‘Oh, yeah?’ Mike could feel his bladder giving way.
Colin leaned ever closer and whispered something as Mike looked on in stunned amazement. ‘You kidding me? That much?’
Colin winked, tapped his nose. ‘That’s classified information but that’s how much.’
‘Shit. That’s mind-blowing.’
‘Yeah, and so’s the security. Routes change every few months, just to safeguard it ever being leaked.’ Colin patted Mike’s head, grinning. ‘Think about it and we’ll have that curry next week.’
‘Okay, how about next Thursday?’
Colin agreed. ‘Fine by me. We’ll take the wives, shall we? Make a night of it.’
Ester slipped her arm around Julia, drawing her close. ‘What are you taking, Julia?’ She tried to move away but Ester held on tightly. ‘I know, Julia, I can tell by your eyes and your mouth. You get very chatty. So what are you taking?’
Julia shoved at her. ‘For chrissakes, nothing. What’s got into you?’
Ester pushed her away. They kept their voices low, afraid to be heard. ‘Lemme see your arm.’
‘No, I won’t. Why are you doing this? Don’t you trust me?’
Ester pinched her face. ‘No, I don’t. You’ve been acting up since you got back from your mother’s.’
Julia shook her off but Ester grabbed her again. ‘Tell me, Julia, or I’ll tell Dolly.’
Julia rolled her eyes. ‘Okay, look, I took one hit, some gear I’d left at Mother’s, just the one, I swear before God. I was feeling so bad, and that Norma was hanging on to me.’
Ester got out of bed and looked around the room. ‘I’ll find it, if you got a stash here. I’ll find it, Julia.’
Julia reached out for her. ‘Darling, there’s nothing, on my mother’s life. There was just a teeny-weeny bit. I wouldn’t get back on it, you know that.’
Ester slowly allowed Julia to draw her back to bed. ‘I hope not, Julia, because if you have started, you’re fucked. And if Dolly found out she’d kick you out of here so fast.’
Julia wrapped her arms around Ester, kissing her neck. ‘I wouldn’t do it, Ester.’
They kissed and then curled up together as Julia tried to think of a good hiding place for her stash and Ester wondered if she should warn Dolly. To use Julia in the robbery if she was back on junk would be dangerous. Then she started to think about returning the video and the more she thought about it, the more she began to think she should piss off and leave. The robbery was becoming a farce anyway.
Gloria felt restless. Her back ached constantly from all the horse riding and she kept thinking about Eddie, wondering how he was. Not that she missed him; if she calculated the years they had been married, the time spent together was minimal because he had been in and out of prison so much and she had been inside herself on and off. It hadn’t really been a marriage at all. He was just somebody that was connected to her, bad or good, and there was nobody else. Her kids didn’t even know who she was by now. She wouldn’t know them if she came face to face with them. Maybe it was having the little girls around her that brought back the memories. She’d had her kids taken away when she first got arrested. Like Kathleen’s girls, they had been shuttled from one foster home to another before she signed the adoption papers. She did it to give them a better life. She wondered if they had, and then started to cry. She cried for the long, wasted years and eventually fell asleep.
It felt as if she’d only just dropped off when her door was banged loudly.
‘Come on, get up! Time to ride.’ It was Julia. She was usually the first up and about as she took Helen of Troy out in the early mornings.
That morning they had a breakthrough. It happened almost all at once: the fear left them and they went from a canter into a gallop and at the end of the two-hour lesson, they all began talking at once, well pleased with their progress. The general up feeling continued as they ate the eggs and bacon Angela had prepared. Coffee and toast went down as they listened to Julia giving each one separate hints as to where they had gone wrong that morning.
Dolly had a private discussion with Julia. She was getting worried that the stable girls might get suspicious and she wanted Julia to book in at the other place so they could switch for a while. This also meant they would have to get used to different animals, which Julia was a little pessimistic about, but Dolly was insistent. She also mentioned to Julia about finding out exactly where they kept the keys to their local stable yard and then asked her to find out how they could clad the horses hoofs.
‘What do you want to do that for?’ Julia asked.
Dolly kept her voice low. ‘We’ll make a hell of a lot of noise coming out of that stable. We got to ride down the lane, past two cottages, so look into it. We got to be silent.’ She went back to her coffee and was left at the table with her precious notebook as Angela washed up. Ester and Gloria checked the tapes to see if there had been any developments at the signal box. They were now armed with Connie’s information and the number she had seen Jim dial to cancel out the police. They also knew they had four minutes before the police could get to them unless a panda car happened to be cruising nearby.
Gloria had also been under the signal box. She had called out for Buster, a make-believe dog, but nobody had stopped her as she clocked the electric cables, the main electricity-power sector and the telephone wires. Gloria had also seen the large danger signs with the red zig-zag and hadn’t dared get any closer as they unnerved her. Shivers went up her aching spine because the voltage was so high: Connie had told them at supper one night that a dog got on to the line and was thrown up into a tree!
When Gloria got back to the manor, she had severe doubts. ‘How do we get on the line? We’d get blown into a friggin’ tree if any of us hit that cable.’ She was drawing a map of the signal box and the railway junction. ‘If the gates open and that train moves, it’s gonna go over the bridge, right? Well, after that it’ll pick up speed and no way is it gonna stop.’ Gloria prodded her diagram with a chipped fingernail.
Ester frowned, turning the map round. ‘Maybe she’s gonna think to stop it just at the crossings, then we ride up to it.’
‘No way. She stops it there and we’re screwed. There are lanes either side of it — we couldn’t stop a cop car with a bleedin’ horse!’ Gloria sniffed.
Julia leaned over them, arms around each of their shoulders. ‘Maybe she’s gonna blow it up.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ Ester rapped.
‘We still got three shotguns,’ Gloria said flatly, ‘but it’s a bloody big train.’
Ester shook her head. ‘No way, they’d be like ping-pong balls off the side of the train.’
They all remained staring at Gloria’s drawing as she took a thick red pen and drew in the danger zigzags. These will blow us off the track without any shotgun, loves.’
Ester said to Julia. ‘You know. I think it’s time we had a serious chat. We’re all here being ordered around to do this and that and she’s keeping her mouth shut, scribbling in that ruddy black book of hers. I reckon we’ve got to face her out, ask her just what she intends doing and, more important, how she’s gonna do it.’
Gloria crossed to the window and drew back the curtain. ‘We got a visitor. Shit! It’s that ruddy cop, Angela’s bloke. I told you we couldn’t trust that two-faced bitch.’
They huddled at the window, watching, as Dolly walked towards Mike, who was getting out of the car. ‘Stay put, love, let’s just go for a drive, shall we?’
Mike waited for Dolly to get in beside him and then reversed, turned the car round and drove out.
‘What do you make of that, then?’