Murmuring the Judges

6

Martin looked around the low coffee table in the Deputy Chief Constable’s office. The astute McIlhenney had suggested that they use Skinner’s room for the meeting with the bank security chiefs, since two of their number were retired Assistant Chiefs, who would appreciate the courtesy of an invitation into the Command Corridor.

Six men and one woman faced him. On his instructions, Sammy Pye had invited heads of security from the four established clearing banks, from two recently converted former building societies, and from the two largest remaining mutuals. Five had accepted at once, two others, with no regional head of security in post, were represented by area managers, while the eighth, a building society, had declined the invitation.

The Head of CID looked seriously at each visitor as they settled into the low leather seats. Four of them, each well into his fifties and running to fat, fidgeted so uncomfortably that he wondered about the wisdom of McIlhenney’s strategy.

But then Ronnie Manuel, the bulkiest of the quartet, and a former ACC in Tayside, smiled back at him. ‘I guess we should be honoured that you’ve invited us in here, Mr Martin. Bob Skinner has become something of a legend, so to be in his office. .’

The younger man grinned. ‘The name’s Andy. We thought you’d like it,’ he said. ‘On top of that, Bob’s room has the most comfortable seats!

‘If you’re all settled into them,’ he went on, ‘let me tell you why you’ve been invited here.

‘I believe that you’ve got a big problem.’ As Martin blurted out his blunt message, he looked at Manuel, who was head of security of the Bank of Scotland, at David Sullivan, a trim ex-soldier from the TSB Bank, and at Moyra Lamb, regional manager of the Nationwide Building Society.

‘You three have experience of it, having all been robbed recently. This rest of you are in the firing line.’

‘You mean the hold-ups?’ said Ms Lamb. ‘The Bank’s, the Clydesdale’s, and ours?’

‘That’s just what I mean,’ the Head of CID acknowledged. ‘We’re satisfied that they were all the work of the same people. We believe that we are faced with a highly organised, well-trained team which is targeting bank branches, in and around Edinburgh.

‘I’ve invited you here to alert you to the continuing danger, and to advise you as strongly as I can to put all your branches on maximum alert.’ He paused, and looked around the table once more. ‘May I ask whether any of you have increased security lately?’

Harry Durkin, who had been Head of Special Branch in Strathclyde until taking early retirement five years before to join the Clydesdale, shrugged his shoulders. ‘I can’t speak for the rest, Andy, but I’m always reviewing our security operation. And from what David was telling me on the way in, the branch that he had turned over the other day was kitted out with all of the standard stuff. . video surveillance, bullet-proof glass screens for staff, a silent alarm system linked to the nearest police office.’

He shook his head, making his heavy jowls wobble. ‘But when three guys walk in with shotguns and tell all the staff to get out front or they’ll shoot one of the punters, they can’t do anything but comply. Once the bank staff are under their control, the bank is busted; simple as that.’

‘I know that,’ agreed Martin. ‘Like you said, though, Harry, you never stop trying to make them harder to bust. Look, in the last two robberies, the team has taken the tapes from the video surveillance equipment. That’s easier and surer than disabling the camera.’

Eyebrows rose around the table. ‘Have they, by God?’ muttered George Hudson, a former Grampian ACC, now employed by the Royal Bank.

‘Indeed they have,’ his host emphasised. ‘So let me suggest this to you. Either move the video units out of the branches into other buildings. . your nearest police offices, for example. . or install duplicate recording equipment. It wouldn’t even need to be functional, just realistic enough for the robbers to be shown it and given a tape.’

‘Would that fool them more than once, Andy?’ asked Manuel.

‘I reckon it would. These guys won’t actually be bothering to run the tapes. They’d have trouble anyway, on a domestic player.’

The Bank of Scotland official looked at his colleagues. ‘Okay, I’ll look at the feasibility of those options.’ Around the table the others nodded agreement. ‘Got any other ideas, Andy?’

‘How about security people outside the doors of the branches?’ Moyra Lamb interrupted.

Martin shook his head. ‘They’d need to be armed to have any deterrent value, and in this country that’s not on. Unarmed, they wouldn’t hold up an attack for a second. In fact, the team would have ready-made hostages before they were even inside the bank.’

He hesitated for a second. ‘Look, this is just a thought. I’ve seen banks in Europe where customers are only admitted when a teller unlocks the door remotely. I can even think of a couple of jewellers in Edinburgh who use that system. Have any of you ever looked at that possibility?’

Hudson glanced at Manuel and Durkin, then looked at the Chief Superintendent. ‘Ronnie, Harry and I sometimes get together informally to swap ideas. We looked at that one a while back. We decided that it might be practical in country branches, or in smaller operations in the cities and towns. We ruled it out, though, on the basis that the annoyance to customers, on rainy days for example, would more than offset any security gains.

‘In the big branches, it isn’t a runner. They’re just too busy, I’m afraid.’

‘Fair enough,’ Martin responded. ‘You might like to have a rethink about the smaller ones though. Neither Dalkeith or Colinton seem like massive branches to me. I think if you polled your customers, you might find that they preferred a few seconds more in the rain to the possibility of looking down the barrel of a sawn-off. ’

‘All that’s very fine,’ broke in Paul Oxford, regional manager of one of the new banks, ‘but what are the police going to do to protect us?’ There was a hint of petulance in his voice, a sign, thought the policeman, that he was slightly out of his depth.

‘The best way to protect you, Mr Oxford, is to catch these guys and bang them away for a long time. That’s exactly what we will do. However in the meantime, we’ll use our resources as best we can to make you feel more secure.

‘I’ve asked ACC Elder, who’s in charge of uniformed operations, if he can arrange panda and traffic-car patrols so that they pass by your branches frequently, and so that we can respond to an emergency in the shortest time possible. I’ll also make the services of our crime prevention team available to all of you, to visit, if you wish, every branch in my area and to advise you on security improvements that might be made.

‘But I can’t emphasise enough that we need your co-operation too. For example, where you have a safe with a time-lock, make proper use of it, don’t leave the bloody thing lying open all day.’

He paused once more and looked at the visitors. ‘There’s one thing more I have to say to you.

‘Each of the three robberies has taken place at a time when the branch involved was full of cash. Please bear that in mind. Brief all your managers to vary their routines as much as they can. Tell them to try to ensure that cash is delivered as close as possible to the time when it’s actually needed. And tell them also to be discreet.

‘We’d be foolish to rule out the possibility that these criminals have had inside information. Therefore, please. .’ He leaned heavily on the word ‘. . emphasise that staff should be told of big cash movements into branches only on a need-to-know basis.

‘Careless talk costs money. . yes, and possibly lives, too.’