‘Somefink I said?’ Tony grinned. Jack pushed his chair away from the table and stood up. ‘Don’t go yet, son. We’re having a nice chat, ain’t we?’
Jack paused. ‘I hear the man who attacked you is recovering well.’
His tone was now very different. The sucking-up had stopped, the pandering to Tony’s ego had stopped and he was suddenly playing a different game. Tony could feel the change in mood, although he didn’t know what had brought it on.
‘I also hear that you’re on a warning. One more bit of trouble and you’ll get a nice, long stint in solitary.’ Jack placed his fists squarely on the table, looked Tony straight in the eye and whispered, ‘I’m going to make sure you die in here. No one looked up to you then and no one looks up to you now — as Harry Rawlins said, you’re just a big, stupid ape.’
Jack waited for the second Tony’s brain disengaged and animal instinct took over. It didn’t take long. Tony leapt to his feet, dodged round the table and charged. Jack, being thirty years his junior, dodged his incoming fist with relative ease; but Tony swung again and again. He was strong and relentless but Jack was fast and that’s all that mattered, because all he had to do was stay out of the way. The alarms sounded within seconds and all of the other inmates started cheering for Tony. The guards ran across the room, Asps extended, and landed a couple of blows on Tony’s back but he didn’t even flinch. The next three hits landed on his thighs and they took him to the floor. Once he was down, there was no getting up. With his face pressed against the cold blue lino, Tony spat out every threat he could think of while Jack walked calmly from the room.
In the incident statement Jack was asked to write, he neglected to mention that he’d called Tony an ape, and instead made something up about bringing up the wrong person from Tony’s past and stirring bad memories.
‘He’s got quite a temper, hasn’t he?’ Jack said innocently.
The prison warder reassured Jack that Tony would have plenty of time to think about his actions in solitary confinement. Jack was then given back his mobile, his wallet and his warrant card, and he left.
Once outside the prison, he checked his phone. There was one missed call from Ridley, with an accompanying voicemail asking if he’d found Julia Lawson and Angela Dunn yet. Shit! Jack hadn’t even started looking.
Chapter 14
Jack sat at his desk with his trouser leg pulled up to just below his knee. When stumbling backwards in an attempt to stay an arm’s length away from Tony Fisher, he’d banged his calf on something and now a large bruise was forming. He could feel it as he’d walked up the station stairs and now, as he looked at the purplish-black circle on his skin, it reminded him of the satisfaction he felt in seeing Tony face down on the floor. It was as much of a power rush now as it had been at the time. Jack was by no means a violent man, but he loved the feeling of manipulating a thick shit like Tony Fisher into securing himself a stint in solitary confinement. It was the first cruel thing Jack had ever done in his life, but he felt no guilt.
Two hours and several cups of tea later, Jack sat ploughing through the extensive police files on Harry Rawlins. Rawlins’ actual file was surprisingly thin because he was too smart to be tied to most of his suspected crimes; it was the unproven files that were extensive. George Resnick had collated hundreds of case reports which, if they were all accurate, showed Harry Rawlins to have been one of the most prolific gangsters of the 1980s. No wonder Resnick had been like a dog with a bone — Rawlins would have been the catch of the century.
Jack flicked through the crime scene photos of the explosive Strand underpass robbery from 1984. Joe Pirelli and Terry Miller had been in the back of the van when it burst into flames. Pirelli had been identified from his dental records, as the hands were never found and he couldn’t be printed. Miller was identified from a partial thumb and forefinger print from what remained of his left hand. And ‘Rawlins’, assumed to have been the driver, was blown sky-high. All forensically identifiable parts of his body were too badly damaged to be of any use. However, a cadaver dog had eventually found a charred left forearm about seven feet from the van, not belonging to either Pirelli or Miller. This arm wore a gold Rolex watch with the inscription ‘To Harry — Love Dolly — 12/2/62’. And so the mangled, unidentifiable third body — missing its head, both legs and one arm — was documented as belonging to Harry Rawlins.
Jack looked at the images showing this mammoth jigsaw puzzle of body parts. He understood why 1980s forensics had identified this man as Harry Rawlins — but the fact remained that Rawlins had been shot to death by his wife several months later, so the third man in the Strand underpass robbery actually remained unidentified. It could be one of a dozen known criminals from the time. It could even be Jimmy Nunn. Jack sighed heavily as he weighed up the possibilities. His birth dad could be in a thousand pieces, wrongly buried in place of Harry Rawlins back in 1984, or he could be hiding out on some paradise island spending stolen money. Maybe even the money from the train robbery. Jack couldn’t decide which discovery would be more disappointing. Then again, neither might be true.
Jack woke at five o’clock in the morning. His body had moulded into the shape of his desk chair, so for a good few minutes he had to sit motionless, waiting for the blood to start circulating back into his extremities. Jack stared at his computer screen — once again, he’d spent police time and used the police databases to research his own paternity case. If he was caught, he’d be sacked for gross misconduct, but that seemed to encourage him rather than anything else. He was working smart for the first time in a long time and it made him feel good.
The showers in the station reeked of lemon-scented bleach; the cleaners had been working into the early hours too. Jack watched the mass of shampoo suds slowly spiral down the drain and replayed the events of the previous day in his head. There were two key memories — Tony Fisher’s face being squashed into the blue lino by four prison guards... and Ridley asking if he’d found Angela and Julia yet. One memory made him grin with a new-found sadistic thrill; the other made him turn the shower off and race back to his computer.
‘Ester Freeman said that Julia Lawson would be in a gutter or a morgue somewhere,’ Jack announced to the attentive squad room.
Ridley stood in his office doorway leaning against the frame, arms folded, unblinking. He was like one of those paintings whose eyes follow you round the room. Since this investigation began, he had mainly communicated with Jack via voicemail — which Ridley hated. Jack knew that by the time he’d finished speaking, he’d need a damn good excuse for missing yet another one of Ridley’s phone calls yesterday — and ‘I was in Pentonville, without your clearance, asking Tony Fisher about my birth dad’ definitely wouldn’t cut it. It was a good job he was now redeeming himself by having solid leads on Julia and Angela.
‘It seems Julia keeps a low profile running a children’s home. Most of the kids she cares for are in trouble with one or both sides of the law, so she doesn’t advertise what she does. She registered as a safe house with the Manchester force, and she takes in the kids of parents who choose rehab programmes instead of prison. And Angela Dunn got married, but didn’t change her name. I have addresses for both of them now.’
Behind Jack, the two evidence boards were almost full. They spanned 1984 to 2019, and the face of Tony Fisher had been added since the last time Ridley was in the office.
‘Good work, Jack. And I’m glad you weren’t injured when Tony Fisher attacked you.’