Buried (DC Jack Warr #1) - Lynda La Plante Page 0,21
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 enquiry. 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 colour,’ Bill sneered. ‘Who chose grey?’
‘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 grey 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, towards 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 any more, she was still there. She had a wicked sense of humour ‒ 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 an A & E corridor.
Gloria Radford, Ester Freeman, Julia Lawson, Connie Stephens and Angela Dunn were all last arrested on the same day, 27 August 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