The police filmed the entire funeral, hoping that people linked to the robbery might show their faces, but no one did. They also examined the flowers. Pamela’s message was obscure, perhaps from a mistress or a lover, though “lady-in-waiting” seemed to refer to the robbery. The florist was contacted and remembered that a bedraggled, red-haired lady with a refined voice and sophisticated manner had placed the order. Unfortunately she had not left an address or contact number. When shown the computer pictures of Pamela from Maureen Stanley’s description, the florist gasped. “Oh, my God, this is the woman wanted for the Crown Jewels robbery. I don’t believe it.” She took another look at the photo fit and shook her head. “No, it wasn’t her. The woman I met was much older.”
The police were at yet another dead end, and the robbery was dropping out of the headlines. They felt their next best move was to have it profiled on a television crime program. The Crime Show had given over an entire fifty-minute episode to the case, and a private benefactor had offered 25,000 pounds for information leading to a conviction. As the program closed, the phones were ringing. The following morning, the calls were still being followed up.
Chief Superintendent Dom Rodgers, the officer overseeing Operation Crown, was feeling ill. He had been coughing for a couple of days and feared he had caught a virus. Now he felt red-hot, and he took himself to his G.P.’s surgery in Maida Vale. The waiting room was chilly and uninviting, and the two patients ahead of him both had streaming colds. He sat feeling wretched, wishing he had remembered to bring his morning paper. His cell phone rang, and he fished it out of his pocket. “Rodgers,” he answered, then listened. “What?” he said in amazement. “Look, I’m not far from their station. I’ll get right over there.”
He snapped off his phone, left the surgery, and drove straight to the St. John’s Wood police station. His chest hurt and he was sweating beneath his overcoat, but his excitement put his ill health to the back of his mind. He asked to speak to the officers involved in the Sylvia Hewitt inquiry.
Detective Sergeant Jon Fuller’s hand shook as he spooned sugar into a beaker of tea. “I’m so sorry, sir, but we had a list of David Lyons’s clients Miss Hewitt had named as losing in the crash of the Internet company and-”
“Just get to the fucking point, Sergeant. Philip Simmons. You called the robbery squad and”-he banged down a small tape recorder, then gestured with his hand-“go on, you’ve lost me enough times already, son. Philip Simmons.”
Armed with the details of the Hewitt case, Rodgers returned to Scotland Yard, where his team was waiting, having received the call from St. John’s Wood station earlier that morning. He tossed over his tape recorder.
“Listen to this prick, then come into my office. We’ve had a development we could have had fucking days ago.”
25
Other developments now materialized in the wake of the television program. A taxi driver was sure he had picked up Lord Westbrook from Waterloo Station just before he died. He said he had driven him to his family estate but at the time did not recognize him. He was unable to say what train Westbrook had alighted from, but they had the date and time, so they could begin checking which trains had arrived around then. A hotel barman was sure he had seen Westbrook in the company of a man similar to the one described in the program, but he was more dark blond than redheaded. He could not recall the exact day but knew it had been sometime in January. A railway porter recalled seeing someone fitting Westbrook’s description on Plymouth station and said that he had arrived in a wheelchair pushed by an elderly, red-haired woman. A train had left Plymouth to arrive at Waterloo just before Westbrook was picked up by the taxi driver. The description of the woman wheeling the chair matched that of the woman who had purchased the flowers for Westbrook’s funeral.
The inquiry was buzzing again. An estate agent said that a man named Philip Simmons had rented a boathouse close to Putney Bridge. The transaction had been done over the Internet, and he had never met Mr. Simmons. The boathouse had burned down on the day of the robbery.
Officers were sent with frogmen and equipment to drag the river in and around the boathouse. They hauled up the wreck of a small speedboat. An identical boat was photographed and appeared on the front page of the Evening Standard with a request for anyone with information about a boat of this description to contact the police directly. This produced the mechanic who had sold the boat to Wilcox. He gave a description of Wilcox, whom the police identified as one of the men who had picked up Maureen Stanley, and who had purchased the two Daimlers. The mechanic, however, had never met anyone by the name of Philip Simmons.
All of this information made it look as if the robbers had escaped via the river, and appeals were made for anyone who had seen these two boats on the Thames to come forward. More officers questioned the owners of the vast number of boats along the Thames. This investigation yielded the location of the mooring facility rented for the two speedboats, and the name materialized yet again: Philip Simmons.
The Operation Crown officers were certain that Philip Simmons was the cyber-identity of their number-one man. But the most vital clue to his real identity came as a result of the death of Sylvia Hewitt, which now became part of the inquiry. They had the names of the men who had suffered extensive losses in the fall of the Internet company: James Wilcox, Anthony Driscoll, and Edward de Jersey. Could these three be connected in some way to Philip Simmons?
Pamela became frightened by the headlines-POLICE ABOUT TO SWOOP-and holed up in her grimy apartment. She felt cut off and alone. She wore a head scarf and dark glasses when she left to buy a dark brown hair dye. Then she went to the nearest off-license and bought a large bottle of vodka. When she returned she locked and bolted the front door, put the rinse on her hair, and left it for half an hour. She began to drink the vodka and chain-smoked, watching television from her bed. Her recent adventure seemed a far-off fantasy, except that the six o’clock news had implied it was just a matter of time before the robbers were arrested.
Driscoll and Wilcox were in the same boat as Pamela, albeit a more comfortable one. They both watched the news bulletins and read the papers from cover to cover. They had each watched The Crime Show with equal trepidation, their confidence dented. Their women put their bad moods down to financial pressures. Unlike de Jersey, Wilcox and Driscoll rarely left their homes. They felt more terrified with every phone call and knock on the door. The waiting was becoming unbearable, and eventually each decided independently that he had to flee the country.
Driscoll went to Spain, telling Liz that he needed to secure the sale of their villa, and after a quick phone call, Wilcox agreed to join him. They were breaking the Colonel’s rules, but they were unable to deal with the pressure alone. Still, they resisted the urge to contact de Jersey.
The latest developments had given Chief Superintendent Rodgers fresh energy, but by late afternoon on the day after he had interviewed Detective Sergeant Fuller, his temperature had risen again and he was forced to go home. The doctor insisted he spend at least two days in bed. The police press office assigned to the robbery now put out a statement saying that they had acquired vital new evidence and were confident arrests would soon be made. Rodgers warned, however, that not one of the three men’s names was to be divulged until they had more evidence. Above all, they didn’t want them tipped off. They knew that they were still in England from the statements taken by the young officer, but Rodgers made the mistake of delaying the requestioning of Wilcox, Driscoll, and de Jersey when he took to his sickbed.