“Have you all heard of the safety deposit con?”
Two heads nodded, one shook.
Claire didn’t seem interested.
“Okay. It’s been around forever. Until a couple of years ago, I thought it was a myth.”
“What changed your mind?”
“I tried it, up in Glasgow.”
“Wow,” said Jake, impressed.
“So, you get two guys dressed as security guards. You take your two guys to a bank, on a busy street, and you cover up the deposit box with a metal sheet. Hold it in place with whatever cheap glue you can find, but it needs to look real.”
“You did it with a metal sheet?”
“No, actually, I did it with hazard tape. Covered the deposit box and crossed over it with the tape, like a big X. But I think metal looks better.”
“Okay.”
“So, you’ve got your two security guards, you’ve got the safety deposit box sealed, and you’ve got a sign put up saying the deposit box is out of order.”
“You never mentioned the sign,” said Claire.
“I’m mentioning it now. The trick is, you see, that you’ll get all sorts of people coming to deposit their money. It depends on the timing, but if you do it on a Friday, just before five o’clock, you’d get a lot of impatient shop workers. They want to drop their cash and be done with their day. If you do it at the right bank, you can do it on a weekend, and get people who are in a hurry to be done with their week.”
“And they just give it to you?”
“That’s the job, you have to make them believe you’re a security firm acting on behalf of the bank. They put their cash into whatever you’re using — a metal briefcase, maybe, or a security van — and you give them an official-looking receipt. They go on their way, and so do you.”
“It’s one of the first scams I ever heard of,” said Jamie, “No way does this work.”
“I swear, I thought the same thing. But I tried it.”
“And you made good?”
“Five grand.”
“I need another drink,” said Claire.
After another round of drinks, Ed tapped the laptop again.
“You want us all to work the security con?” said Jake.
Jamie didn’t like the idea. “Where’s the money in it? I mean, five grand is good, and would pay for that nice shiny laptop of yours and maybe a Chelsea season ticket, but it won’t pay for five of us to be involved.”
“You talk as if five grand is nothing,” said Jake. “You’re young.”
Ed raised his hand and nodded at both Jake and Jamie in turn.
“Okay. Jake, Jamie, you’re both right. But what if I told you I have an idea to make a hundred grand out of it?”
He had everyone’s attention at this point.
“Jamie is right, basically. It’s a short con, and there’s no fortune in it. I wanted to find a better angle. Do you know the trick to the long game? It’s finding the human interest. In this case, everyone always looks at the trick itself. I bet, even as I told you about it, you were thinking about the job. About which bank to hit, who to put in uniform, and how much money you’d get in your case when you walked away.”
Jake nodded.
Jamie shrugged.
Tom twitched.
Claire drank.
“You know what I thought the first time I heard of it? I wanted to know what happened to all those people.”
“The people you stole from?” Claire said in between her drink and a raised eyebrow.
“Exactly. What happens to them? All these people putting their hard-earned cash into my briefcase. It’s their money and I got to keep it. So what happened to them?”
“Banks cover it, don’t they?” said Jamie, “I mean, like if a bank vault is robbed, or if someone uses your identity to scam money, the bank’s insurance covers it, right?”
“They do. That’s why I did the job, to watch and see. And in every case they paid up. To the exact penny. Banks can’t afford any bad publicity right now.”
“Good for them. I don’t see the profit in it though. I mean, we steal a bit of money, the bank pays back a bit of money, and everyone goes home happy. But we’re still only up by five grand.”
“But what if we were the ones being stolen from?” said Claire.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
“Exactly,” said Ed. “We combine the short and the long con. We go through with it as normal. We also provide some victims. Some expensive and trusted clients. Say, for instance, the daughter of Ransford Gaines. The bank will cover whatever amount she was to have written on her receipt.”
Everyone set their drinks down and didn’t pick them up again.
“Brilliant,” said Jake.
“Fucking brilliant,” said Jamie.
“I don’t get it,” said Tom.
“If that’s the end of your presentation,” said Claire, “what was the laptop for?”
Ed picked it up and dropped it; it made a hollow plastic thud.
“Case in point. It’s all about making people believe in what you’re doing.”
Everyone nodded. Everyone drank several more drinks. The last two to leave, Ed and Claire, sat on the pool table talking through the plan.
“You’ll need to find out which bank your father has most of his money in and, if you haven’t already, open an account with them.”
Claire looked at Ed over her final drink.
“You’re scared of me, aren’t you?”
“I think we all are.”
She had very dark eyes.
“You can kiss me, if you want to.”
On the 1st of April, Ed Baker walked into the bank in Solihull and opened an account.
He opened it with a deposit of three thousand pounds and over the following month he paid in another two. Five thousand pounds in a month was enough for the bank manager to earmark him as an important customer.
Claire Gaines already had an account. She’d been having large sums of money paid in on a regular basis from her father’s account, and similar sums going out.
Living is expensive.
On the 1st of May, at four in the afternoon, an unmarked van pulled into the alley beside the bank.
Josh and Tom, dressed as security guards, took a thin metal sheet from the back of the van. Using cow gum glue they fixed it into place over the deposit box. Ed had given them a sign with the bank’s insignia printed at the top, stating that the deposit box was out of service. Ed had even put the bank’s phone number on.
Jake didn’t like that last touch because it made him nervous.
“Everybody’s got a mobile,” he said. “It won’t take them nothing to ring and check before depositing the cash.”
“Relax. It’s just like the laptop, it’s all for show. They’ll see the number and they’ll assume everything’s okay. I promise you they won’t call.”
“And if they do?”
“Run like hell.”
“We get to carry guns?”
“Nah. You ever see a guard carry a gun? Not over here. Nobody will give you money if you carry a gun. Unless you’re pointing it at them.”
At quarter past four, they got their first drop. A local shop owner making his weekly drop. He put seven thousand pounds in the case.
Jake wrote him out a receipt on official bank slips.
At twenty past the hour, Ed Baker walked up. He was wearing his best suit and he made a point of walking past a couple of cameras near the bank. He stopped to chat with a traffic warden. Outside the bank, he let the security guards explain the situation to him. They pointed to the sign. Ed opened his briefcase and handed the bigger of the two guards, the one who was writing the receipts, four bundles of plain paper. The paper was cut to look like bank notes. The fake money was locked in the case and Ed walked away with his receipt.