‘Fine. Whatever.’ Viggiano ran his hand through his thick quiff of dark hair in frustration and picked up the file where he’d thrown it down on the table earlier. ‘Where do you want to start?’ His eyes flashed at her, brimming with resentment.
‘Right at the beginning. With how many people have had access or actually been into the vault in the last twelve months. If we need to go back further we will, but let’s focus there first.’ Viggiano muttered under his breath as he counted the numbers again, consulting various sheets of paper that he picked up from in front of him.
‘Like I said before. Forty-seven people.’
‘Plus me. That makes forty-eight.’
‘What, you think I’m an idiot? You’re in the forty-seven,’ he said, his chin jutting in indignation.
‘I am? How do you work that out?’ Jennifer flicked through her hieroglyphic notes, adding numbers in her head.
‘Twenty-five guards from the Mint Police, fifteen military personnel, five Treasury officials and two Federal agents, one of which was you. Not that many people get down there.’ Viggiano held up the sheet of paper on which he’d done his sums and waved it in the air as if to prove his point.
‘That’s strange. Rigby told me there were twenty-six guards. That’s why I made it forty-eight,’ said Jennifer, her smooth brown forehead momentarily creased by a slight frown.
‘Who?’
‘Rigby. The Officer in Charge, remember?’ she said impatiently, although the corners of her mouth twitched at the memory of Sheppard’s pink trousers and Rigby’s ashen face.
‘Well according to the Treasury, it’s twenty-five. I got all the names here.’ He held up several sheets of paper by their corners between his thumb and forefinger. ‘They faxed them over this morning.’
‘Let me see those,’ she demanded. Viggiano shrugged and passed them over to Jennifer who scanned through the names carefully. She paused on the final sheet and then frowning, held it up to the light.
‘What?’ Viggiano’s tone was immediately defensive. Jennifer didn’t say anything but just gripped the sheet between her thumb and forefinger and rubbed them together. A second sheet peeled away from the first with a faint sucking noise. Viggiano went white.
‘Like I said, twenty-six guards,’ Jennifer said quietly, inspecting the single name at the top of the newly revealed sheet with a grim look on her face.
‘I don’t understand,’ Viggiano spluttered.
‘I guess the ink must have stuck them together.’ She knew that if their roles had been reversed, Viggiano would have come down on her hard for that sort of oversight, but that wasn’t her style. They both knew he had screwed up and as far as she was concerned that was that. There was certainly no point in rubbing his nose in it. What was important was seeing whether this new piece of information led them somewhere.
‘Tony Short.’ She read from the piece of paper, ‘DOB 18 March 1965. Deceased.’
‘Deceased? So he’s irrelevant,’ said Viggiano with relief.
‘He had access to the vault.’
‘But he’s dead.’
‘Only just.’ She laid the sheet on the table and pushed it over to Viggiano so he could read what it said for himself. ‘Four days ago.’
‘A coincidence.’ Viggiano sounded like he was trying to convince himself as well as her.
‘Maybe. But he’s the only one we haven’t checked out. What do we know about him?’ Viggiano turned to the laptop to his left and typed in the name. A file flashed up a few seconds later.
‘Ex NYPD. Medal of Honour. Transferred to the Mint Police five years ago. Married with kids. Usual boy scout shit. It’s all here. Deceased*.’ He looked up. ‘What’s the asterisk for?’
‘Suicide,’ Jennifer replied. ‘The asterisk means suicide.’
Clerkenwell, London
22nd July – 7:42pm
It had been a hat factory when it had first been built in 1876, according to the inscription chiselled into its once proud façade. Then, during the Second World War, production had been given over to the manufacture of buttons for RAF uniforms. By the time Tom had bought it, the building had fallen into disuse, the store and warehouse level empty, the three upper floors carved up into office space in the 1960s.
Tom had chosen the, by comparison, palatial surroundings of the Managing Director’s office as his bedroom. Inexplicably it came complete with its own marbled en suite bathroom, as if the former boss’s managerial mystique would have crumbled had the staff ever suspected that he used the toilet much like the rest of them.
Eventually, Tom’s idea was to have this top floor as a huge open plan living room complete with kitchen and dining area. The second floor would be bedrooms and bathrooms while the first … well he still hadn’t quite decided what to do with the first. More showroom space perhaps?
It didn’t matter. That was all in the future anyway, after the store was up and running. For now, he had to make do with the cracked mirror on the back of the bathroom door as he adjusted his tie, picking his silver cufflinks off the chipped filing cabinet that now doubled as a chest of drawers and deftly threading them through the double cuff of his Hilditch & Key shirt.
‘I’ll see you later,’ he shouted to Dominique as he clattered down the concrete steps, his footsteps echoing back up around the stairwell’s empty carcass.
‘Okay.’ She had appeared at the doorway to the second floor where she had taken up residence amid the tea-stained walls of the former finance department. ‘Have fun.’
Tom stepped out into a cherry sunset, the sun scrolling down through an orange sky, a warm whisper of air shushing through the streets. He liked seeing the city at this time. It was a strange transition period, when one set of users melted away and another appeared.
He soon reached Smithfield, Europe’s oldest meat market, a low slung amalgam of a refurbished cast-iron Victorian market hall and a post-war brick and concrete hangar. It was surrounded on all sides by a crenulated roofline of alternately short and tall warehouses, a jarring convergence of red brick and white stone, of Gothic windows and industrial steel shutters. Five minutes later he was in Hatton Garden, the centre of London’s diamond trade.
It was nearly empty. Gone were the eager shop assistants enticing you to enter, offering you their very best price, suggesting a pair of earrings to go with the necklace. Gone were the courier bikes and the security vans and the anxious soon-to-be-weds, comparing ring prices in gaudy shop windows. Their shutters had been drawn down, their contents safely stowed for the night, their neon lights extinguished.
And yet the street projected a latent energy. Rather than be asleep it was merely resting. A few Hasidim with pale faces and dark suits still stood in doorways, plunged into shops and buildings, swapped anxious glances from under their dark fedoras. Behind the scenes, the work went on, stones were cut, deals were done, hands shaken, money counted.
Perhaps because his own life had been so lacking in order, so devoid of any fixed reference points or rules, Tom was fascinated by this place. As in Smithfield, he drew an almost spiritual reassurance from the continuity of these streets, their daily cycle, the comforting embrace of their familiar routine. In a way, he craved their predictability.
Stepping in off the street, Tom presented his