Maggie got up at her usual time of three o’clock and went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. On the breakfast bar was a scribbled note:
Gone to Mum and Dad’s. I’ll call you when you’re up. Don’t worry. Jack xx
And then Maggie’s phone rang.
“Hello, lovely,” Jack whispered. “I’m on a train so, if I lose you, I’ll call you back. I brought the car back to the flat for you.”
“What’s happened? Are Penny and Charlie OK?”
“Not sure. I’m two hours away, so I’ll call you when I know.”
Jack wasn’t being standoffish, and Maggie knew it. He just hated talking on trains, surrounded by strangers who couldn’t help but listen in. And this—especially this—was nobody else’s business. So Maggie did the talking.
“OK, honey. Well, I’m in work from four, but I’ll keep my phone on vibrate and, if you need me, you call me. I may not be able to pick up, but I’ll get to somewhere quiet and call you back as soon as I can. Was it your mum who called?”
“Yes.”
“So, it’s Charlie?”
“Yes.”
“OK. Well . . . whatever it is, we’ll be fine.” Jack’s phone pinged as a text message came through—which he ignored for the time being. Maggie continued, “We can cope with anything, you know—the four of us. And if you need me there, you ask, OK? Don’t think I can’t come, Jack, because I can. I’ll make work understand—”
And then the phone went dead and Jack lost signal.
The text message was from Laura—Ridley told me. Hope you’re OK. L x.
Jack texted Maggie—love you xx—and then watched it fail to send. Seven times. On the eighth attempt, it finally went through. He spent the rest of the journey looking out the window, thinking about how to react if his mum told him that his dad was dying.
Charlie and Penny Warr always knew that they couldn’t have children of their own; it was something to do with Charlie, but they never dwelled on the details. Adopting had been a very quick and easy decision for them.
It was June 1987. Jack was four years and seven months old when Lillian, his social worker, walked him across the village green toward the little Devonshire pub where they’d all agreed to meet. Penny and Charlie watched for what seemed like an age, because Jack was constantly distracted by the world around him—he’d pause, look round, change direction, sit down—and all the while, Lillian gently encouraged him to keep on track. Little Jack smiled the entire time, his wide brown eyes taking in every detail.
“She’s wearing the same pedal pushers as me,” Penny whispered.
Charlie looked at his wife, noted the tears welling in her eyes, and they both burst out laughing.
“What a ridiculous thing for me to say! I’m just so nervous. Look at those amazing brown eyes, Charlie. Look at him looking. He’s so smart.”
Charlie put his arm around Penny’s shoulder and she slid along the pub bench, closer to him. They sat there, sipping lime and soda, watching their boy toddle toward them. And by the time Jack had covered that small patch of grass, they loved him.
Jack didn’t clearly remember any of this first-hand, but, like many memories that actually belong to someone else, this one had oddly started to feel like his own. As the train continued toward Devon, he could even recall the color of Penny’s pedal pushers and the smell of Charlie’s aftershave as he fell asleep in his big, working man’s arms.
At Rose Cottage, Laura watched the last of the evidence, including the cut hose pipe, being bagged and loaded into the back of a police van. She checked her mobile for the umpteenth time, but Jack hadn’t texted her back. In her heart of hearts, she knew he wouldn’t; but, like many women in love with the wrong man, she couldn’t bring herself to give up hope.
Ridley stood with forensic pathologist William Fox, as the grumpy Aylesbury undertaker opened the back of his white van and the overwhelming smell of over-barbecued pork hit them both. The transfer journey to the London mortuary had only taken an hour and a half, but still, the driver clearly hated moving around the capital and couldn’t wait to get home.
Will backed away from the smell, slipping his jacket off as he moved.
“Bloody hell, Simon. You didn’t say it was a fire. That smell sticks to everything and this jacket’s new, you know!”
Ridley smirked to himself.
Will was only in his late thirties, but he was one of the foremost forensic pathologists in the UK. His mind was as sharp as his dress sense, he was loved by everyone and he showed an unrivaled passion for his profession. His sense of justice had originally taken him toward the police force, but his height, or lack of, his small frame and his aversion to physical confrontation forced him toward a behind-the-scenes job. And from the second he chose forensics, he shone brighter than anyone else in his class.
Will, or Foxy as he was sometimes called, played the sexy Silent Witness pathologist card on women all the time—and it worked. He referred to himself as “The Death Detective” and made out that the police couldn’t make a move without him. Ridley didn’t mind; it wasn’t entirely untrue and, besides, all he cared about was his team being exceptional. And Foxy was exceptional.
The Aylesbury undertaker handed Foxy a large evidence bag and pushed the gurney indoors. Ridley explained.
“His left foot came off when they picked him up.”
The walk from Totnes railway station to Charlie and Penny’s bungalow was visually quite an ordinary picture of semi-rural life, but emotionally, for Jack, it was borderline enchanting. Every step was a memory: the pub where he’d had his first underage drink; the back garden where he’d first touched a girl underneath her clothes; his first fight, his first heartbreak and the pub where he first saw Maggie. She was horrible to him. But they were both drunk and were showing off with their respective groups of friends.
The day after, Jack had gone to the café where Maggie worked and apologized. He’d stayed for four hours until she finished her shift and then taken her for a drink . . . Three hours later, they knew everything there was to know about each other. Jack wasn’t Maggie’s first love, but she was his.
Of course, he thought he’d been in love before, but he hadn’t really—he’d been in lust. Love was calm, lust was frantic. Frantic because Jack never knew exactly how long it would last, so he had to make the most of it while he could. But with Maggie, he knew immediately that he had all the time in the world. She was going nowhere.
Jack stared at the bungalow he’d grown up in. Every light was on. Every light was always on. He smiled and shook his head. He watched Penny fussing in the lounge through always-open curtains, then in his old bedroom—she was fluffing his pillows, probably for the twentieth time. He was sure she was checking she’d put every toiletry under the sun in his en suite, just in case he’d forgotten anything—which would be handy on this occasion because, in his rush to get here, he’d forgotten pretty much everything.
From the second Penny opened the front door, she never once stopped talking.
“Tea, darling . . . ? Oh, the trains are a nuisance, aren’t they . . . ? How’s Maggie . . . ? Georgina’s got herself a puppy, can you believe it . . . ? There’s a chicken in the oven, but the veg isn’t on yet . . . Would you like a whisky to tide you over?”
Charlie smiled at Jack and rolled his eyes, gently mocking his hyperactive wife.
Father and son hugged. Charlie held on for a moment longer than usual and, in that instant, Jack knew something was very wrong. When Charlie pulled away, the tears were welling—then he sniffed, shook his head and squeezed Jack’s shoulders. In the background, Penny fussed between the sink, the oven and the drinks cabinet—oblivious to the fact that the dreadful news she was so frantically avoiding had just been silently shared.
When she finally turned around, holding two glasses of whisky and ice, Charlie and Jack were hugging again, and Jack was crying.
Penny carved the chicken as Jack and Charlie sat across the table from each other. Jack was frowning as he tried to get his head around everything.
“OK, so who’s said it’ll be no more than a few months from now?”
“Dr. Chakrabarti, his name is.”
This was Penny’s domain, as Charlie had never been any good with details.
“And what treatment has he suggested?”
Jack picked up his mobile and googled Dr. Chakrabarti.
“We’ve done it all, darling. Your dad was told just before Christmas and—”
“Christmas? You were with us in London at Christmas!”
“Are you listening or shouting, darling?”
Jack fell silent. His mum faced away from him and started to tear the remains of the chicken to pieces with her hands. He knew she wasn’t being rude, she was just terrified of breaking down before she’d said everything she needed to.
“Your dad was told just before Christmas, and in the new year he went straight into his first round of chemotherapy, which didn’t agree with him at all, did it, my love?” Charlie shook his head. “So, we tried a second type, which didn’t have as many side effects, but didn’t really do much good—”
“I can’t find Chakrabarti,” Jack interrupted. “Does he work at Derriford?”
“Yes. The best in the West Country, he is. C—H—A—K . . .”
“Found him.” Jack read background on Chakrabarti at the same time as finding out everything that had happened while his bloody back was turned. “But there must be something else you can try. Isn’t there? I mean, even if there’s nothing right at this moment, new cures come along all the time.”
Now, Charlie spoke for the first time.
“The word ‘cure’ was never used, son. Not from the very beginning. It was always only ever about giving me as much time as possible. And they’ve done that. We are where we are.”
The pain in Jack’s chest built as he squeezed the words out from between his pursed lips and the tears welled again.
“A few fucking months!”
Penny let the swear word go on this occasion.
“Yep,” Charlie said. “So, me and your mum are going on holiday. If that’s all right with you.”
“For how long?” Jack asked. “Do you need money? Where are you going?”
Charlie beamed as if he didn’t have a care left in the world.
“Everywhere. We’ve cashed in the pensions and the bungalow’s on the market.”
Jack couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You’re selling? That makes no sense at all. Where are you going to live when you come back?”
Penny gently, lovingly, stroked the back of Charlie’s head.
“Why don’t you boys nip to the pub?”
Although it was way too late to be starting the full postmortem, Foxy did need to make certain that there was no evidence on the body which simply couldn’t wait until the morning. The preservation of any dead body was a delicate process at the best of times, but Sheila, as he’d now been universally christened, was extra vulnerable and brittle due to the fire.
Sheila still lay on his side, in the fetal position. This was a common death position for people exposed to extreme temperatures—partly as a natural yet futile defense against flames and smoke, and partly because as the body dried out, the joints would naturally curl. However, this body had been found on a small two-seater sofa and so the curled position could equally be because he’d been too long for it.
Foxy flicked through Abigail Coleman’s very thorough preliminary observations and tentatively agreed that the large fracture to the back of the skull could be a blunt force trauma and therefore the cause of death.
Tomorrow morning, when he cut Sheila open, the first thing Foxy would look for would be signs of smoke inhalation. If there were none, then Sheila would have already been dead when the fire started. Which would be some consolation.
As Foxy refrigerated Sheila for the night, he smiled. He loved a good mystery.
Jack and Charlie sat in the window of the King’s Head, looking out over the patch of grass that the locals proudly called the “village green.” Charlie told the story of their first meeting and, although Jack had heard it a thousand times, he didn’t mind at all hearing it again.
On that day back in 1987, Charlie had got up from the garden bench and knelt on the grass to greet his potential new son. As Jack got within touching distance, he’d instinctively turned his back to Charlie, reversed, and sat down on his waiting knee. And there he’d stayed, while the women tutted about how inexplicable it was that someone had chosen to walk away from such a stunning little boy.
Reluctantly, Jack brought the conversation back to the present.
“You’re selling the bungalow ’cos you’re not coming back, aren’t you?”
Charlie took his time in answering. “A friend of my brother’s has reserved a short lease on a one-bedroomed flat in a wardened complex for your mum. She can have it for as long as she likes. She’s said she doesn’t want . . .” Charlie stumbled over his words for a second. “She doesn’t want to be in our bungalow on her own.”
“You might come home though, eh, Dad? I mean, you hear about people surprising doctors all the time. A few months doesn’t have to mean a few months.”
Charlie took a slug from his pint and even managed a smile, as he lied to his son.
“Maybe. You know us builders, lad . . . if we’re given six months, we always take twelve.”
The rest of the evening was like old times. Jack moaned about how badly Plymouth Argyle were doing this year; Charlie asked about Jack’s job, about Maggie and whether there were any kids on the horizon.
“The jobs have got to come first at the moment, Dad. Mags has not long started at the New Victoria and she’s doing really well—impressing all the right people, you know. Maybe in a year or two.”
“Ah, Jack, once she gets where she wants to be, she’ll not want to leave to do parenting.”
“She might not be the one who leaves.”
Jack realized that he’d said this almost without thinking. He wasn’t even sure where the thought had come from—him being the one to give up work and look after kids—but, once he’d said it, he really didn’t mind how it sounded.
“Mags skips to work—I don’t. It’s my fault. I need to focus and get into the swing of things in London. Don’t tell Mum right now, she’ll only worry and, in all honesty, there’s nothing to worry about. Me and Mags are strong. It doesn’t matter who does what, as long as we’re together.”
Charlie took an age to get his key in the front door, partly because he was pissed and partly because it was 11:30 and he was tired from all the meds he was currently taking. They sniggered like naughty schoolkids, thinking they were being completely silent when, in fact, they were making a terrible racket.
Two cling-filmed plates of food sat on the kitchen top, already pierced and ready for the microwave. The kitchen table was set, complete with two glasses for water and two glasses for whisky. Charlie heated the food and Jack filled all four glasses. While the microwave was on, Charlie said, “I’ve got something for you, lad,” before disappearing. By the time he came back, the piping hot food was on the table.
Charlie put a dog-eared file down in front of Jack. At first he thought it was probably filled with the legal stuff that would have to be dealt with after Charlie had gone; but this file was as old as Jack, by the looks of it. He opened it up and, inside were several yellowing pieces of paper and tons of old photos. Charlie ate in silence as his son slowly took in the enormity of what he was looking at—a birth certificate, adoption papers, photos of a young woman holding a baby. Jack slammed the file shut. Charlie spoke before Jack could.
“You’re my son. You took my name, you have my mannerisms and I’d swear that you’ve got my nose, even though that’s impossible.”
“I’m not interested,” Jack snapped, before stuffing his mouth full of chicken.
Charlie laughed for a second. “And when you sulk, I’d swear on my life that you’ve got your mum’s frown.” He suddenly seemed to sober up. “You’ve never asked where you’re from, Jack, and you don’t have to ask now. Just know that you’re not disrespecting me or your mum if you choose to find out.”
“Why would I want to, Dad? I don’t need . . . You think I’d want to call someone else ‘Dad’? You think I want anyone else calling me his lad?”
“People come and go, that’s life—and we make the most of them while they’re here. If you want to look into your past, all I’m saying is . . . you have my blessing.”
Jack lay on his fluffed-up pillows, on his childhood bed, and listened to Maggie’s phone send him to voicemail. He didn’t leave a message. She’d know no message was the same as saying, “call me back when you have a second.” Jack waited for the screen of his mobile to light up silently, because tonight of all nights, he knew that Maggie would call him back within seconds.
It was actually three minutes later when his screen eventually lit up.
Maggie got straight to the point. “How are things there?”
“He’s been given a few months. It’s in his lungs and his liver, but they’re both secondaries, they don’t actually know where the primary is.”
“Oh, Jack, I’m so sorry.”
“That can’t be right, can it, Mags? Not knowing where it started? I mean, it can’t have disappeared, can it? Why can’t they find the primary? If they find the primary, maybe they can fix it. Do you think . . . ?”
“Do you need me there?”
By changing the subject, Jack knew that Maggie had no answers to his barrage of questions.
“No, I’ll be home first thing.” He sounded almost bitter in his reply. “I was only given one day off and, anyway, they’ve got it all sorted here. They knew before Christmas, so they’ve already got their heads round everything and they’re off on a world cruise, if you can believe that.”
“So, no more treatment?”
“It won’t do any good.”
“Jack . . . you have to let them do this in the right way for them.”
Maggie could hear Jack holding his breath, then that slow exhale as he stifled the noise of crying.
“What about me?”
“This isn’t about you, love.”
Jack took deep, heavy breaths and regained his composure. Once his breathing was back to normal, Maggie continued.
“Don’t be angry for long. The most important thing in times like this is to have no regrets. Give them your blessing. We’ll Skype every day, and we can even meet them on one of their stops if you like.”
Jack’s voice suddenly perked up, just a little. “They go to St. Lucia.”
“There you go, then. We’ll meet them there and stay on for a few days. I can even book the same hotel we stayed in when we did that extravagant holiday we couldn’t afford. It’s nearly two o’clock, Jack. Go to sleep. I love you.”
By five o’clock, Jack was up, showered, dressed and heading out the front door to catch the 5:45 train back to London. As he leaned into the hallway to close the front door, he saw Penny standing in her dressing gown in her bedroom doorway.
They shared the tightest, saddest of hugs. Penny kissed his cheek. And Jack left.
If Jack hadn’t walked into the squad room carrying his overnight bag and looking as if he was running on fumes, he’d have been in big trouble. As it was, Ridley took one look at him and immediately assumed that Jack had had very bad news from his parents. Ridley wasn’t going to inquire further, and he allowed Jack a free pass for rolling in at ten o’clock rather than 8:30. Laura, on the other hand, was desperate to inquire further and see if Jack might need a friendly shoulder to cry on. Jack joined the briefing and Ridley continued.
“William Fox is doing the postmortem as we speak. What we know is that the body found in Rose Cottage is definitely male, but dental records are a no-go due to extensive, seemingly accidental, facial damage. We’ll get DNA from bone marrow so, when that’s through, Laura, I want you to lead a couple of uniforms in checking it against all databases. Anik, the money?”
“Our forensics have picked up from where DI Prescott’s left off and are trying to find a serial number or part serial number for comparison. It’s very unlikely, they say.”
“Keep on them, Anik. And in the meantime, I want you checking all known sex offenders. Start close to Aylesbury and work outward.” Anik clearly wasn’t happy with such a menial task on a murder case, but Ridley didn’t care about that. “The word ‘pervert’ was painted on the wall for a reason. Actually, Anik, check local vagrants as well.”
“Sir,” Anik mumbled obediently as he opened a brand-new file to record his part in this investigation. Jack glanced at his overnight bag and recalled that the file Charlie had given him was lying atop his clothes right beneath the zip.
Jack got an empty file from his desk, just as Anik had done, and wrote on the front cover: AYLESBURY ARSON / MURDER. JUNE 23, 2019. He then reached into his overnight bag, pulled out the dog-eared file containing information on his birth parents, and put it inside the Aylesbury file. As Ridley waffled on, none the wiser, Jack read his birth certificate.
He had always known his birth mother’s name was Trudie Nunn and his birth father was James Anthony Nunn. There were no photographs in the file of James Nunn. Just Trudie. Looking at the photos, she had a petite frame, bleached blonde hair and a naturally sexy look about her. Jack wished that the word “sexy” hadn’t popped into his head, but he couldn’t change that now—it was a fact: his birth mum had been a sexy woman in her day. Jack then found Trudie’s death certificate. It was dated 1998 and the cause was a brain tumor.
Jack didn’t hear Ridley say his name the first time.
“Jack!”
He slammed the file shut on his desk and looked up. An elderly man—early seventies—was standing next to Ridley, leaning on a cane.
“For your benefit, Jack, as you missed the opening of the briefing, this is retired DS Bill Thorn from Aylesbury. He’s kindly agreed to help us with some background information as he was part of the investigating team on the mail train robbery and knew Norma Walker, last occupant of Rose Cottage.”
Jack smiled his “hello,” as Ridley gave Bill the floor.
“I chatted with DI Prescott first and he directed me your way—this could be one hell of an open case you’ve picked up.” Bill Thorn was clearly a copper to his very core. He was in his element at the front of Ridley’s squad room, all eyes on him. “I worked with Norma in the mounted division till I moved to CID in the late nineties—but it’s 1995 that you need to hear about. Bottom line is, I don’t know anything about your murder, DCI Ridley—but I think I know plenty about your money. Back in ’95, Aylesbury had the biggest train robbery this country’s ever seen. As you already know, £27 million was taken from a mail train by a gang of masked gunmen. It was bloody smart, I can tell you. One was on horseback, posing as a mounted officer, and there was definitely one in a speedboat on the lake next to the tracks, ’cos the two train guards distinctly recalled hearing the engine. They all disappeared like ghosts. But it had to have been a decent sized gang based on sheer volume of cash. I mean, a million is a fair weight, so twenty-seven million would need some muscle to shift it and hide it in less than forty minutes. That’s how long they had before we started closing all the main roads into Aylesbury. And we were searching properties by the early hours of the following morning.”
“How well did you know Norma Walker?” Jack asked.
“She wasn’t the armed robber on horseback, if that’s what you’re asking.” Bill was adamant. “Norma was as honest as they come. I think someone took advantage of her property, nothing more than that.” He paused. “May she rest in peace. Cancer’s a bloody horrible way to go.”
Jack flinched, but pushed on. “Took advantage in 1995 when Norma still lived there, or took advantage once it became empty after she died?”
“I don’t know about that,” Bill said. “But I can tell you, whatever happened, and whenever it happened, Norma was not involved with the mail train robbery.”
Despite Bill’s vehemence, every member of Ridley’s team noted down Norma as a potential suspect for the armed, mounted rider who had brought the train to a halt so that it could be robbed. She was an experienced horsewoman, and she lived on the spot, so it didn’t make sense to rule her out.
Oblivious, Bill continued. “Imagine . . . imagine if you’ve found where they hid the cash from that train robbery after 24 years!”
The room didn’t quite share Bill’s enthusiasm. It seemed too unlikely that train robbers would have left the stolen millions untouched for so long—especially in the cottage of an ex-copper who “allegedly” was as honest as they come.
Ridley politely humored the ex-copper. “Who were your suspects at the time, Bill?”
“We didn’t have any firm suspects if I’m honest. We pulled in all the local names, but it was none of them. We raided all the local properties within hours. The first place we went was The Grange—that was the big old manor house that stood on what’s now the housing estate. We had to go there first ’cos it was occupied by a bunch of ex-cons, but it wasn’t them either. They were all women. When we showed up in the early hours, they were in their nightdresses, and we woke a load of kids, too. There’s a lot about those women in the files DI Prescott’s sent you. The cops—not my division, mind you—but the cops made a fair few mistakes back then. They raided The Grange numerous times on nothing more than rumors. They accused those women of stashing guns on one occasion. Oh, DCI Craigh was certain he’d got ’em bang to rights, but he hadn’t. Sure, they were all ex-cons but, according to Norma, they were on the up-and-up. Starting a kids’ home or something, and I’m far more inclined to believe Norma than Craigh, who I always found to be a bit hot-headed. The only one of them Craigh arrested was Kathleen O’Reilly, and that was on a poxy ‘failure to appear’ charge. And besides, like I said, twenty-seven million in mail sacks is bloody heavy—so a bunch of women pulling it off is fairy stories. They were all investigated anyway, of course. No connection.”
Ridley persisted a little longer for his own satisfaction.
“Can you tell us anything about Dolly Rawlins? She owned The Grange at the time of the train robbery, didn’t she?”
“And before that, it was owned by Ester Freeman, who ran it as a brothel.” Bill laughed. “Although if you ask the Neighborhood Watch crowd from back then, they’ll tell you she ran night classes. Load of old shit. She was closed down as soon as the ages of the girls started to dip below legal.”
Laura couldn’t hold her tongue. “Running a brothel isn’t legal, no matter how old the girls are.”
“You know what I mean.” Bill shrugged. “It was the nineties.”
Blaming the decade for the abuse of vulnerable women was clearly a good enough excuse for Bill, so Laura didn’t say anything more on the subject.
“So, Ester was a madam,” he continued. “Kathleen, as I recall, was a forger. Julia was . . . I’m not sure what Julia was. Connie was a prostitute, and Dolly shot her husband. I’ve missed someone, I think. Ester, Kathleen, Connie, Dolly—”
Ridley interrupted. “It’s fine, Bill. As you rightly said, it’s all in the files.”
“Those women didn’t rob that train,” Bill repeated. “It was a smart, savvy bunch of professional men who, I reckon, came from your neck of the woods. I tell you, when you find those train robbers and, more to the point, when you find that missing money, you’ll be a bloody hero, DCI Ridley.”
An additional thought popped into Ridley’s head.
“Anik, I want you to cross-reference all the sex offenders that end up on your list with known patrons of The Grange when it was a brothel. And Jack, use Bill’s files to locate all of the surviving women from The Grange.”
“That’ll be a waste of his time,” Bill interrupted.
Ridley remained polite, calmly explaining that everyone around at the time of the train robbery needed interviewing again, as potential witnesses at least, and so they could be eliminated from the current inquiry. He then swiftly, and very politely, ended Bill’s visit.
“Thank you so much for coming down, Bill. You’ve been very helpful. May we call on you if we have any more questions?”
“Please do, sir, please do.” Bill still exuded enthusiasm. “It’s exciting to think I might finally get to see this case closed.”
Ridley nodded at Jack.
“May I take you to the lift?” Jack asked, rising to his feet and opening the door.
They walked at Bill’s slow pace.
“This bleedin’ paint’s a depressing color,” Bill sneered. “Who chose gray?”
“Someone who doesn’t have to walk this corridor. The top floor’s painted sky blue.”
“Course it is! Sky blue for the suits upstairs, depression gray for the workers down here. You’re not from London, are you? Your accent’s further west.”
“I was brought up in Devon. Although I worked hard to get rid of the accent.” Jack paused. There was something he wanted to ask. “I hope you don’t mind me asking, Bill . . . but did you see Norma when she was ill, toward the end?”
“At least once a week.” Bill looked Jack in the eye. “Cancer’s a shit illness, I won’t lie. But you know, even when the outside didn’t look anything like Norma anymore, she was still there. She had a wicked sense of humor—even at the very end. Cancer kills the body then, eventually, the spirit. So, you pay close attention and when you see them flagging, you remind them how loved they are. That’s your only job, really.”
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 a hospital corridor.
Gloria Radford, Ester Freeman, Julia Lawson, Connie Stephens and Angela Dunn were all last arrested on the same day, August 27, 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 councilors 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 afterward.
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 median. 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 twenty-three 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.”
“Love,” Maggie said gently, “why do you want to find Jimmy Nunn?” Jack looked at her blankly, as though the answer should be obvious. “I mean, you can,” she continued, “and I’ll gladly help you. But why?”
The oven pinged and dinner was ready. Maggie kissed him and took her glass of wine into the kitchen. By the time she came back, he’d gone. The hallway door was open and she could hear him talking on the phone.
“I’m sorry to call so late, Aunt Fran.” Jack checked his watch: 11:45. “Oh—I’m really sorry, I didn’t realize what time it was. Yes, I’m fine. I know, it’s been ages . . . London now. Yes, we moved with Maggie’s job . . . I’m a police officer.” Jack laughed politely. “I do like it, yes. It’s challenging, you know.”
Maggie sat down on the sofa to listen.
“The reason I’m calling is that I was wondering what you knew about Jimmy Nunn.” Jack fell silent except for the occasional “hmm,” “OK” and “I see.” “Well, do you know anyone who might know anything about him . . . ? Yes, I know it’s old ground but . . . No, I understand. OK then, well, thank you for your time and apologies again for calling so late. Mum and Dad are fine, yes, thanks for asking . . . I’ll tell them you said hi.”
Jack came back into the living room and started to gather up the scattered papers and photos and put them back into the file. He looked dejected.
“Don’t worry, love, you’ll find him without her,” Maggie reassured him, and went back into the kitchen to dish up their dinner.