How to Rob the Bank of England by Clifford Thurlow

Author:Clifford Thurlow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 2024-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

20. THE BIG FISH

A couple of days after lunch at Simpson’s, Ray picked up Henry and drove out to his favourite boozer in Romford. The Plough was one of the oldest pubs in England and had stood on the same spot at Gallows Corner since about 1500 when farmers and field workers would come in for jugs of ale and a ploughman’s lunch. No one drank the water, it was polluted by the waste that ran off the fields.

While Ray was at the bar, Henry found a window seat and let his eyes drift over the pinched East London faces. He was the first to tell you that he liked a bit of rough. His gaze wandered off to the trees and bushes outside the window. It was a perfect end of summer morning and a few words from Blake’s Jerusalem came into his mind … And did those feet in ancient time, Walk upon England’s mountains green. He was not a believer, but he liked to think so.

Ray placed his pint and a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon on the table, sat and lit a Senior Service. They were the odd couple. Jekyll and Hyde. Beauty and the Beast. Everything had come easy to Ray. Blind to his limitations, comfortable in his own skin, the sort of man who gives regulars a chill up the spine when he walks into a pub. A gangster has to be bloody sure of himself to wear shorts. Henry with the rosebud in his buttonhole was a leftover from another time, overripe, overrefined, the queen bee with friends in the highest of high places and a ginger, as they say in prison (ginger beer – queer), the cut-glass accent that irritated Ray from others he tolerated from ’Enery.

They were like flies on flypaper glued together. Keith had no idea how or where they had met and had never got a straight answer when he asked. What he did know was that in 1989 – not long before the big one – Ray was stuck in a French prison cell for nine months for his alleged involvement in a multi-million-euro bank fraud, and Henry must have had a good reason, as well as the contacts, to pull strings across the Channel and persuade le magistrat that they had the wrong man.

Was Henry’s motive to prepare Ketteridge as the front for the robbery? Before that morning on 2 May when John Goddard was relieved of the bonds, Henry had encouraged Keith to stay close to his Indonesian friend TJ, knowing that he was in the market for bent bonds. Henry had introduced banker John Bowman to the party the night of the robbery, but they were clearly well acquainted before then. This was Henry’s package. Ray did the talking but Henry was the ventriloquist throwing his voice through sealed lips.

Bowman’s plan was to place small tranches of bonds in Lichtenstein and Zurich before the Bank of England circulated the serial numbers, maximising their value. That didn’t happen, but the bulk that remained still provided myriad underworld options.

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