The Hawk Is Dead

85

Tuesday 28 November 2023

Unfinished business. Rose Cadoret was losing her nerve. They all were. Since Smoke’s botched shooting of Sir Peregrine and his insane killing of Geoffrey Bailey, things were unravelling. That astute Sussex detective, Roy Grace, was a real worry, and was making very dangerous assumptions.

Dangerous to them.

But she still had one piece of unfinished business. Actually, two pieces.

Detectives from the Met were crawling all over the Household staff following Bailey’s death. If Smoke’s misguided intention had been to silence the footman, it had catastrophically backfired. Dead men might not talk, as the saying went, but Geoffrey Bailey certainly had talked his head off in the days — hours even — before his death. He’d poured out his anger over the medal to anyone who would listen, but worse, Rose had heard, he had dropped very large hints that he knew about items that had been stolen.

If Smoke had simply put the frighteners on him, as he’d been instructed, it would have silenced the footman. Now, as the Met detectives interviewed his former work colleagues and were gathering disturbing information from them, it felt like Geoffrey Bailey was still shouting his head off from the grave.

Further, thanks to Detective Grace’s meddling, unless the missing items from the Royal Collection were found, and quickly, Lorraine McKnight was poised to bring in the police to investigate their disappearance. And the items wouldn’t be found, because they were no longer here.

The group had always known that the day would come when they would have to do a fast exit. They were rich beyond their wildest dreams from the items they’d already sold, and they had even greater riches stored in the unit conveniently near to London’s Heathrow Airport. Their loot was in Bitcoins, shared out equally, into accounts each of them held, and they’d made two rules.

The first was never to cash in any of their Bitcoins until they were safely out of the country. It was drummed into them that the fastest way for a criminal to get caught was to start splashing unexplained cash around.

It was a rule she had broken. Not badly, she hadn’t gone out and splurged on a Ferrari or anything daft like that. But even so she felt a little guilty, because she’d taken a risk. It was a tiny one — stupid, she knew. But it was something that as an only child she’d needed to do, while she was still here in England and able to.

She’d only cashed in a tiny fraction of the millions of pounds’ worth of Bitcoins she had. It was to get her elderly, wheelchair-bound mother out of her damp council flat and into the beautiful care home in Bexhill, with a glorious sea-view room. It was expensive, costing £1,800 a week for her small suite, and a further £1,700 a week for her round-the-clock carers, and Rose had paid a year in advance.

It was just worth it for peace of mind. She was very aware that once she had left England she was unlikely ever to return or see her mother again. At least she now knew she was in good hands and in a place where she could live out her last years in a level of luxury she’d never before experienced. And probably could never have imagined.

Any guilt Rose might have had about stealing from the Royal Collection was more than assuaged by the knowledge that, at least, one under-privileged pensioner would benefit from the nation’s treasures. Besides, how many of those treasures had been stolen or blagged in the first place?

And as for the rules, hey, soon they would be safely offshore. With different names, untouchable in a country with no extradition treaty with the UK. Each of them carrying on their phones and laptops a carefully backed-up string of thirty-five numbers and letters, some in uppercase, some lowercase, in electronic Bitcoin wallets. Untraceable funds she and the others could draw from, anywhere in the world, any time. Millions. She loved the sound of that word.

Millions!

And just the tiniest drop in the ocean for the Royal Collection.

The second rule they had made was for none of them to be too greedy. They had unanimously agreed that the moment the balloon looked like it was going up, they would be gone, accepting they would all be happy with what they already had. And they had a lot. A very great deal. They all had IDs, credit cards and passports in assumed names, ready for when Exeat, the code for Exit Day, came.

And before that they had work to do, covering their tracks as best they could. Tying up loose ends. She had two loose ends and she needed to move fast. The button had been pressed.

Exeat was in three days’ time.