As Micky took a sharp right turn, he lost control of his bike and careered into a parked car. Without thinking, Dolly jumped from her car, grabbed the blue bag and broken necklace from inside his jacket, and drove off, leaving him for the approaching sirens to deal with.
When it was safe to stop, Dolly pulled over. Her heart was pounding and she gasped for breath as the tears welled in her eyes. Her fists pounded the steering wheel as she tried to forget the sight of Shirley’s body, but she knew she never could. It was what she deserved. It was she who had called the police and caused the chaos. She had been so consumed by vengeance that she hadn’t given the bystanders a second thought. What had happened to Shirley would be an eternal torment that Dolly would take to the grave.
An ambulance roared past, siren blaring, and snapped Dolly out of her melancholy. She looked inside the dark blue bag and saw jewels sparkling back at her. Diamonds, emeralds, rubies, pearls... every gemstone you could think of, encased in gold and platinum. Dolly put the broken necklace — torn from Shirley’s neck — into the bag, pulled the drawstring tight, put it into the glovebox and drove home.
The signal box at the old rural track crossing in Aylesbury was now abandoned. The lower half of the small oblong building was mostly wood panelling with two very small windows; it seemed to be entirely separate from the upper half, which was accessed by an external flight of wooden stairs. All of the wood panels were a creamy colour, or used to be, and all of the trimmings were dark brown. Ridley stood in the middle of the disused railway tracks, looking up, oddly transfixed by the signal box. The upper half of the building was all windows, giving a 360-degree view of the surrounding countryside. Each floor-to-ceiling window was split into eight smaller panes of glass, separated by wooden beams in the contrasting dark brown wood. All of the glass panes had been smashed by stones, probably thrown from where Ridley now stood. He glanced down at the sea of heavy gravel beneath his feet and the temptation to see if he could hit a window was almost too much to bear. Laura frowned as she watched a very slight grin creep over his face.
‘I’m not a trainspotter if that’s what you’re thinking, Laura. But I did have a train set when I was a kid. I saved up for two Christmases and two birthdays to buy a signal box just like this one.’
Laura shook her head as Ridley reminisced. She couldn’t imagine he was ever a child. Then Anik appeared at one of the broken windows — ‘stinks of piss in here’ — and Ridley’s beautiful childhood memory was shattered.
Anik stepped out at the top of the external wooden stairs.
‘Stop there!’ Ridley shouted. ‘What can you see?’
‘Nothing.’ Anik shrugged as he glanced down at Ridley’s stern face. He looked around again. ‘The trees would have been lower back in ’95 but, even so, the bridge where the train was held up definitely can’t be seen from here. Can’t see the new housing estate either ’cos of the... the... erm...’ He made a wavy movement with his hand.
‘Terrain?’ Ridley guessed.
‘Yes,’ Anik agreed. ‘The terrain’s, you know, up and down. So, The Grange wouldn’t have been visible from here either. Not much is visible from here, to be fair. Nice view though.’
He walked down the wooden stairs, joining Ridley and Laura on the tracks.
The team then went their separate ways. Anik went to interview James Douglas, the signalman on duty the night the train was robbed. And Laura and Ridley went to interview John Maynard, the builder who had been helping to convert The Grange into a children’s home.
Jack was halfway through a 1 hour and 50-minute train journey from London to Taunton. He had his notepad out and was scribbling names down as he searched for various people in the HOLMES database and also googled news articles from back in the day. Jimmy Nunn, ‘Boxer’ Davis, Carlos Moreno, Joe Pirelli, Terry Miller: the same names kept coming up, over and over. The East End of London was definitely a different place back then. The criminal ‘underworld’ was actually quite visible, with everyone knowing who the key players were, who to stay away from, who not to cross. There was a definite hierarchy and it was respected. Not like today. Criminals today never climbed to the lofty heights of ‘notorious’.
Jack came across several old case files belonging to DI George Resnick who, back in the late seventies and early eighties, had seemingly been obsessed with tying the elusive Harry Rawlins to any of the numerous crimes he was suspected of. Resnick had been like a dog with a bone, ignoring all contrary opinions and faithfully following his gut. His name had been dragged through the mud by the gutter press; he’d been suspended, forced towards early retirement, denounced as an embarrassment to the force... Still, he stood by what he absolutely knew to be true — that Harry Rawlins was involved in the Strand underpass armed robbery on a security van. It was Resnick, and only Resnick, who’d claimed that Harry Rawlins had survived that otherwise deadly explosion. It was Resnick, and only Resnick, who’d chased a ghost with the absolute conviction of eventually being proved right.
Shit! Jack thought to himself. That’s what I want.
That all-consuming passion for catching the bad guy. That unshakable knowledge you were right.
But Jack knew he was asking for the impossible — because to be that kind of copper, he’d require a nemesis like Harry Rawlins and they just didn’t exist any more. Each day on the job, all Jack was doing was hoovering up scrotes, wasters, druggies and lazy bastards who had decided that crime was easier than working. That’s why the Rose Cottage case was so intriguing and why tracking Jimmy Nunn was so exciting: because he was being taken back to a time when being a criminal was a vocation and a crime could be a work of art. Jack couldn’t quite believe he was yearning for ‘proper’ gangsters, but the thought of his birth dad being part of this old-school criminal underworld was oddly exhilarating.
Jim Douglas was a timid, unassuming man who said very little, very quietly. He was round, in his early sixties and bald as a coot. He had a large, rosy-cheeked face with wide eyes like those of a child.
‘You OK being in the garden with me?’ Jim asked Anik. ‘Only, the grandkids are coming for tea and I want to get these trees planted before they arrive.’
He knelt on a flowery gardener’s knee-pad and dug the last hole, as Anik slurped tea from a chipped mug.
Jim’s house sat at the heart of the housing estate that had been built on the grounds once belonging to The Grange, and it was a clone of the rest of the street. But this garden had been lovingly landscaped and was clearly Jim’s domain. At the far end of the garden was a shed and, through the window, Anik could see the top half of a bike with a child’s seat on the back. Scattered about the lawn were numerous footballs, a miniature football net, some plastic skittles and stray pieces from a giant Jenga. Kids were obviously welcome here and any ensuing mess was most definitely allowed. There was even a home-made tree house in an old, sprawling oak that must have been around for centuries longer than any of the buildings which now surrounded it. The oak would have known the Grange women and all of their secrets.
‘Do you remember the night the mail train was robbed, Mr Douglas?’
‘Jim, please. Yes, I remember. Well, I remember my bit. All those police loading the money sacks into the carriage at the crossing, then me sending the train on its way. About a minute later, I heard a massive crack of thunder, then saw the lightning and that was it. Course, it wasn’t thunder at all — it was dynamite on the tracks. Very clever, that.’