Dolly went into the washroom at the town hall and told Angela to see which room they should go to. When she returned, Dolly had carefully stashed the bag of diamonds on top of one of the old toilet cisterns. She reckoned she might have a visit later: if some bastard set her up, they wouldn’t leave it as it was. Somebody was bound to come sniffing around at the manor.
She turned as Angela slipped in and whispered, ‘I said we’d been here for fifteen minutes waiting down the hall. They said they’re running a bit behind and for you to go into the waiting room outside the boardroom.’
Dolly examined her face in the mirror. She looked a bit ruffled but she put on some lipstick and only then did she realize she was shaking.
Angela was biting her nails as she sat next to Dolly in the waiting room. Ten minutes ticked by, during which two women came in and walked out, Dolly making a point each time of saying, ‘Good afternoon.’
Angela suddenly started to cry again and Dolly squeezed her hand tightly. ‘Don’t. Just hold on.’
‘I think he was dead, Dolly. I’m sure I killed him.’
‘You did, love.’ Angela gasped with shock but it calmed her, just as the boardroom doors opened and Mrs Tilly walked out.
‘I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting, Mrs Rawlins, but please do come in.’
Dolly smiled and straightened her jacket. She noticed Mrs Tilly looking at her watch and she said quietly, ‘We got here early. I didn’t want to be late, this is too important for me.’
Mrs Tilly held open the door, allowing Dolly to walk into the boardroom ahead of her. As the door closed behind them, Angela sniffed and pressed her hand to her mouth. She’d killed that poor man, she’d killed him and she couldn’t face it. She pressed her hands to her mouth, then got up and hurried out.
Mike’s wife picked up the phone. She could hear someone sobbing on the other end. ‘Look, whoever this is, don’t keep calling here, do you hear me? Leave us alone.’
Angela sobbed that she had to talk to Mike, it was urgent, and there was something in her terrified voice that made Susan not put down the receiver. She didn’t know where Mike was, but she paused. ‘What’s your name? Do you have a number he can contact you on? Hello? Hello? Who is this?’
‘It’s Angela, it’s—’ Susan couldn’t make out what else was said because of the sobbing, and then the phone went dead. She called the office and they said he was out. She called her mother-in-law. Audrey answered.
‘Is Mike there, Mum?’
‘No, love, I’m waiting for him to call. Did he tell you? I’m going to Spain, I’m just waiting for my passport.’
Susan asked Audrey to get Mike to phone her straight away if he happened to call.
‘Are you all right, Susan?’ Audrey asked, concerned.
‘No, Mum, I’m not. If I ask you something, will you be honest? I mean it, Audrey, I don’t want you to lie to me.’
‘I won’t, love.’ Audrey had never heard Susan so agitated.
‘I think Mike is seeing someone else. I’m getting hysterical phone calls and then sometimes they just put the receiver down on me.’
‘Oh, Mike wouldn’t, love, it’ll be somethin’ to do with his work, he wouldn’t carry on.’
Susan clutched the receiver tighter. ‘You ever heard him mention a girl called Angela?’
Audrey sighed because she had. In fact, he’d called an Angela a couple of times from her flat. When she asked about her, he had said she was a kid he was trying to help out. Maybe he’d been doing a bit more than helping her out. ‘I’ll talk to him, don’t you worry about it. I’ll find out. But I think you’ve got it wrong — he wouldn’t, not Mike. I’ve got to go now, love, don’t you worry.’
Audrey could hear Susan crying and then the phone cut off. She replaced the receiver, feeling a bit guilty, but there were more important things on her mind. She looked at the clock: it was almost five. She crossed her fingers. Dolly Rawlins should have been arrested by now. She went back to her packing, half an ear listening for the phone, selecting her clothes for the trip to Spain. The face of her dead daughter stared back from the picture frame. Shirley Miller looked on with that sweet, vague smile.
The women were huddled in the kitchen as Gloria told her side of it, then Ester hers. Julia said nothing. Kathleen looked glum and Connie wanted to cry. She said, ‘So, there’s no diamonds?’
Ester gave a slow, burning stare. ‘That’s fucking bright of you to fathom out, Connie. What the hell do you think we’ve been talking about, Smarties?’
Mr Arthur Crow, the Chairman of the Board of Directors, looked over Dolly Rawlins’s forms and listened intently to her answers. She seemed nervous but that was only to be expected. She described the manor and her intentions, how many staff she felt would be required to run it, how many children she could easily accommodate. That section was impressive: she was concise and to the point, saying the grounds were ample, there were stables and a swimming pool but truthfully that the house was in a poor state of repair. That was why she had pressed Mrs Tilly for an on-site visit as she wished to make the house suitable for children and therefore any structural work required by the social services she would carry out, but did not want to go to unnecessary expense. She had costed the rebuilding and was able to give estimates and overall costs of running the home. No one there could have queried her good common sense. They now turned to her criminal record and she made it clear what her crime was, how many years she had been sentenced to, and, as she had been sentenced for murder, that she would be on licence for the rest of her life. She said quietly that she had never been involved in any criminal activity before the shooting of her husband and that it had been at a time when she was emotionally unstable because she had at first been told he was dead, then had discovered he was alive and living with another woman who had his child. She spoke candidly about the therapy sessions she had been given at Holloway and that she had required no therapy for the past five and a half years.
‘I found great solace in working with the young female offenders, especially in the maternity section of the prison. I developed an interest in working in the group-therapy sessions for the inmates and became a trusty, working with probation officers and therapists, not as a patient.’
Deirdre gave Dolly small encouraging nods and Mrs Tilly was a constant source of encouragement. The men were offhand and cool, showing much more restraint.
‘You have no children of your own, no near relative with young children?’
‘No, I have not.’ Dolly looked directly at a ruddy-faced man, who had made copious notes throughout.
‘You have specifically requested young children.’ It was the stern-faced Arthur Crow’s turn; his thin wispy hair hung in a strand across his bald head.
‘If that were possible, but I would hope for any child, or children, and having so much space and accommodation, if there were children that came from the same family and were to be separated, then I would accept any age, male or female.’
Dolly was asked further questions about whether she would be prepared to work with a foster carer and resident home advisory officers, and she agreed to be available and prepared to do anything the board suggested that would enable her to open the manor as a home.
‘Mrs Rawlins, how are you at this present moment financing the running of the Grange?’