Buried (DC Jack Warr #1) - Lynda La Plante Page 0,56

that the dirty old man’s mind strayed back to the good ol’ days of shagging Trudie on his brother’s French-polished desk. Jack’s nostrils flared and his eyebrows dipped.

‘Somefink I said?’ Tony grinned. Jack pushed his chair away from the table and stood up. ‘Don’t go yet, son. We’re having a nice chat, ain’t we?’

Jack paused. ‘I hear the man who attacked you is recovering well.’

His tone was now very different. The sucking-up had stopped, the pandering to Tony’s ego had stopped and he was suddenly playing a different game. Tony could feel the change in mood, although he didn’t know what had brought it on.

‘I also hear that you’re on a warning. One more bit of trouble and you’ll get a nice, long stint in solitary.’ Jack placed his fists squarely on the table, looked Tony straight in the eye and whispered, ‘I’m going to make sure you die in here. No one looked up to you then and no one looks up to you now ‒ as Harry Rawlins said, you’re just a big, stupid ape.’

Jack waited for the second Tony’s brain disengaged and animal instinct took over. It didn’t take long. Tony leapt to his feet, dodged round the table and charged. Jack, being thirty years his junior, dodged his incoming fist with relative ease; but Tony swung again and again. He was strong and relentless but Jack was fast and that’s all that mattered, because all he had to do was stay out of the way. The alarms sounded within seconds and all of the other inmates started cheering for Tony. The guards ran across the room, Asps extended, and landed a couple of blows on Tony’s back but he didn’t even flinch. The next three hits landed on his thighs and they took him to the floor. Once he was down, there was no getting up. With his face pressed against the cold blue lino, Tony spat out every threat he could think of while Jack walked calmly from the room.

*

In the incident statement Jack was asked to write, he neglected to mention that he’d called Tony an ape, and instead made something up about bringing up the wrong person from Tony’s past and stirring bad memories.

‘He’s got quite a temper, hasn’t he?’ Jack said innocently.

The prison warder reassured Jack that Tony would have plenty of time to think about his actions in solitary confinement. Jack was then given back his mobile, his wallet and his warrant card, and he left.

Once outside the prison, he checked his phone. There was one missed call from Ridley, with an accompanying voicemail asking if he’d found Julia Lawson and Angela Dunn yet. Shit! Jack hadn’t even started looking.

CHAPTER 14

Jack sat at his desk with his trouser leg pulled up to just below his knee. When stumbling backwards in an attempt to stay an arm’s length away from Tony Fisher, he’d banged his calf on something and now a large bruise was forming. He could feel it as he’d walked up the station stairs and now, as he looked at the purplish-black circle on his skin, it reminded him of the satisfaction he felt in seeing Tony face down on the floor. It was as much of a power rush now as it had been at the time. Jack was by no means a violent man, but he loved the feeling of manipulating a thick shit like Tony Fisher into securing himself a stint in solitary confinement. It was the first cruel thing Jack had ever done in his life, but he felt no guilt.

Two hours and several cups of tea later, Jack sat ploughing through the extensive police files on Harry Rawlins. Rawlins’ actual file was surprisingly thin because he was too smart to be tied to most of his suspected crimes; it was the unproven files that were extensive. George Resnick had collated hundreds of case reports which, if they were all accurate, showed Harry Rawlins to have been one of the most prolific gangsters of the 1980s. No wonder Resnick had been like a dog with a bone – Rawlins would have been the catch of the century.

Jack flicked through the crime scene photos of the explosive Strand underpass robbery from 1984. Joe Pirelli and Terry Miller had been in the back of the van when it burst into flames. Pirelli had been identified from his dental records, as the hands were never found and he couldn’t be printed. Miller was identified from a partial thumb and