Minton, next cut to Freddy Farmilow, who fenced it. They were in Switzerland the same night the robbery took place. The stones were carried by...”
He paused, closing his eyes, pressing his fingers to his forehead.
“Stones were carried by...?” Larry prompted.
“Girl,” Von Joel said, opening his eyes. “Can’t remember her name. Worked at Christie’s until six months after the robbery. She had a boyfriend, a rock musician. The stones went over in the band’s equipment. The band didn’t know. The girl was paid ten grand.”
“You’ve not mentioned this girl before?”
“Like I said, I can’t remember her name.”
“Can’t remember her name.” Larry played up the scepticism, running his tongue along the inside of his cheek.
“No,” Von Joel said flatly.
“Going back to your previous answer, you said this girl, the one you cannot recall the name of, was paid ten thousand...”
Von Joel’s recall was operating at a different level from Larry’s line of inquiry. He was fishing deep, dredging for names.
“The drivers,” he said, snapping his fingers softly, encouraging the flow of memory. “Little Harvey Hutchinson, his brother Tommy — and Willy carried the shooter. It was a fake.”
Larry was impressed. He looked at the notes he had scribbled.
“Can we just go over each name again?”
“Sure.” Von Joel bowed his head, concentrating. “Kenny Greason, Donald Lather, Roger Fairclough... ah... Doreen Angel, Harvey Hutchinson, Tony Avis, George Minton...”
As Von Joel continued to lay the foundations for further police action, a few miles away George Minton was standing in the hall of his comfortable home, the telephone receiver pressed to his ear, listening to a Spanish housekeeper trying to explain in her basic English that her employer was not available.
“Senor Von Joel is not at home, please. Senor Von Joel away, si? London, si, si...”
Minton put down the receiver, picked it up again and dialed. He lit a cigarette, sucking the mixture of air and smoke deep into his lungs as he waited. The phone at the other end was picked up. No one spoke, but someone was listening.
“He’s not in Spain,” Minton said. Now a voice at the other end spoke softly. Minton shrugged. “I don’t know, but I don’t like it. Can you check around?” He listened again. “She doesn’t speak frigging English, so she could be confused, but she said London.” He nodded at the receiver, frowning. “Yeah, that’s what I thought...”
At ten past one Von Joel was still talking, still listing names and dates and events. When it came to figures, Larry noticed, his memory operated like a fast-access database.
“As far as I can recollect, the moneys went like this — Lloyds Bank job, ’76, fifty grand. There was another Lloyds one at Kennington, ’69, a grand. Security Express, March ’89, one million. Barclays Bank Ladbroke Grove, April ’90, that was eighty-one grand.”