Getting Away With It

by Victor Davis

Genres: General Fiction; Thrillers; Crime Fiction; Spy Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

Classic thriller from the author of QUEENS' RANSOM

When a ruined City of London office block is bought for demolition, no-one sheds a tear except for construction tycoon Vernon Gatling, who put the block up following the Blitz.

But Vernon doesn't have a sentimental bone in his body, so what are his real motives?

Release date: August 16, 2012

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 400

Sample

Chapter One

While the British trooped wearily to the polls on 9 April 1992, at the end of an ill-tempered general election campaign, two men arrived at the front door of a middle-aged couple in the village of Colney Heath near the cathedral town of St Albans in the county of Hertfordshire. They had a tempting bundle of crisp, crackling fifty-pound notes in their hands, and had arrived in response to a Van for Sale advertisement in a magazine.

Acting out their roles as ordinary buyers, the men made a cursory inspection of the couple’s pale blue and white Ford transit, and made a brief pretence of haggling over the asking price.

But there was never any doubt that the vehicle was ideal for their wicked purpose and they determined to have it.

A deal was speedily struck – so speedily that it would be difficult but, as it proved in this case, not impossible for the couple later to identify the purchasers from photographs they were shown by officers of Britain’s anti-terrorist squad.

The cash was handed over in exchange for the keys and vehicle documents, and the satisfied couple waved the two men goodbye as they headed off towards the M25 orbital road.

As the unsuspecting vendors turned their backs and went indoors, a long period of anxiety and terror was about to begin for them.

For the two men, members of the Irish Republican Army from South Armagh – one believed to be a farmer in his mid-thirties and the other an electrician nine years his junior – twenty-four hours of intense, murderous activity, for which until this day they still have not been called to account, lay ahead.

They took their new purchase to a secure address somewhere on the twenty-mile drive into the north London suburbs. Here a crude bomb, weighing up to one ton and composed of a satanic mixture of fertilizer, fuel oil and ammonium nitrate, designed to produce a violent shockwave, was loaded into the back.

The following day was a Friday. Normally, the end-of-week exodus from the money-churning mills of the City of London’s financial district begins early and is completed by seven p.m. But not on 10 April.

The high-commission earners from the merchant banks and bond-trading floors were in euphoric mood. At that hour the pubs and wine bars were still doing brisk business as the lingerers celebrated the unexpected election victory of the Conservative Party, which had hitherto left them free to trade hindered by minimal regulatory shackles.

Later, on that early-spring evening, the two Irishmen carefully parked the van outside the Baltic Exchange, a heavily ornamented Edwardian building in St Mary Axe in the heart of the City. Security cameras positioned on neighbouring buildings caught the two hurrying away, heads down in their hooded anoraks to frustrate identification.

When the pair were safely clear of the area an imprecise warning was telephoned to railway staff across the River Thames at Waterloo station.

Twenty minutes later, at nine-twenty-five p.m. and before the threatened City area had been accurately pinpointed by the police, the van exploded with devastating effect.

A crater fifteen feet deep was instantly created in the roadway, revealing traces of an old Roman road and tearing out sewage and water pipes, gas lines and electric cables as if a crazed surgeon had gone to work on a supine patient’s entrails. The Baltic Exchange seemed to bloat under the force of the blast and then shatter. The front doorman, aged forty-nine and working overtime, was instantly killed, as was a fifteen-year-old girl waiting in a car for her father, and a twenty-nine-year-old securities dealer, who had been drinking with his colleagues.

The appalling blast roared through the narrow grey canyons, gathering debris and spreading out to thunder against some three hundred buildings, shattering stone, brick and marble, and sending millions of glass shards hissing through the air.

Inside the multi-storey buildings, the raging beast of dust-thick air plucked down false ceilings and ducting systems, swept desks, filing cabinets, computers and late workers against far walls.

That night, ninety-one of them were injured.

Chapter Two

During the following few days the press and television newscasts carried many pictures of the devastation to the City’s more outstanding buildings and those occupied by the most famous companies – the Commercial Union building, the NatWest Tower, the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank, the Union Bank of Switzerland among them.

The cameras also pointed sadly at the almost total ruin of St Helen’s Church, which had stood for nearly seven centuries in Bishopsgate, having survived the Great Fire of London in 1666 and the German Luftwaffe’s bombing campaigns during the 1939–45 war.

Apart from its Nigerian owners and tenants, no one fretted overmuch at the damage to nearby Abura House, an undistinguished post-war structure of seven storeys in multi-occupation, the tenants including an American bond dealer, a venture-capital group and the Nigerians themselves, who seemed to have interests in many spheres.

When it was originally raised on blitz ruins in 1955 as offices for HM Customs and Excise, Abura House had been named Fletcher Hall, marking the site where in medieval times had existed a guild of fletchers or arrow-makers.

In the sixties, the building had proved too small and inconvenient for the customs men and they had moved on. The building then underwent several changes of ownership and usage, and in the early eighties the weather-worn blue plastic panelling of the façade, which had been inspired by the decorative ideas of the Festival of Britain back in 1951, was replaced by modern glass curtaining and an updated marble entrance hall and canopy.

After the facelift, the original builder would not have recognized the place.

This fact was later to have extraordinary repercussions that no one could have foreseen.

In an assessment of the IRA devastation, bomb damage experts noted that these post-war structures may have lost their fragile façades in the blast, but the steel-and-concrete skeletons beneath had withstood the thunderclap much better than the older buildings, with their timber floors and internal plaster walls.

So the Nigerians now had on their hands a sturdy skeletal building that remained uninhabitable while they sought compensation from insurance and government sources. At first they were content to await the arrival of their money and use it to restore the building to its pre-bomb state and function. During this hiatus they were pleasantly surprised to be approached by the Montemar Bank of Spain and asked, ‘Why bother? We need a foothold in London. Leave the reconstruction to us.’

The Nigerians received a sum considerably in excess of what their own surveyors had said Abura House intacta was worth on the current property market, and happily allowed themselves to be bought out.

The directors of the Montemar Bank of Spain were lying to the Nigerians. They had no intention of restoring Abura House. They immediately ordered the drawing up of plans to demolish the building, excavate the site to provide underground parking and erect a state-of-the-art architectural showpiece of twenty-two storeys above ground.

Finalizing these plans and having them accepted by the demanding City of London Corporation’s Planning and Transportation Committee and English Heritage took three years. Finally, in 1997, the scaffolding and the blue plastic dust screens went up and the forty-two-year-old bomb-blasted building was poised to come down.

Chapter Three

Before demolition of Abura House began, there had been an extremely distasteful incident – carefully kept out of the newspapers – involving the City Corporation and the construction tycoon, Vernon Gatling, who had failed to win the demolition and reconstruction contract.

The last time Gatling had figured in the list of Britain’s richest men his fortune had been put at £460 million. These lists were always wildly inaccurate, since they were composed by journalists taking desperate guesses when they could not access the true figures. But there was no disputing that, give a million or two, Vernon was awesomely rich.

He was not, however, entirely a self-made man. His father Frank (always known as Gunner, a reference to the famous Gatling gun with which he, incidentally, had no family connection) had first made significant family money from post-war demolition and reconstruction. From this foundation Vernon had created an international construction empire and had broadened out into the building and ownership of hotels, holiday resorts, shopping malls and skyscrapers. The so-called Gatling SkyCities in New York, Chicago and Rio de Janeiro were his monuments.

Vernon was aggressive – as aggressive as any American. For a while he’d revelled in notoriety in America for a headline feud with the city fathers of Beverly Hills in Los Angeles. He’d shocked the filmland enclave by producing the blueprint for yet another Gatling SkyCity with a proposed site on a corner of Rodeo Drive. He must have known he was pissing in the Santa Ana wind, though, and that the usual bungs to officials would not work: the city fathers had never yet made an exception to the zoning laws permitting such a high-rise building in Beverly Hills. The construction industry suspected the whole farce was a case of Vernon Gatling having fun to keep boredom at bay. He had made his pile through dogged drive and head-down determination, and conflict played an essential role in his amusements.

From early on in his confrontation with the City of London Corporation, it was apparent that Vernon was, once again, pissing in the wind, although on this occasion there was no fun on his agenda.

Deeper passions, as yet unsuspected, were in play.

He as good as accused City of London planning officials of accepting favours to use undue influence with the Spaniards and their architects to steer the Abura House contract towards a rival.

The three Common Councillors, who comprised the unofficial court of inquiry, were puzzled. Vernon Gatling’s tender to the Spanish bank’s architects had been received six weeks past the deadline. That wasn’t his gung-ho style at all. When they summoned him to the Guildhall, he arrived in a truculent mood flanked by two lawyers who appeared less than happy with their client’s stance and their brief. On his behalf, they demanded that the whole bidding process be taken back to the beginning, with the existing contracts declared null and void while Vernon Gatling’s accusations of collusion between the successful construction rival and the Corporation officials were further investigated.

Apart from being affronted by the slur on the good name of their officers, Corporation members were baffled by the tycoon’s vehemence. After all, given the size and extent of Gatling’s global operations and holdings, the new building in Bishopsgate was minor league, even taking into account that the Corporation had upped the plot-ratio in line with its policy to prepare the City for global competition.

At the confrontation Gatling banged the table in a bullying manner not appreciated by the City gentlemen. The glass tumbler covering the neck of a water jug jumped and rattled.

‘Would you kindly not do that,’ said the chairman icily. ‘With all your experience of the construction industry, Mr Gatling, I simply don’t understand why on this occasion you were so laggardly with your tender.’

‘When the work was put out, I was bluesail fishing off Cuba with my daughter,’ said Gatling irritably. ‘My contracts people simply failed to appreciate the significance of Abura House, which has undergone considerable alteration in recent years. Until I returned and spotted its exact address on the published tender documents, I had not linked the property with its original name – Fletcher Hall. After all, it was a long time ago.’

‘What was a long time ago, Mr Gatling?’ The chairman struggled to be patient with him.

‘When my father let me build it. Fletcher Hall was the first time he trusted me to take charge of a large construction project. I was only twenty years old.’

‘You’re telling us,’ said the chairman slowly, ‘that the building is of great sentimental importance to you?’

‘Yes, that’s it,’ said Vernon Gatling, nodding vigorously. ‘Enormous sentimental importance. I really should be the one to put a new building on that site. Tradition and all that . . .’

The committee members were a study in incredulity. The chairman said explosively, ‘Mr Gatling, nursing a sentimental attachment to a building is one thing and quite understandable. Most of us save that for our old schools. But taking it so far as to impugn the integrity of officers of the City Corporation in order to get your own way is totally unacceptable.

‘You have produced nothing but unsubstantiated rumours of the flimsiest nature and we have dutifully squandered our time looking into them. Unless you and your advisers have anything more germane to offer, this committee intends to terminate this inquiry forthwith. Enough of our energies have been wasted on this slur. We must insist that you withdraw your allegations. Your legal advisers must have told you that what you have implied is actionable and we will not hesitate to grant our officers permission to initiate such proceedings as they see fit.’

The trio watched cold-eyed as Gatling’s lawyer leaned over and whispered into his ear. The face of the tycoon grew grimmer and his lips compressed. Across the mahogany, they could see the blood disappearing from his tightening nostrils and hear his teeth grating.

Finally, they watched him stomp off to a side room to confer with his unhappy mouthpieces. The committee waited.

On Vernon’s return, they observed him attempting to rearrange his menacing face to appear chastened. The look did not come easily. Massive wealth means never having to say you’re sorry.

But now Vernon spread his arms in a gesture of surrender. ‘All right, gentlemen, I admit I got carried away.’ He attempted a boyish grin. ‘My advisers are right and I am wrong. I withdraw without reservation anything I said that reflects on the Corporation and its servants. It’s just that Fletcher Hall is so close to my heart and the honour of building the new one would give me immense pleasure. Is there any remaining prospect of a review of the tenders?’

The chairman shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not, Mr Gatling. We have satisfied ourselves that our officers have behaved correctly at all times and that the winning contractors are qualified to carry out the work in accordance with City of London building regulations. We have no cause to intervene on your behalf with the Montemar Bank of Spain. The matter is closed.’ The chairman snapped shut his file. ‘I would add that it is in everyone’s best interest that this unhappy business is buried and forgotten.’

Much later, when a young writer named Gervase Meredith was floundering with the research for Vernon Gatling’s unofficial biography and had prised out of a member of the City Corporation committee an account of these proceedings, that last remark assumed a haunting resonance.

The fracas with the City Corporation meant little in itself. Just another spoilt bigshot who, for once, couldn’t have everything his own way.

No one at the time detected the desperation that lay behind Vernon Gatling’s ill-judged slander of the Corporation’s officials.

In truth, he nursed as much sentimentality for Fletcher Hall as he would for the rebuilding of a public lavatory.

Chapter One

Sometimes late at night when only insomniacs are watching, or in the afternoon when mothers and the unemployed have joined the glum television audience, it is possible to catch a repeat screening of the first of the celebrated Ealing comedies. It is called Hue and Cry.

In 1946 Laurence Varnish saw the black and white film eight times at the Elephant and Castle picture-house in South London when it was first released. He was in it.

Naturally, Larry Varnish never bought a ticket. Like all his mates, he’d creep round to the side of the cinema alongside the railway arches where the ticket-buying mugs queued out of the rain, insert his wire hook into the crack between the emergency double doors, draw it upwards, snag the inside push-bar and tug until the doors clicked open. Then, in a commando crawl that he’d seen in many a war movie, he’d slither into the auditorium and surface, a picture of boyish innocence, comfortably ensconced in a red plush sixpenny seat.

This was known to one and all as Bunking In. What else were the kids to do? There was no money about.

The tactic did not always succeed. If the po-faced box-office lady in her smart crimson uniform said she’d sold only a dozen tickets for the early show, and the manager could see even in the gloom that there were at least twenty people in the auditorium, he did not have to look far for an explanation. Then all hell would break out as the young street-rakers ran every which way to avoid his wrath.

If you were unlucky enough to feel his Frankenstein grip on your shoulder before you could charge headlong at the exit door and burst forth into daylight and freedom, you could accept the good hiding – what was ‘good’ about it? young Larry wanted to know – or accompany the fuming manager to his office while he summoned the police. No kid in his right mind took this option. The police meant angry parents. The police meant an appearance at the Tower Bridge juvenile court. The police meant Borstal, if you had previous convictions. You took the walloping.

The miserable old sod of a manager didn’t even give the third option – which you were offered across the road at the rival Trocadero cinema – of doing penance by taking the Brasso and yellow rags and polishing the circle rails and the long narrow ashtrays screwed to the backs of the seats. Cleaning staff were hard to come by in 1946.

Larry was neither walloped nor arrested. When the ushers’ torches began criss-crossing the stalls seats, like the wartime searchlights of recent memory, seeking out the young miscreants as if they were Heinkel bombers, he knew it was time to forget his special movie for a while and concentrate on personal survival.

Larry could leap those curving rows of plush chairs like a champion hurdler while the manager and his staff, wrong-footed at every aisle, cursed as the little will-o’-the-wisp ducked and dived, jumped and scampered and fell unwelcomed into legitimate patrons’ laps before breasting the exit doors with the kamikaze’s cry, ‘Banzai!’ This last was not particularly appropriate but what did Larry care? The triumphant howl sounded good.

And the hurdling was excellent training for similar encounters that were to come later when the City of London police had come to identify him as Vanishing Larry.

Despite all the obstacles put in his way, Vanishing Larry was still able to bunk in at evening performances and disappear into audiences too big for the manager to count by the light of the flickering movie.

‘Here I come,’ he’d hiss at his mates, giving them a few moments’ warning as the screen showed a mob of street urchins charging along Bankside where Shakespeare had once toiled, and up on to Southwark Bridge. Larry remembered so well Mr Crichton, that funny bloke who was the director, shouting, ‘Run, you little buggers, run!’

Take after take they had run their hearts out for him, supposedly in pursuit of a gang of villains, although no one had bothered fully to explain the plot at the time. He’d had to wait until the picture reached the Elephant and Castle for that.

And in the scampering mob of local kids, who’d been hired as extras for a shilling a run, you could catch just one glimpse of Larry’s slum-pale face, mouth open in a shout (probably ‘Banzai!’ but the soundtrack was later redubbed) as he whizzed past the camera at a distance of eight feet.

‘I’m a blinking star – just like Errol Flynn,’ Larry would declare, to a chorus of farts and other rude expressions from his mates.

Larry had just left school at fourteen and was hauling beer crates at Barclay Perkins’ brewery, a few yards down the road from where he’d had his moment of movie glory.

What with the upset of the war, his dad away in the Kate Carney, and one thing and another, no one had bothered overmuch to see that Larry Varnish emerged from the school system fully rounded for citizenship. But at least he could read and write, and he was bright enough to know that there must be more to life than hauling crates and the promise of all the free beer he could drink on the brewery premises – when he was old enough.

Sometimes there were long delays between camera set-ups while Hue and Cry was being filmed, and cast, crew and extras would idle away the time in the shell of a bombed Thames-side building on the north-east end of Southwark Bridge where the film’s climax was to be shot. One of the actors, a cropped-haired man playing a plain-clothes copper, was popular with the street urchins. He made them laugh with his stories. He knew Will Hay and George Formby.

But it wasn’t this acquaintance with the popular film comics of the day that grabbed Larry’s attention. The geezer seemed to know a lot about London. He sat on the river wall, pointing out the house where Sir Christopher Whatsisname, the bloke who built St Paul’s Cathedral, had lived, the spot where Shakespeare’s plays, none of which Larry had ever seen, had first been staged, and a boozer, the Anchor, that had a secret bolthole for smugglers behind the sliding oak panelling of an upstairs room. The tide, as brown as Mum’s Oxo gravy, was ebbing, and the actor pointed out a couple of barefooted boys foraging in the mudflats on the far side of the Thames. ‘They’re called mudlarks. They’re looking for old coins, anything from the past.’

Then the actor, who was a bit on the flowery side when he wasn’t being a stern upholder of the law in the movie, did something that was to seal Vanishing Larry Varnish’s fate. He scuffed the heel of his size ten Metropolitan Police-issue boot into the dirt alongside the river and said dreamily, ‘Who knows what tales the shades of the Romans beneath our feet would have to tell if only they could?’

Larry was genuinely flummoxed. Romans? What Romans? From what he’d seen in the movies, the Romans were a bunch of Eyeties who ponced around showing their knees and racing chariots. What had they to do with London?

Larry voiced his bafflement. ‘You’re having me on. We had the Normans not the Romans. That’s what they told us at school. Battle of Hastings – ten sixty-six.’

The actor laughed. ‘You must have gone to a funny school,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘The Normans are practically newcomers. Long before them, the Romans practically founded this place – Londinium, they called it. They were here for more than four hundred years.’

Larry didn’t give him an argument, which he might have done if it had been one of his own mates. The actor had a posh voice, which meant he knew what he was talking about. The man dug his heel in again. ‘Almost anywhere around here, if you went down deep enough, you’d find the evidence.’

‘What kind of evidence? Dead bodies?’ asked Larry. He felt a stirring, a whisper of interest as if phantoms were already rising from the earth, tugging at his newly acquired long trousers – his long ’uns – to claim his attention.

The actor patted the pudding basin haircut that Larry’s mum gave him every three weeks and said gently, ‘No, my boy. They’d be merely bits of bone by now. “Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”’

‘Blimey!’ said Larry, impressed at the vibrant delivery. ‘So what would you find then?’

Oh, masonry, crockery, pots, burial urns, that sort of thing.’

‘No treasure?’ Larry was disappointed.

‘Some. Jewellery. Coins. The occasional Roman miser’s hoard, I daresay. In fact, there’s an ideal opportunity to look – probably the only chance there ever will be – right now.’

‘How’s that, mister?’

The actor made a sweeping motion with his hand. ‘Look around you and weep for the imperial splendour that is gone. Since the blitz, the City of London has lain mostly in ruins, waiting for the money to rebuild. They brought in Italian and German prisoners-of-war to clear the surface rubble and dump it in Essex – which seems an appropriate role for Essex. The last POWs have just been sent home and, until the rebuilding begins, Londinium lurks temptingly just beneath our feet.’

Chapter Two

After the film-crew had wrapped for the day and Larry had trudged home to the Buildings for his tea, he told his parents what the actor had said about the Romans. His father immediately told him the joke about the Italian tanks that had only one forward but five reverse gears and his mum said, ‘You be careful of them actors. Bunch of nancy-boys.’

Like Larry himself, neither parent had any notion that the Romans had ever been in London. His mum said, ‘You’re as daft as your father. You want to wake your ideas up, sonny Jim.’ Then wistfully to her spouse, whom she had just insulted but who was serenely rolling a fag with the aid of his Rizla machine, she added, “Do you remember, in the silent movie days, when I took my mum to the Canterbury to see Ben Hur? The silly old cow thought the thing was real. She really showed me up. She screamed so much I had to take her outside. She said that Ramon Novarro could have made a fallen woman of her any time he liked!’

The boy could see he had failed to impress with his newly acquired historical knowledge so he shut up. But his imagination had begun to stir.

The following Sunday, Larry crossed the Thames from the south side and took a stroll around the City. He had been raised in a townscape torn asunder by war and hardly noticed the ruins any more. Now, looking closer, the place was as the actor had described – acre upon acre of empty sites, with cellars laid bare, and shattered office blocks, warehouses, shops and churches. Here and there, the remnants of a building were identified by a small plaque erected by its pre-war occupants. The offered information somehow did more than the sight of the ruins themselves to make Larry sad. He was just beginning to be aware of the bustling life that had existed around him when he was a baby, and which had all been untimely snuffed out.

The war had been over for almost a year but you could still catch in your nostrils the whiff of damp, crumbling mortar and the acrid tang of sundered iron gas-pipes. Chickweed, London Pride and other anarchic plants were pushing up everywhere. Not that Larry could identify any of them. He was a child of the Smoke. He knew tomato plants, because his father attempted to cultivate them in window-boxes, and orange blossom, because his mum had her wedding headdress wrapped in tissue paper on top of the wardrobe, but that was the extent of Larry’s horticultural knowledge.

The streets were deathly quiet. Apart from the presence of caretakers and the nightly detail of guardsmen at the Bank of England, in 1946 there were few surviving City buildings in residential occupation.

In Cornhill, Larry came across an intriguing sight. He leaned on a low brick wall and for a while watched a small group of young people, not much older than himself, working in what had once been the basement of an office block. They had marked off areas with lines of pegged string and were carefully cutting a series of narrow trenches across the former basement floor, scraping tentatively with bricklayers’ trowels or using small stiff-bristle brushes to clear away surface earth.

A makeshift card nailed to a wooden post told passers-by that they were watching volunteers with the Roman and Medieval London Excavation Council at work.

Larry was disgusted. What a bunch of pussyfooting wankers. They’d never find a Roman at that rate. They needed a squib up ’em. He felt like shouting, ‘Get some picks and shovels, you daft buggers, and put some elbow grease into it!’ but thought better of it.

As if Larry’s indignation had been carried on telepathic waves, a young man took up a mattock and began hacking at the packed earth. That’s more like it, thought Larry, an idea forming.

Larry’s imagination had been fired by the actor in a manner that none of his schoolteachers had ever achieved. He had gazed across the Thames and shivered. He’d had a similar thrill before the war when his mum took him to a pantomime at the Lyceum up West. One minute he’d been gazing at what he thought was a solid curtain and then something wonderful had happened. Coloured spotlights had been switched on and the curtain – gauze he could now see – became invisible. Beyond it lay a magical kingdom of castles and gingerbread houses with twinkling lamps. And now across the Thames another light had been switched on. He marvelled in his mind’s eye at the charging chariots, the plumed helmets and dazzling armour of the centurions, the imperial columns of the palaces, the coliseo and towers of Ancient Rome he had seen at the pictures. Larry was entranced.

He had a long, hard think on the walk back home by way of London Bridge. A day later he joined the public library just round the corner from the Jolly Gardeners where his uncle Teddy had been playing in a darts’ competition when the doodlebug hit and killed them all. The lady librarian was amused at this Cockney youth’s inchoate thirst for Roman Lon