Johnny Siddley and the Bank Heist Bungle

When retired barrister, Johnny Siddley, gets caught in the middle of a bank hold-up with his neighbour, Cynthia Tullet, disaster is inevitable because no-one ever beats the bank, do they? 


Johnny Siddley ranked bank queues among his top three most aggravating first-world problems, ranked bank queues in the top three, and the one that day was a doozy.

There were eight ahead of Johnny and Cynthia Tullet waiting for a middle-aged fellow with an Ebenezer Scrooge hunch to decide who might enter the branch proper, and join more queues. Each teller window—two open, four closed—had at least half a dozen more patrons in line, and someone holding a ticket to see the flustered matron who considered more complicated requests filled every available seat. One cubicle manned, two deserted.
“Have you tried our online portal?” he asked a young lady with a pram who sought permission to pass. A badge on his uniform tee-shirt identified him as Melvin. He looked like a Melvin, to be honest. Not a cheery ‘Mel’. A wombat in human form, low-slung, big in the rear, stubbornly guarding his burrow.
When he’d retired, Johnny looked forward to shopping midweek with heaps of time after thirty years cramming chores between appointments before hanging judges, ungrateful wrongdoers and scornful police officers. Now, he wondered how he ever found time to earn a living.  
“What profit did this lot make last year?” Johnny asked Cynthia.
She shrugged.
“Four billion,” said the tradesman behind Johnny. “You’d think they could afford a few more staff.”
“And open more branches,” Johnny told his new friend.
Scrooge McBankFace pointed imperiously to a row of ATMs. The mother surrendered with a sigh, and the line inched forward.
“I’ve seen High Court judges more sympathetic than that bloke,” Johnny told Cynthia. “Got your plea prepared?”
“I know how to deal with his sort,” she said, tapping her passbook on her purse.
Cynthia was capable in astonishing ways for a petite, grey-haired spinster with a ready smile. Johnny had quailed himself under the look that had humbled testosterone-crazed teenage boys and feral mean girls when she was deputy headmistress responsible for discipline at a prestigious, northern suburbs private school. A memory that raised Johnny’s spirits. Wrestling the major bank octopus was one of life’s forlorn hopes. No-one ever beat the bank, did they? But with Cynthia, the tussle should at least be entertaining.
Seven minutes of silent torture brought them to the head of the queue.
Melvin rolled out his spiel. “The Eastern Savings and Equity Bank website—” 
“Rejected the code.” Cynthia shook her head at the failings of the modern age.
“Our helpline—”
“Said, ‘Go to the branch’. So, let’s not hold these people up any more.”
As Cynthia stepped around the dumbfounded sentry, a scream from the teller windows froze everyone where they stood.
“He’s got a gun!” 
Retreating customers opened a semicircle of beige industrial carpet around a startled youth and the woman behind the counter with her hands in the air. The boy, who looked about fifteen to Johnny with a faded black skater-boy hood pulled over his head, raised a pistol half covered by the drooping cuff of his sweatshirt. “Don’t move,” he croaked. “I’ll just get my money and no-one will get hurt.”
An ear-splitting alarm shook the ceiling panels, lights flashed and the doors that opened to the shopping centre slammed shut. The bank robber jumped, and customers dropped to the floor anticipating gunfire.
The bank really ought to think a bit more about the likely consequences of sudden loud noises in a fraught environment. Thank goodness Australian branches went without armed security guards, another cost-cutting measure no doubt, but in New York or Chicago bullets might be flying already.
Melvin shouted over the din, “Now, now. Police are on their way, so why don’t you—”
 The matt black barrel zeroed in on his chest at the same moment the alarm cut out and the lights came back on. The sliding doors remained firmly closed.
“I need the money,” the boy said to no-one in particular.
The teller coughed, and flinched as the deadly weapon swung her way.
The boy lowered it hastily. “Sorry. Empty the drawer.”
“I can’t, Love,” she said. “It locks down when we activate the alarm.”
“What?”
“You’re not getting any money, son.”
The would-be blagger jabbed his finger at the McBankFace wombat. “Shut up and get down.” He thought again and swept his arm to take in the whole room. “All of you. Down! Now!”
Under the threat of the ominous black pipe poking from the youth’s sweatshirt, the rest of the bank patrons, led by Melvin, went down like burst balloons, except for Johnny. His hips didn’t work that way anymore. He offered their tormentor the friendliest grin his lips could manage under the circumstances as he bent his knees, then gaped at Cynthia, who hadn’t moved a muscle and now stood above a carpet of supine humanity like the lone pine at Gallipoli. Taller. Sturdier. She had a way of projecting an oversized presence despite her vertical challenges. 
“You too, please, Mrs,” the robber said with a reluctant flick of his gun hand.
“I don’t think so,” Cynthia answered with the chummy warmth of a chat over coffee. Into the face of a criminally frustrated youth with a loaded firearm! 
“Sit down, woman!” Johnny hissed.
Which brought the barrel his way and succeeded in putting Johnny hard down on his pelvic bones with a thud that sent shooting pains to his breastbone and ankles.
Cynthia ignored the flurry. “It’s quite a pickle you’ve got yourself into, isn’t it? Let’s talk about it. I’m sure we can sort things out.”
“The police—”
Cynthia silenced the contemptuous bank waller with a glare that would have melted plastic.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked the lad. “There’s always a reason people are driven to these things. I’m sure yours is a good one. I know young people. I’m rarely wrong. You’re not a troublemaker, are you? People like you don’t cause a fuss unless it’s forced upon.”
The boy glared, puffed his cheeks and his chest, then as Johnny prepared to get himself off the floor somehow between Cynthia and the bullets, the lad let it all out. His shoulders sagged, drooping his hood over his eyes.
“I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t remember coming here. I was home with Mum and…” He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “We really need money. We’re desperate, so worried, and it’s all I could think of. My dad died.”
“Oh, no.” Cynthia sighed, and half the other women in the bank sighed with her.
The teller touched her fingertips to her mouth.
“The bank accounts are all in Dad’s name. Eastern Savings says Mum can’t get any cash until the estate goes private, or something. They’ve stopped her cards. She was in tears at the supermarket.”
Melvin stepped in. “I doubt that’s right.”
His condescension sparked Johnny. “Let him speak, man. The boy means passes probate, not private, I’m sure.”
“Well, that’s wrong, too—”
“All that matters,” Cynthia said. “Is what Eastern Savings and Equity Bank has led this young man to believe. What brought him to this depth of despair, leaving him and his poor mother with nothing to pay for groceries or funeral arrangements when they are at their lowest ebb after an awful loss?”
There were murmurs of agreement from those on the carpet. The teller lady winced. Mel the moron raised a finger to speak, but Cynthia hadn’t finished.
“I understand what you’re going through. Some rotter got hold of my bank details and tried to buy Converse sneakers and a bottle of Crème de Menthe on the internet. Eastern Savings has stopped my credit card and won’t issue another.”
Heads shook.
“Yeah,” the young fellow said. “And this is where the money is, so—”
“You came here to set things right. Perfectly reasonable.” 
As so often, Johnny marvelled at Cynthia's instincts in such matters. She’d deftly stopped the lad blurting out criminal intent in front of two dozen witnesses hanging on every word.
She speared Melvin with a laser glare. “The website and the call centre are useless.”
Another chorus of muffled agreement.
The gunman had withered in the spotlight, now no more than a pasty kid in a sweatshirt too big for him. A ghost of the skater-boy hooligan who’d terrorised the bank branch. He scratched at his ear, cocking his chin in the hood’s shadow, the gun slack at his thigh.
The churning in Johnny’s chest eased at last, but the forces of the law, as so often over the decades, sent his blood pressure soaring straight back to imminent stroke.
“Armed police! The building’s surrounded,” a bullhorn echoed from the shopping centre. “Come out with your hands up.”
“No!” the boy yelled, his hand rising.
“No!” Cynthia and Johnny yelled together, raising their hands, too, with the opposite intent.
“We can solve this,” Cynthia said, which Johnny rather doubted.
The boy wound into a ball of tension, clenching his free hand. “I can’t let the cops get me. Mum won’t cope if I’m not there.”
Cynthia edged forward, purse clutched at her waist. “No, no, no. Your anxiety’s talking. You don’t want to shoot it out, do you? These people might get hurt, and you don’t want anyone hurt. You just want a bit of consideration from the bank.”
“How do I get out of this?” He threw his arms wide.
“You’d be amazed what a good lawyer can achieve.”
“Where do I get a lawyer! We’re broke!”
“Well,” Cynthia said. “Funny you should mention it. There’s one right here. My friend, Johnny Siddley.”
Who, more than ever, wished he’d gone for coffee instead of agreeing to accompany his neighbour, who now wanted him to step into the middle of a life-or-death standoff.
People were raising their heads to look at him over the person next to them. Talk about hopeless cases. He’d fought the finest legal minds before the most impervious judges of the State Supreme Court, and won, but only after months of careful preparation with the law on his side and a reasonable belief the accused might not be guilty as charged. Never when he saw the crime with his own eyes.
“Johnny will help you. Won’t you, Johnny? He always does what’s right.”
Right in this case being that the perpetrator go directly to jail without passing go, but her eyebrows rose expectantly with that teasing look that said, ‘you dare to disappoint me?’ They both knew he couldn’t deny her when she played the shame card.
The gun jittered, the kid-bandit trying to point it at everyone at the same time while not pointing it at anyone at all. Cynthia was right. This was a a frightened boy, pushed beyond his tether. Frightened now, raising the likelihood of a dreadful slip with dire consequences, but not a bad lad. He needed help, not confrontation, and a couple of dozen innocent bystanders plus a contemptible bank official were sandwiched between two of the elements Johnny trusted least, from long experience, to make calm, rational decisions—the police and an agitated teenager.
He lurched onto his knee, half rose and fell back, bruising his hip again.
Cynthia’s face fell. “You will help won’t you, Johnny?”
The naked uncertainty that flashed in her eyes would have convinced him if he weren’t already. He’d not let Cynthia stand alone. 
If he could get up off the floor.
“Yes, can you, err?”
Two customers and Cynthia got him to his feet. “Right.” Johnny rubbed his hands together. “Let’s see if we can’t soothe things a little. How about you put that thing away while we talk?”
The boy looked at the barrel poking out of his sleeve as if it had just then sprouted from his thumb and shoved it into the pouch on the front of his hoodie.
“Good. I’ll tell the boys in blue we’re having a word.”
Melvin scoffed. “You don’t negotiate with terrorists.”
Cynthia rounded on him. “Would you rather be in the crossfire when a SWAT team hot fires in? Good for you! The rest of us would quite like a negotiated solution, wouldn’t we?”
They agreed, so Johnny raised both hands and slalomed through the prostrate customers, most now comfortably on their elbows following proceedings. “Sorry. Excuse me.” He stopped a few feet from the door and raised his voice because his heart was hammering in his chest. If Johnny were any judge, the group outside would be a mix of confused men not unlike the boy in the hoodie and steroid-crazed bullies itching to use their weapons on a live target. He was overly-cynical about the police, true, but rarely wrong. “Don’t shoot. I come in peace. Not armed.”
He pressed his nose between the numbers in a transparent interest rate advertisement pasted to the locked sliding doors. “Can you hear me out there?” 
A science-fiction movie-style helmet poked from behind a pot plant and nodded once.
“Good oh,” Johnny yelled. “Everyone’s fine. Give us a minute to sort something out, alright?”
Johnny motioned Cynthia and their captor towards the manager’s office, the only space that offered privacy other than the safe—which probably wasn’t a good idea—and the staff restrooms at the end of a short corridor.
As he ushered them in, Melvin chuntered something hostile under his breath, and Johnny lost his temper.
“Don’t you dare do something stupid. If a shot’s fired, I’ll take you and the bank for everything you own.” Which was a stupid thing to say, because he wouldn’t be alive to sue anyone, but it shut up McBankFace. “You look like a sensible lass,” Johnny told the teller lady. “If he tries anything, tell us immediately.”
She nodded in a way that told Johnny she’d enjoy a little authority over Melvin the moron.
The robber leaning over the desk from the manager’s chair with his hood pulled low over his eyebrows looked unfortunately like the emperor in Star Wars. “I can’t go to jail,” he said as Johnny pulled the door closed. “Mum’s in such a state.”
“Understood,” Johnny said. It didn’t do to raise false hopes. The chances of the kid avoiding a spell behind bars were slim indeed, but now was not the time for stark realities. “The worst thing would be to use that pistol or run for it because the Tactical Response Group is better than you at this stuff. It wouldn’t end well.”
“What if I went out with some customers? You know, like a shield.”
“Bad. Bad idea.”
“What else can I do?” He threw his head back with a sob, and the hood slipped off, revealing a pale, hollow-cheeked, tow-headed boy with big brown eyes shining with confusion and desperation.
Cynthia, in the visitor’s chair, gulped a breath, and fair enough, the poor kid had come straight from the High School computer club.
“No escalations,” Johnny said. "If you got away, they’d track you down in no time and you’d be in even more trouble. De-escalation is the thing. Remorse is your best bet. Back down. Apologise. Let the customers out, that’s very important, then invite the police in, coolly and calmly, see if we can’t convince them to go easy on you.”
“That’s good advice,” Cynthia said. “Policemen are people too, you know, with families, mums, sons of their own.”
The boy sniffed but nodded.
“Let’s see what we can offer in mitigation.” Johnny grimaced. The client had to be told. Defence counsel’s role was to test the prosecution case to the fullest extent possible, not to deny the obvious. “The gun is a big problem, I’m afraid.”
The boy reached under the table, making them both jump.
“Well,” he said. “Actually…”


Johnny told the customers they could leave from the door of the manager’s office
They looked at each other, but didn’t move. Reluctant to be the first to rise.
“The young fellow will stay in the manager’s office. He’s a very nice young man, as it turns out. A good kid in a bad place, you know.” The more you repeated something, the more likely people would believe it. He and Cynthia had a plan, but it depended on a dozen flimsy assumptions breaking their way.
A motherly lady near the door broke the ice, and the others rose. A milling crowd brushing themselves down and congratulating each other on surviving a tale they’d embellish around the Christmas table for years. The sliding doors clanked, stuttered and sprang open with a whoosh that brought general relief.
Melvin eyed Johnny with disdain. The teller, Lorraine by her name tag, stood alongside him, arms folded, emboldened by her brief promotion in the bank employee power dynamics.
“I promised the boy I’d stay behind to facilitate his surrender to police. Represent him, you might say, but everyone else should go. Get a coffee, Melvin, a breath of fresh air.” Johnny stepped past the bank officers, leading them to the door, but Scrooge McBankFace, back in wombat mode, wasn’t for budging.
“Everyone else is leaving.” Johnny waved to Cynthia, departing in deep conversation with a customer in a pale pink rain jacket.
“I’m not going,” Melvin insisted. “I represent the bank.”
“Oh, dear.” The first small plank of their unlikely scheme had sprung a leak already. “I’m sure the police would say the fewer, the better. They’ll take your statement later.”
“Where is he?” The police had arrived in the form of a woman in a stylish raincoat, pencil skirt, low heels and an air of sophisticated competence. “Detective Sergeant Sally Brooking. You are?”
Two officers in riot gear followed her with snub-nosed machine guns at port arms across their chests, staring under chairs for concealed snipers.
DS Brooking stopped them just inside the door with a whip of her head that dared Johnny to hope he might have encountered one of those rarest of endangered species, the thoughtful copper.
“Johnny Siddley,” he said. “The accused asked me to represent him.”
“Accused! He pulled a gun on us,” Melvin blurted.
“This is Melvin, who’s… something to do with the bank, and Lorraine, the teller caught up in this unfortunate event.”
“Armed robbery!”
Johnny appealed to the police officer by addressing McBankFace. “Now, Melvin. This is why I asked you to leave with the others.”
“The hostages!” 
“Customers.” He appealed to Brooking. “It was quite tense for a few minutes but we’ve brought calm, made things safe. Shall we keep it that way, Sergeant?”
“Suits me.”
“He’s an armed thug!”
“No. No. No. This young chap, a frail teenager provoked beyond reason by Eastern Savings and Equity Bank’s appalling, heartless treatment of his mother grieving the very recent loss of her husband, his father, the family provider—”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Well, you wouldn’t, would you, Melvin?” 
DS Brooking tapped her foot. Johnny had moments to convince her before the handcuffs locked irrevocably. 
“Faced with the bank’s cruel refusal to bend it’s harsh, inflexible rules, this grieving son came to argue for mercy, but there was a complete misunderstanding.”
Melvin spluttered. “Misunderstanding? Misunderstanding. The kid said he had a gun. He demanded money from Lorraine.”
Johnny turned to the teller. “Is that how it happened?”
A critical moment in the approach Johnny and Cynthia had manufactured under duress in the manager’s office. He crossed his fingers mentally, and Lorraine came through on cue.
“Well, no, not exactly.”
“So how exactly?”
“Lorraine—”
“No, Mr Simpkin, I have to tell the truth. He was just stepping up to my window when that woman yelled. He didn’t say anything to me at all.”
“But he demanded money with menaces.” Melvin brandished an imaginary pistol. “He yelled, ‘Give me the money’.”
“The money? Or our money, as in the contents of the family bank accounts rightfully belonging to his mother, which the bank has wrongfully withheld? He merely meant to discuss the situation with Lorraine here.”
“At the point of a gun.”
DS Brooking moved to end the conversation, but Johnny had his trump card to play.
“You saw the firearm in question, Lorraine?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“A big gun? Small? A pistol? A Revolver?”
The earlier exchange had primed Lorraine to be exact. “Well, no.” She stroked her arm. “His sleeve had slipped down, but I could see the barrel poking out.”
“This?” Johnny produced the weapon from his pocket.
Melvin leapt back, choking a yelp as he recognised it for a black felt-tipped marker.
DS Brooking shoved her hands in her raincoat pockets. A snort of amusement escaped her lips.
He had her! The boy would walk free. Justice served. Melvin defeated along with all the ruthless bank bullies he represented.
Johnny twirled the pen like a conductor’s stick. “A confused, troubled boy at the end of his rope who never had a chance to ask for anything before a well-meaning bystander misidentified the perfectly innocent contents of the lad’s hand.”
“All right,” DS Brooking said. “I’ve heard enough. Let’s get him.”
A glorious moment of elation for Johnny, before Melvin stuck his oar in to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory.
“He created the belief that he had a gun.”
“No, he didn’t. That was the woman who screamed,” Johnny corrected.
“But he didn’t correct us, did he? Let us all believe it was a pistol. The law treats that just the same as if he did have a gun. And the bank has zero tolerance for any breaches of the law.”
“I bet it does. Whatever the justice of the situation?”
Melvin scoffed. “DS Brooking, I insist you arrest him for armed robbery.”
She motioned Johnny aside. “He’s right, Mr Siddley.”
Johnny had failed.
The bloody banks always won.
“Where is he?” DS Brooking asked in a tone of command not at all unlike Cynthia delivering a dressing down.
They all shuffled to see into the office. Which was empty.
“The lad said something about using the men’s room.” Johnny pointed down the hall. “Perhaps…”
“Boys!” 
Armed officers thundered to the gents at the sergeant’s direction, yelling, “Come out with your hands up!”
“He’s unarmed,” Johnny pleaded, but they took no notice, kicking the door in when no-one emerged.
Johnny couldn’t look. His latest trouncing burned too much.
A TRG man shouted from the restroom. “He’s gone! A window’s open!”


Cynthia was waiting at a table outside the coffee shop with their friend, Ranjan. 
“I heard it on the radio,” he explained.
Trust Ranjan to come rushing to share the excitement. 
“How are you feeling, Johnny?”
“Relieved to be alive.”
“How did it go?” Cynthia asked.
“The usual. Plan fell apart the moment we engaged the enemy.”
“The police?” Ranjan asked, sipping his coffee.
“No, Scrooge McBankFace.”
“Oh, Melvin.” Cynthia sagged.
“Funny how often the people who know the law are those who really shouldn’t. I had the DS ready to let him off with a stern warning, then it was all riot police kicking doors down. The Tactical Response Group,” Johnny said. “Really, Cynthia, ‘SWAT team hot fires in’? Where did that come from? It’s the TRG in our state.”
Ranjan sniggered.
Cynthia fidgeted. “I was agitated. It worked anyway, didn’t it? They didn’t find that poor young man?”
“No.” Johnny nodded to the pink jacket in her lap. “You got it back, then?”
Ranjan looked from one to the other, open-mouthed. “You—”
“Helped out a troubled young man in his moment of need,” Cynthia said.
“But won’t they get him?”
Cynthia left that to Johnny.
“Perhaps not. Fingers crossed. No-one saw his face except us. He never told anyone his name.”
Cynthia raised her chin. “We made sure of that.”
“And if they search for recently bereaved families with Eastern Savings accounts, he’ll decline to comment.”
“We coached him on that, too.”
“They’ll struggle to place him at the bank. I don’t think Sally Brooking will take the trouble. Until Melvin spoiled it, she was ready to call it a fuss over nothing. A slap on the wrist and don’t be so silly again, the supposed pistol being a Sharpie, and all.”
Cynthia patted her bag and whispered. “What do we do with his gun?”
“A quick run down to Fremantle, I think. Toss it off the bridge in the middle of the river.”
Coffee spat over the table.
“Don’t panic, Ranjan. It’s a toy, a replica much too like the real thing for comfort. Almost gave me a heart attack when he pulled it out.” 
Ranjan rocked back. “You’ve done it then, got him off?”
“Well, hopefully. Justice 1, Bank 0.”
“You got your credit cards sorted, Cyn?”
“Err, no. We’ll have to go back tomorrow. A different branch. I don’t suppose we’ll be welcome in this one for a while.”
“Do the beggars have any others, or have they closed them all?”
“Sorry, Johnny.”
“No problem. Nothing can make me unhappy.” In fact, he couldn’t wipe the smile off his face. “Whatever tomorrow brings, we got it over them today. For once we beat the bloody bank.”

If you liked this, why not grab a copy of Johnny Siddley's Life of Crime?

Oh, and there's another Johnny & Cynthia story a few posts further on in this blog: Cynthia Tullet's Big Jump

Piggy bank photo credit: Pexels, Maitree Rimthong