Bank Job

At first glance, the robbery in a small bank branch doesn’t seem overly mysterious. After all, the CCTV footage clearly shows a masked robber threatening bank clerk Jim Carling with a gun before disabling the cameras.

However, the robber knew a bit too much about the inner workings of the bank, so Detective Inspector Helen Shepherd quickly suspects that the robber had inside help. But who of the five bank employees is the insider? And what happened to Jim Carling after the robber took him hostage?

 

 
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Some background information:

• Bank Job is a novelette of 9300 words. This story is a digital premiere and has never been published previously.
• Like Old Mommark’s Tale, The Iron Border, Seeing Red, The Cork and the Bottle and Overdose, this story was written in response to the eight-hour e-book challenge instigated by Joe Konrath and continued by a bunch of people at KBoards. For information about the eight hour e-book challenge, see this website run by Donald Rump. I’m pretty sure Bank Job took longer than eight hours to write, though fewer than twenty-four.
• Bank Job also marks the third appearance of Detective Inspector Helen Shepherd, her assistant Police Constable Kevin Walker and forensic medical examiner Dr. Rajiv. All three characters were introduced in The Cork and the Bottle, a previous eight hour e-book challenge story, and also appear in Overdose.
• Once again, I borrowed the plot for Bank Job from a crime short I’d read in a magazine about an insider faking a bank robbery.
• When I was a student in London, I used to live close to the railway line from London Euston to Birmingham New Street. There was no derelict brick factory there, but there were several other factories, both operating and derelict.
• After having the robber threaten Jim Carling with a gun, I belatedly remembered that guns are rather hard to come by in the UK, so I made the gun a fake and the actual murder weapon a brick.
• PC Walker occasionally shops at Forbidden Planet, which suggests he’s probably a comic book fan.
• The cover image is a stock photo by British photographer Katherine Evans.