Paper Money by Ken Follett Page B

prices, sometimes as little as half their retail value. In two days the warehouse was empty and Tony Cox had three thousand pounds in cash in two suitcases. He locked the warehouse and went home.
    He shivered in the front seat of the warm car as he remembered. He would never take risks like those again. Suppose one of the suppliers had got wind of the sale? Suppose the bank manager had seen Tony in a pub a few days later?
    He still did the occasional long firm, but these days he used front men, who took long holidays in Spain as soon as the ax fell. And nobody saw Tony’s face.
    However, his business interests had diversified. He owned property in Central London, which he let to young ladies at extremely high rents; he ran nightclubs; he even managed a couple of pop groups. Some of his projects were legitimate, some criminal; some were a mixture, and others were on the nebulous borderline between the two, where the law is unsure of itself but respectable businessmen with reputations to worry about fear to tread.
    The Old Bill knew about him, of course. There were so many grasses about nowadays that nobody could become a respected villain without his name going into a file at Scotland Yard. But getting evidence was the problem, especially with a few detectives around who were prepared to warn Tony in advance of a raid. The money he spent in that direction was never skimped. Every August there were three or four police families in Benidorm on Tony’s money.
    Not that he trusted them. They were useful, but they were all telling themselves that one day they would repay their debt of loyalty by turning him in. A bent copper was still, ultimately, a copper. So all transactions were cash; no books were kept, except in Tony’s head; all jobs were done by his cronies on verbal instructions.
    Increasingly, he played even safer by simply acting as a banker. A draftsman would get some inside information and dream up a plan; then he would recruit a villain to organize the equipment and manpower. The two of them would then come to Tony and tell him the plan. If he liked it, he would lend them the money for bribes, guns, motorcars, explosives, and anything else they needed. When they had done the job they would repay the loan five or six times over out of the proceeds.
    Today’s job was not so simple. He was draftsman as well as banker for this one. It meant he had to be extra careful.
    He stopped the car in a backstreet and got out. Here the houses were larger—they had been built for foremen and craftsmen rather than dockers and laborers—but they were no more sound than the hovels of Quill Street. The concrete facings were cracking, the wooden window frames were rotten, and the front gardens were smaller than the trunk of Tony’s car. Only about half of them were lived in: the rest were warehouses, offices, or shops.
    The door Tony knocked on bore the sign BILLIARDS AND SNOOKER with most of the AND missing. It was opened immediately and he stepped inside.
    He shook hands with Walter Burden, then followed him upstairs. A road accident had left Walter with a limp and a stammer, depriving him of his job as a docker. Tony had given him the managership of the billiards hall, knowing that the gesture—which cost Tony nothing—would be rewarded by increased respect among East Enders and undying loyalty on Walter’s part.
    Walter said: “Want a cup of tea, Tony?”
    “No, thanks, Walter. I just had my breakfast.” He looked around the first-floor hall with a proprietorial air. The tables were covered, the linoleum floor swept, the cues racked neatly. “You keep the place nice.”
    “Only doing my job, Tone. You looked after me, see.”
    “Yeah.” Cox went to the window and looked down on the street. A blue Morris 1100 was parked a few yards away on the opposite side of the road. There were two people in it. Tony felt curiously satisfied: he had been right to take precaution. “Where’s the phone, Walter?”
    “In the