Bill didn’t ask who Jack was losing, and Jack didn’t tell him.
The rest of Jack’s day and early evening was spent tracing the women from The Grange. He was a heads-down kind of officer with tasks like this one; whereas Anik, who sat opposite him trawling through a depressingly long list of Aylesbury sex offenders, couldn’t stand this part of the job. Anik was young and enthusiastic, so he saw policing as being ‘out there’ and not in here.
As Anik waffled on about how disgusting it was that more than five hundred sex offenders allegedly under surveillance were actually off-radar, Jack was discovering all he could about the Grange women.
He learned that Kathleen O’Reilly had been arrested at The Grange in 1995 during the disastrous ‘arms deal’ raid led by DCI Ron Craigh. No guns were found, Dolly Rawlins sued Craigh for damages and Kathleen was arrested for failing to appear in court. She was immediately sent back to prison to serve out her sentence on a forgery charge. By the time Kathleen was released, her three girls were in care and none of them wanted to see her. She opted for a very slow death by turning to the bottle, until in 2009, her liver finally gave up and she died alone in an A & E corridor.
Gloria Radford, Ester Freeman, Julia Lawson, Connie Stephens and Angela Dunn were all last arrested on the same day, 27 August 1995 — just days after the mail train robbery in Aylesbury. Ester was arrested for the murder of Dolly Rawlins; the other women were arrested as a matter of procedure because they were present at the scene. Once any kind of conspiracy was eliminated, they were released.
Ester’s statement to the police was a rambling, venomous spewing of hatred for Dolly Rawlins. She screamed about being double-crossed and about being treated like a piece of shit on Dolly’s Italian leather shoes.
The statements from the other women supported the fact that these two alpha females had always rubbed each other up the wrong way. It seemed that their mutual disdain had started when Ester conned Dolly out of £200,000 to buy The Grange without divulging that it used to be a brothel; and it ended when Dolly accused Ester of sabotaging her dream of turning it into a children’s home with the help of the other ex-cons. Tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of funding had rested on one unannounced spot check from the board of councillors and, when they’d turned up, Ester was caught hosting an orgy in the sauna. In that split second, Dolly’s dream had shattered into a million irretrievable pieces.
On the morning of the shooting, DCI Craigh had visited The Grange to bargain with Dolly about the amount of money for damages she wanted from his misguided arms raid. Ester, quite wrongly, had heard them making ‘a deal’, and thought that Dolly was setting her up to be arrested on some trumped-up charge. The red mist descended, Ester spectacularly lost her senses, picked up a gun and emptied all six rounds into Dolly.
Craigh had been standing right next to Dolly at the time. He retired shortly afterwards.
Ester was released in 2017, after serving fourteen years for Dolly’s murder and a further eight years for the attempted murder of her cellmate. According to Ester’s parole officer, she now lived in Seaview on the Isle of Wight. Jack noted down her current address.
Gloria Radford had a record for gunrunning with her husband, Eddie. They both died in the same car crash in 2004. They’d been out celebrating Eddie’s release from prison and came off worse in a head-on collision with the central reservation. It was a blessing that the crash occurred at 3 a.m., as the road was clear of other drivers.
Connie’s last known location was Taunton, where she’d applied for various safety assessments in connection with running a B & B; but, from there, Jack was struggling to pin down an actual address. And he lost track of Julia Lawson and Angela Dunn around 2010 and 2015 respectively so, for tonight, he gave up.
Jack glanced across at Anik. He looked miserable, but also preoccupied enough not to notice that Jack was about to misappropriate the HOLMES database. James ‘Jimmy’ Nunn had a mediocre juvenile police record for drink driving, TDA and similar car-related crimes. Then, in his mid-twenties, he moved up to being a getaway driver for hire. Jack was so disappointed, and hoped to God that if this ‘wheels-man’ was the Jimmy Nunn on his birth certificate, there was more to him than that. He turned to Google to fill in the blanks.
Jimmy Nunn, for a short but glorious time, had been a racing driver. Something undocumented put a sudden end to his blossoming career when he was just 23 years old, and that’s when things started to go wrong. Jimmy had worked as a mechanic to pay the bills, but the money was terrible and this, seemingly, was when he got into more serious crime.
Jack read article after article, mentioning Jimmy in association with some of the all-time greats: Niki Lauda, James Hunt, Jackie Stewart and Mario Andretti. Jack shook his head.
‘What a fucking waste,’ he whispered to himself.
‘What’s a fucking waste?’ Anik asked.
Jack took a second to think up a lie. ‘One of these women lost her kids while she was in prison and then drank herself to death.’
‘That’s not a waste. They’re better off without a mum like that.’
‘Probably,’ Jack agreed, just to bring the conversation to an end.
By the time he was ready to pack it in, Jack had created a timeline from Jimmy’s birth in 1945, through his wayward teens, his short-lived Formula One career, and on into his adult criminal years. In 1984, however, the timeline ended abruptly. One of the recurring names from Jimmy Nunn’s Formula One years was Kenneth Moore, an engineer now in his mid-70s and living in Hackney. With the digital trail at an impasse, the next step would be to start talking to people who’d actually known Jimmy Nunn... Packing his various files into his overnight bag, Jack headed home.
Jack was surprised to see that Maggie had taken the night off; dinner was in the oven and the wine was poured. This was the first time he’d seen her since he’d told her the news about his dad. She hugged him, handed him his wine and waited for him to talk about Charlie. She wasn’t expecting to hear him talk about a man she’d never heard of before.
Jack started in the middle, rather than at the beginning.
‘Jimmy Nunn could have been right up there with the likes of Jackie Stewart, but then something changed the course of his life and he... Well, he just carried on doing what he was good at really — driving.’ Maggie stared at the contents of the dog-eared file, tipped out and scattered across the living room floor. ‘Dad said that, if I wanted, I could learn about my past. I snapped at him, Mags, and said I didn’t need anyone but him and Mum. But, well, by the time I got to work, I was curious.’ He picked up Trudie’s death certificate and showed it to Maggie. ‘Dead end.’
‘She was beautiful,’ Maggie commented as she sifted through the old photographs.
Jack shrugged. ‘Yeah, maybe... But I’m going to find Jimmy Nunn. I’ve tracked down one of his old work colleagues and Aunt Fran must know something about him.’
Frances Stanley was Trudie’s sister, and her signature was on Jack’s foster care paperwork, dated 1984. On the floor in front of Maggie and Jack were several birthday and Christmas cards from Fran, but these seemed to have stopped around the time Jack was five or six years old.
‘I think I remember speaking to Aunt Fran on the phone once. I’d won something at school and I asked Mum if I could phone her. She was proud of me. Said she’d send me something for being so clever... but she never did.’