Several years after the robbery the safe was accidently recovered.
The enormous, impenetrable safe was recovered from the bottom of a lagoon, situated off a rarely visited island in the Caribbean. When brought to the surface it was still locked… and completely empty. It had been the subject of a great deal of media interest at the time of the robbery. It had been removed from one of London’s major banks, leaving detectives, security experts, safe designers and mystics, scratching their heads.
When the bank was built, the safe was installed first, anchored to the building’s foundations, then the bank was constructed around it. Engineers agreed that to remove such a thing it would have required the demolition of at least half of the bank’s structure. However, after the robbery, forensic teams combed the scene thoroughly finding that nothing had been disturbed.
The fact that such a thing could vanish, was in itself a great mystery, but to have it spotted from a scenic tour operator’s light aircraft in the Caribbean brought the whole thing back onto the front pages. The feedback from the public at large had thrown up the most bizarre and improbable solutions; all of which served to keep the whole thing on the boil. No doubt partly out of shear frustration, the bank’s original reward for information received was doubled.
Meanwhile, in a small café in Venice, Italy, Clive Bloomfield, now Anthony Beddington-Smythe, paid for his afternoon cappuccino, as always, leaving a nice tip. This being a convenient spot when not travelling the world.
On the stroll back to his apartment he reflected on the two most rewarding aspects of his recent enterprise. Firstly there was the commission of the act itself, and secondly that the contents of the safe were now, and would go on being, spent in plain sight.