Audrey Withey was furious about being brought into the station at 7:30 in the morning. She’d not even had time to dry her hair so, as she sat in Interview Room 1 dunking biscuits into her coffee, she complained about uncontrollable frizz.
“I’m not having my picture taken!” she shouted. “I flatly refuse!”
The female PC standing just inside the door was used to disgruntled visitors and was, therefore, perfectly able to block out the noise of Audrey’s voice.
Anik’s early morning knock on Audrey’s front door had been designed to catch her off guard. It was an uncomfortable start to the day if you had something to hide. Audrey, with a lifetime’s experience of being around criminals, was suitably wary. Her aggressive attitude and posturing came from uncertainty—perhaps even fear.
On the other hand, Susan Withey, who sat in Interview Room 2, was a naturally early riser. So, when Laura knocked on her door at 7:30, she’d already been up for a couple of hours. She was calm as she sipped her tea. She had no experience of police interview rooms and, therefore, no ingrained fears; she simply assumed that they wanted a chat about Mike.
Ridley and Anik joined Susan and offered her more tea, which she accepted and then sat down. Anik tucked his legs neatly under the table, but Ridley sat further back, giving himself the legroom to put his left ankle onto his right knee. He was relaxed, so Susan was relaxed.
“We need your help, please, Mrs. Withey,” Ridley began politely. “We now have evidence that suggests Mike was involved in the Aylesbury train robbery back in ’95. This isn’t what either of us expected or wanted to find out, right?”
Anik hid his smile. In one sentence, Ridley had put himself firmly on the same side as Susan and they were now allies.
“Obviously, with Mike being a police officer, we want to be certain that the evidence isn’t misleading us. I can’t divulge the details, but if you could provide us with Mike’s whereabouts on several specific dates, that would be incredibly helpful.”
Anik opened his notebook in preparation for the next phase of the interview.
“DC Joshi has a list of the dates in question. He’ll also be asking you about the money Mike received from the sale of the Spanish villa and the money he used to buy the house you currently occupy. I’m sorry that these are intrusive questions. They’re unavoidable at this stage.”
Ridley doubted Susan knew anything about her husband’s criminal activities. If she was a victim, she needed to be treated with the respect and empathy that deserved.
When Susan spoke, it was with absolute honesty.
“My husband, DCI Ridley, was a drunk, a gambler, a womanizer and . . . and he could be a violent man. He was weak in that sense. But he loved the law. He felt terribly let down by it—his sister was murdered, his brother’s locked away in a system that clearly doesn’t work—but he respected it.” Unconsciously, she straightened her back, raised her chin and all the love she had ever felt for Mike could be seen in her watering eyes. “I’ll help you. And I think we’ll discover that Mike had nothing to do with your train robbery.”
Ridley stood and smiled.
“I hope you’re right, Mrs. Withey,” he said as he left the room.
Susan’s former mother-in-law, on the other hand, was a less than co-operative witness. Audrey sat back in her chair, arms folded, lips pursed, eyebrows down, totally closed off. She was on autopilot and, as soon as Jack opened his mouth to ask her if she needed anything, she’d instinctively said “no comment.”
“You do know you’re not under arrest, Mrs. Withey? You’re helping us to find out who killed your son, and we’re very grateful for that. Very grateful. I didn’t know Mike, but I’ve heard great things. I want justice for him, as I’m sure you do . . . Do you mind if we record our chat so we’re not distracted by note-taking?”
Laura was in awe. Audrey should have been putty in his hands, after that little opening speech.
But Laura was wrong.
“You’re as shit as the rest of them,” Audrey said, and got up and walked out.
On the front steps of the police station, Audrey sucked in half of her cigarette in one go, before coughing out a long plume of smoke. Behind her, Susan stepped out the main doors. As she spotted the back of Audrey’s damp, frizzy head, her jaw muscles flickered and her eyes narrowed.
“I’m sorry we lost Mike.”
Audrey spun round. Susan’s expression was nowhere near as sympathetic as her words.
“He was on a slippery slope, Audrey, and while I was trying to hold on to him, you were giving him a big old shove.”
Audrey’s mouth dropped open, but no words came out.
“He needed to look to the future and you . . . You couldn’t stop dragging him back into the past, could you?” Susan continued calmly. “You were so obsessed with Shirley, so focused on destroying Dolly Rawlins, that in your warped search for justice, you destroyed Mike as well. You did ‘something,’ Audrey, I know you did. You did ‘something’ and, from that moment, Mike had no chance. Losing his job, the drinking, the gambling, the aggression toward me . . . Oh yes, your boy put me in the hospital more than once.”
Audrey opened her mouth.
“Be quiet!” Susan snarled as she stepped closer to Audrey. “I don’t want to hear anything you have to say. My husband would be alive if his mother wasn’t such an almighty fuck-up. If he robbed that train to right a wrong that you started, I swear to God, I’ll see you banged up. Fuck the no-grassing code of honor, I will shout it from the rooftops!”
Tears rolled down through Audrey’s deeply wrinkled cheeks. Susan didn’t let up.
“Mike’s dead because of you. They’re all dead because of you. You’re poison. So don’t imagine for one second that I’ll allow you to do the same to your grandchildren, because I won’t. You’ve seen the last of them.”
As Susan walked off, Audrey remained frozen to the spot. The pain welled up inside her and flooded out in a stream of long-overdue tears—but even now, Audrey was crying for herself. The world was cruel, God had forsaken her, everyone was set against her; nothing was her fault.
Watching from behind the bike rack at the corner of the police station, Jack almost felt sorry for Audrey. He’d come across many people like her. She was one of life’s victims; it was all she knew. If she was ever honest enough to take responsibility for her own behavior, she would probably die from the shame.
Connie snored like a bulldozer on Angela’s sofa. Aggie and Riel giggled from the lounge door, pushing their palms tight over their ears in exaggerated pain. Angela sneaked past them and placed a fry-up on the coffee table, together with a cup of tea. The fabulous smell took about three seconds to wake Connie, who sat bolt upright, almost falling out of her pajama top as the buttons strained under the pressure of her breasts. Riel gawped at Connie’s cleavage for the length of time it took for Angela to usher them both out of the lounge.
“Teeth. Go!”
Angela stood by the window, looking out over her modest domain, and sipped her cup of tea.
“Don’t you wake up starving after a night on the booze?” Connie asked through a mouthful of bacon and fried egg.
“I ate with the kids about an hour ago,” Angela said. “They love having you for a sleepover because they get sausage sandwiches for breakfast.”
“They’ll love me even more when they’re eating banger butties on a sunbed by a pool in 80 degree heat! We’re nearly there, aren’t we, Ange? We’re honest-to-God nearly there!”
Angela couldn’t control the grin that crept across her face.
Jack was beginning to worry about Audrey. She hadn’t moved in at least ten minutes. Just as he decided to go and see if she was OK, she finally snapped out of it and lit herself another cigarette. Now Jack had stepped out of his hiding spot, he had no option but to continue toward her.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Withey?” he asked.
For a good few seconds, she said nothing. She just smoked. When she was ready, she clipped her cigarette and put the unsmoked half back into the packet.
“I got summat to say.”
Jack took Audrey into the Soft Interview Room. Decorated like a sparse living room complete with sofas, lamps, coffee tables and children’s toys, on the back wall was a large, plain mirror. This room was normally reserved for abuse victims and children who were giving evidence, but Jack wanted Audrey to feel like this interview was completely different from the earlier one—she could be the key to their investigation. He sat her down and then left under the pretense of making hot drinks for them both. Once outside, he asked a passing PC to put the kettle on and get Laura to come down from the squad room. He went into the observation room where, through the two-way mirror, he could see Audrey sitting on the sofa, wringing her hands, glancing around and looking generally very nervous.
When Laura came in with one tea and one coffee, Jack got her up to speed.
“Audrey never left. Something’s on her mind. Can you stay here and watch?”
Moments later, he appeared in the Soft Interview Room and sat on the sofa opposite Audrey. He put the drinks down on a coffee table, and gave her time to compose herself before beginning.
In Raeburn’s office, Ridley was listening politely to her rant.
“It’s a can of worms!” she said furiously. “And it’s impossible to shut it down now. We’ll have to identify a pile of bones no one has even been looking for, and we’ll have to fend off the ensuing court case that’s inevitably going to come once the relatives are finally notified.”
Ridley could only agree. There was little point in doing anything else.
Audrey wasn’t here to do the right thing. She was broken. She was a woman with absolutely nothing to live for, so she was here for redemption before she finally curled up into a ball to die. Susan’s words rang in her ears as she sipped her coffee: Mike’s dead because of you. They’re all dead because of you.
“It started with the diamonds.” Audrey looked down into her mug as she spoke.
Up in the observation room, Laura breathed out an excited “Ooohhh!” Down in the interview room, Jack remained a picture of calm professionalism.
“I was pregnant. I was allowed to enjoy that for a whole six weeks before being told that my Shirl was dead and me old man was banged up for his part in the diamond robbery. Then I was just numb. Greg was a worry—he was already off his head from all the drugs, so I couldn’t tell how he was feeling. He went out to score and, within minutes, the doorbell rang. It was her—Dolly Rawlins. First thing she said was how sorry she was to hear about Shirl—then she asked for a favor ’cos she had no one else to turn to. All in the one breath, that was.”
Without taking his eyes off Audrey, Jack took out his notebook and jotted down all the questions he needed to ask. He barely knew where to begin.
“She had the diamonds with her. She actually brought those fucking diamonds into my house. She said that if I did what she wanted, I’d be taken care of for the rest of my life. She said . . .” Audrey paused as if recalling exactly what Dolly had instructed. “She said I was to take the diamonds to Jimmy Donaldson, who was already lined up to take them off her.”
Jack wrote down Jimmy’s name.
“Go on,” he encouraged her.
“Jimmy was a trusted small-time crim who could fence anything,” said Audrey. “Well—I was in shock! I’m grieving and she’s waving death diamonds in my face and promising me more cash than I can spend. Like I’m gonna be bought that easy when my girl’s not even been delivered to the mortuary yet?”
She sounded outraged, but her next words almost made Jack smile.
“Anyway, I took the diamonds and met Jimmy in his workshop out the back of his house. He bricked them diamonds up in his workshop wall and we went our separate ways.” Audrey became more animated. “The next thing—it was in all the papers—she’d only gone and shot her fucking husband! I reckon she knew she was gonna shoot him, which is why she gave me the diamonds—to hide for her coming out.” Now Audrey was visibly shaking. “Can I have another coffee? And some of them biscuits I had earlier?”
Jack headed out to the corridor, where Laura was waiting. They clutched each other in excitement like a couple of kids who’d just stumbled across a hoard of buried treasure.
“Kettle’s on,” Laura said before Jack could even ask. “Why’s she spilling her guts all of a sudden?”
“She met Susan outside the station,” Jack explained. “I wasn’t close enough to hear the conversation, but she looked pretty shocked.”
“Better get back in there while the mood’s on her,” said Laura.
Restocked with coffee and biscuits, Audrey was ready to start talking again.
“With Dolly in prison, I was never gonna be taken care of for the rest of me life, was I? I was never gonna be paid for helping her. Never gonna get what I was owed.” Audrey’s face fell. “I was working all hours on the market, drinking too much and I had a miscarriage . . . And then one day I heard Jimmy had been arrested. I thought, Jesus Christ, he’s been done for the diamonds and they’ll be coming for me! Turns out he was nicked for writing bad checks, so that was OK. But now I was thinking about the diamonds and how no one but me knew they was even there.”
Audrey took a break from her rambling to munch on a biscuit, and Jack worried that she was about to wise up and stop talking before she incriminated herself. She didn’t.
“I went round to Jimmy’s. I knew his missus from bingo—bit simple. I took her a packet of fags and offered to make her a cuppa. From her kitchen, I went into his workshop and there was the wall. Untouched.” She sat bolt upright. “I swear on my life, Mike never knew anything about any of it. Write that down! I don’t want you thinking that any of this is Mike’s fault, ’cos it ain’t. It’s mine. And seeing as Mike can’t defend himself, I have to.”
Jack dutifully wrote down that Mike knew nothing about the diamonds being stolen or hidden, or being found again by Audrey. She watched him do it. As though those words would keep her son’s memory safe.
“Them diamonds got my Shirl murdered, so I wanted them gone. I sold ’em for a tenth of what they was worth and I built a villa in Spain. By that time, my old man had died of cancer in prison, so I told everyone it was his life insurance I was spending. But he wasn’t worth nothing.” Audrey took a deep breath. “Can I have a fag break?”
Outside, Audrey didn’t light a cigarette. She stared into the blue sky and absorbed the freedom she was now feeling. Freedom from the burden of having lived with such secrets. Eventually, she grinned at Jack.
“The next time Dolly turned up on my doorstep, it was to ask for the diamonds back. I can still see her face when I told her I’d got half a million for ’em. Do you know how much they was really worth? Three million!”
Audrey opened her mouth and emptied her lungs in one long, foul laugh, until her skin turned blue, reveling in her warped little victory.
Jack could see just how pathetic she really was. Not only did she seem oblivious to how dangerous her world and its people were, she also seemed incapable of learning. Murdered daughter, stolen diamonds, corrupt son—would nothing make her wake up and smell the coffee?
“Dolly!” Audrey spat. “I told her how the stress had killed my baby and you know what she said? ‘Small mercies.’ She’s stood in my house and telling me my baby was better off dead. I should have killed her where she stood but, God forgive me, I didn’t. Mike would be alive now if I had. That’s when I told him everything. He didn’t know nothing before that and everything he did afterward was to put right the mess I’d made. If you don’t believe that, I’m leaving right now.” Audrey’s hands began to shake in anger. “Mike’s a good boy. You gotta promise that he ain’t remembered as anything else.”
Before Jack could stop himself, he said, “I promise.”
If that turned out to be a lie, he’d cross that bridge when he got to it.
“Come on,” he said, and took her elbow.
He needed her to come back inside and pour her heart out on tape—not on the steps of the police station.
With another coffee in her hand and a fresh plate of biscuits in front of her, Audrey was ready to continue.
“That debt to Dolly Rawlins put Mike in a position he couldn’t get out of. If my Mike had anything to do with the train robbery, it had to be because Dolly forced him into it. Mike was a victim, not a criminal!” Each time Dolly’s name was mentioned, it spat out of Audrey’s mouth with venom. The tears welled. “Dolly Rawlins only got eight years for taking some gangster off the streets—who gives a shit about Harry being gunned down? But she got nothing for killing my Shirl, my little baby . . . and now Mike! That bitch killed my babies, but you lot never punished her for any of that.”
“She was shot six times!” Jack pointed out.
“Not by me! Not by me!”
Audrey dropped her mug, hid her face in her hands and sobbed. Years of ignoring the truth fueled her uncontrollable anguish. It was as if she finally felt responsible for something—and that something was for not killing Dolly Rawlins when she had the chance.
When Jack and Laura walked into his office and closed the door behind them, Ridley hoped it was because they had something to say that he actually wanted to hear. If they were bringing him anything less than a bloody miracle, they’d better watch out. But as Jack relayed Audrey’s second interview, Ridley edged toward his seat and finally sat down on it—a rare event. Once Jack had finished, Ridley confirmed that Audrey would be arrested on suspicion of handling stolen goods, bounced back to his feet and headed out into the squad room.
“Right!” he shouted. “Everybody just listen for now, so we can put this together. Questions later.”
As Ridley and Jack spoke, they shuffled evidence, moved and regrouped suspects and filled in gaps on the three overflowing evidence boards. As Anik watched Ridley and Jack leading this new charge, he could feel the sergeant’s position drifting out of sight.
“Harry Rawlins’s gang did the diamond heist—we know this because most of them were arrested at the scene,” said Jack, looking round at his colleagues. “But the diamonds ended up with Dolly, who gave them to Audrey for safekeeping while she went inside for killing her husband . . .”
By three o’clock, he’d brought everyone up to speed and the case was up to 1995. Ridley took over.
“We know Mike drove to Rose Cottage in his Range Rover and we know someone else drove there in a pest control van—probably Barry Cooper. We know someone killed Mike, then expertly improvised the destruction of the cottage and everything in it—probably Barry Cooper. We know that the remaining cash left the scene in the pest control van. And we know Barry’s on the run. He has a background in the army and in demolition. He’s highly dangerous and we have to find him. He’s the key.”
Ridley looked round at his team. Everyone was gripped—except Laura, who was frowning as she stared at Jack. Ridley followed her gaze. Jack had his hand up.
“I think Barry’s definitely involved, sir, but there’s nothing to suggest he’s a mastermind. I think we need to look again at the women. If Dolly was the woman that Audrey says she was, she’d have had the balls to hide twenty-seven million in the cellar of an ex-copper.”
Ridley looked skeptical. “Those women have been ruled out. Twice. Once in 1995 and again by us. By you, in fact.”
“There was no evidence,” Jack pointed out. “But then, there was no evidence to connect Dolly to the diamond raid either, yet we now know that she was the one who walked away with everything.”
“So, no evidence means they did it?”
Anik smirked and the sergeant’s post drifted back into his sight.
“And,” Ridley continued, “if they’d just got away with a life-changing sum of money, why the hell, two days later, are they shooting each other?”
“That was Ester,” said Jack. “She’s unstable, but the rest of them aren’t. The diamonds have to be how Dolly bought The Grange in the first place, sir. With all due respect, you haven’t met them. They’re . . . I don’t know, there’s something about them. They’re calm—like they’ve been hiding in plain sight.”
“Or maybe they’re innocent?” Anik chipped in.
Jack ignored him and kept his focus on Ridley.
“We know Angela worked for Ester and had an affair with Mike, whose family has history with Dolly. We’ve been slowly linking them together this whole time, and now Audrey is telling us that her son did the train robbery.”
“Which I agree with, but—”
“Call it gut instinct, sir,” Jack interrupted, “but I know we should be looking at these women.”
“Your ‘gut’ has just spent next month’s overtime budget digging up a grave for no reason,” said Ridley angrily. “I’m the one who’ll get daily flak on that for the foreseeable, not you. You’re all right, Jack. Your newly acquired ‘gut instinct’ has a lot to learn. We’re going after Barry Cooper and when we find him, my gut instinct says we’ll also find the rest of the money and a gang of as-yet unidentified army blokes who were in on the train robbery.”
Jack marched the twelve-minute walk to pathology in just under seven minutes. He was fuming. He’d finally found his passion for this thankless job and now he was being ignored. His mind raced with disjointed thoughts and then oddly settled on something he had only read in passing many weeks ago—the name of George Resnick. The entire station had mocked George when he insisted that Harry Rawlins was alive, and hadn’t been blown up in the Strand underpass. Every scrap of evidence was against him, his team was against him, but he knew he was right. Jack recalled how he’d wanted to feel that sort of tenacity. That sort of certainty. Well, now he did. He knew the women from The Grange were up to their necks in this.
As he pushed through the heavy rubber doors into Foxy’s outer lab, his mobile signal died and a call from Maggie was sent straight to voicemail. Jack handed a DNA testing kit he’d bought online to Foxy. One sample was already labeled and ready to go; the second would be taken from the bag of bones.
“Whose is this?” asked Foxy, pointing at the first sample.
“Mine,” said Jack as he left.
Foxy stood there, shaking his head.
“And I thought I’d seen everything . . .”
“Hi, darling.” Maggie’s beautiful voice brought an almost physical relief to Jack. All he wanted to do right now was go home and slide into bed next to her. “I just got a call from your dad’s estate agent. The last offer was above the reserve, so it’s been accepted. They want a quick sale and have asked for the bungalow to be emptied. I know you’re in the middle of a lot right now. I’ll come with you, Jack, but I can’t do it for you. Love you.”
Jack leaned against the battleship-gray wall and texted Maggie back.
We’ll go tonight. He paused mid-text. Then, They don’t need me here.