Blood Money by Julian Page Read Free Book Online Page B

spend his anniversary with his wife, Bill had ended up missing all the excitement over the shooting in Birchin Lane, but it doesn’t take John long to bring him up to speed with yesterday’s extraordinary events.
    Once Bill is fully clued-up the pair begin to prepare their notes for today’s interviews. Normally they’d prefer the questioning to take place back at the station, but Alexis’s personal assistant had made a strong and persuasive request that the meeting should take place at Kronos’s Lombard Street office to enable Mr Vasilakos to stick to his busy schedule.
    John would have much preferred for the fixture to be on home turf but saw nothing to be gained in protesting the issue. Completing their preparations ahead of schedule Bill lumbers off to the kitchen area to arrange the ‘chink-chink’ (getting the coffees made) during which time John succumbs to his insatiable curiosity and he hits the internet to see what else can be discovered about the address they’re about to visit.
    Prior to being Kronos’s London office, 60 Lombard Street had formerly been the headquarters for the People’s Savings Bank (or the ‘PSB’ as it was commonly known). Founded in 1820, the PSB was a British financial institution specialising in accepting savings deposits from the poor. Chuckling to himself, John wonders if anyone else had ever noticed the irony, -no longer a place that helped the poor to scrimp and save, it now housed a hedge fund that tirelessly operates to make the rich even richer.
    In 1995 the PSB merged with a major high street bank, at which point they vacated the cramped Lombard Street offices to make a new home in a purpose built glass and steel edifice less than a mile to the west in 26 Cresham Street. Though old and relatively small, the building at 60 Lombard Street nevertheless might still be very impressive if the pictures on the webpage are to be believed. John clicks from link to link, pausing to examine the pictures of the stunning entrance hall, full of ornate columns and fancy ceiling things and walls covered in dark old paintings. Having discovered a few facts about the location, DS Gibson now feels a bit more prepared for where they’re going. It looks nice, perhaps a bit old fashioned and stuffy, but nice. John reflects quietly to himself ‘What a shame such a beautiful old building is now owned by a piece of work like Vasilakos.’
    Returning with mugs of steaming coffee in hand, Bill is curious to know what’s so interesting about the website John’s so engrossed in. Looking over his young colleague’s shoulder, Bills shakes his head in disbelief. “No way,
not again!”
    This reaction is unexpected, and John insists on an explanation from his grizzled partner. Bill takes a deep breath and begins to recount, “One of my first jobs when I turned CID some twenty years ago was to go over to that place. In those days the ground floor was a working bank whilst the upper floors served as the headquarters for the PSB.” He pauses momentarily to remember the details. “Yeah, that’s right…a criminal gang had tunnelled underneath the vault from the cellar of a pub across the road. Lombard Street is quite narrow you see, so the gang only had to tunnel about 50 ft. We found all the rubble they’d excavated piled-up in the pub’s cellar. They used a thermic lance to cut upwards through the 3ft of reinforced concrete that made up the vault floor. The bank’s security team had taken the precaution to wire-up the steel reinforcement within the concrete to an alarm system and fortunately for the PSB, the Bank Manager was in that morning and heard the alarm go off. He put in a call to Bishopsgate nick and we got there before they’d managed to cut a hole in the floor large enough to get through.
    With nothing stolen, the manager dithered and fretted. He seemed more interested in getting assurances from